I can't do things that require more time like reading a book or watching a movie. It’s 14-15 hours of work. Though, we do rest a bit on the weekends. In my startup I am more of a generalist. My day starts with planning the day, checking up on a lot of work, doing my own work and during the night it's more of the creative work. There are many highs and lows, you lose motivation in between when things are not going the way you wanted them to. The nature of work changes as you grow. In a smaller startup you do a lot of work yourself, you handpick people, as you grow bigger you watch from the top.

One of the drawbacks of being in a hot branch is you don’t have the inner fire to do something as you get a job easily. I participated in a student exchange program in Europe. I really liked living there. That’s when I thought, there are only 2 things that I could do: If I get a good job in a great country with great culture I will do that, otherwise I will come back to India and use the opportunity of a growing market there to build something of my own. The thought of starting something was always at the back of my mind, but I took it seriously only when I started working. Once I began working in a startup, after looking at the tasks performed by the CEO, I became confident in my own abilities to do the same. Starting a business has become easier but making the company sustainable is very tough. Personality wise I had the tendency of going for entrepreneurship, I was among the ones who doesn’t follow many rules. Rules in the sense is not skipping the traffic light but seeing something critically and seeing what change you would like to see.

My cofounder Shweta was working in a healthcare consulting firm. She had seen that data was not being leveraged. Her mother was diagnosed with sleep apnea and she saw that doctors are not approachable, they told her to get a mask . Sleep apnea could have been controlled through lifestyle measures also, which she did not know then. What we thought was why did we not use the data in the report and give all the googling that a person does after a lab result comes in, in the report itself? We did a lot of market research both primary and secondary, we were thinking of an app then we moved towards a SaaS product. By talking to a lot of people, visiting clinics, hospitals, we tried to validate whether we would actually be solving a problem or whether it was in our head.

My friend from Pilani joined us as a CTO and we visited a few labs. We made a very basic prototype. We wanted to see the reaction from the labs and we were not satisfied with it and so we started working on the product . We had kept 6 months for trial and during those six months, if we felt that this wasn’t working out, we’d have gone back to our jobs. We were never the entrepreneurs who wanted to raise funds on go, getting product market fit was our priority.

There are 2 reasons, in my final year I got a really good CAT percentile, it was very lucrative. I was hearing things like if you do not do it now you will have to do it in 5 years anyways so that would be a waste of such a good score. I hadn’t paid much attention to CS as such so I was a bit doubtful in the sense whether I could become a good techie. It was never like I did not want to do a 9-5. I respect that career as well.

Since childhood I had been good at logical reasoning, I did not do well at JEE but I had cracked NTSE. I studied for CAT for 2-3 months and got an All India rank. I was just exploring a few options and it looked interesting to me. I wanted to explore the non-engineering domain. Had I not got a good rank I would have gone for Cisco. I gave CAT just out of an interest for the exam.

They are two very different lives. First of all they have attendance at IIM, we had 75% in Calcutta. Another stark difference is that there is a concept called class participation, there is a TA who notices the kids and there are points for class participation, what happens is that you are supposed to be more alert and you are incentivised to ask questions but what also happens is there is rise in competition. Also there are a lot of case studies, which are group activities, there is a free rider problem in these groups. The group dynamics teach you a bit, you are taught how to be a manager. In MBA you are supposed to slowly get polished. It is very fast in the sense that there is a trimester system, it is easier than engineering but more hectic.

MBA is not very conducive for entrepreneurship as in IIMs everyone wants to get a good corporate job. I too was thinking on similar lines. I was not dying for a job as I knew I would get it. I was assessing things-whether I wanted to do this, or not. I was getting a good salary in my job post-MBA but it was killing me inside, I realized that it was not for me. In India it is difficult to find a good 9-5 as it is the backoffice of many corporations unless you work in a startup or you get a good role, I find 80-90% jobs very boring. 1-2 years of not working wouldn’t kill me. The times were changing, that's how I went to entrepreneurship. I couldn’t find the job I wanted and I found the startup more appealing. By doing some wrong jobs you get to know what you do not want to do and that also helps. Eventually every job becomes monotonous, some people thrive in monotony and some people don’t.

I feel that MBAs are reducing in value as we are progressing. The MBA boom was closer to 2000-2010, Those things are changing a bit. You can be at par with MBA people without doing MBA. MBA polishes you a bit and gives you a platform but it can be self learnt. If you are a bit entrepreneurial, you can carve out your own path. Oh, but international MBA is different as they ask for 4-5 yrs of work experience. In conclusion, MBA doesn’t hold as much charm now as it used to hold 10-20 years ago.

Earlier I used to think that it was tech which was difficult. Now I feel that good non-tech work is the most difficult. If I were to create a spectrum, I feel that bad tech would be at the lowest, good tech would be at the middle and good non-tech would be at the top.

MBA helped me understand the importance of networking which helped me in my startup. I used Linkedin and personal connections in my journey. If someone is in your first or second degree network they appear to be more approachable than random people. When I find someone interesting on Linkedin I try to bring them to Whatsapp which makes the communication more effective. Also, people pay a lot of value to your college, a BITSian will be more likely to connect with you.

First is the feeling that you are working for yourself and the second is that you are doing something for the good, it gives me a drive. There is a lot of learning. If everything fails and you go back to a job eventually, you would have learnt more than you could ever have in a job. You don’t see the negative side after a point. You don’t think of what will happen to you. You just see the positives and go on.

Umm.. I can’t directly answer that. I can see some of my friends earning well and chilling. I lack ample free time and money but I like the kind of work that I am doing. I think that it is not wise to look at life backwards, I can't undo things. I think the high that people in jobs feel is somewhat temporary... I am looking for something more permanent.

BITS has a really good startup culture. I did not have all that when I was in Pilani. A lot of incentives from the government are coming in. College is a great breeding ground, since you have a lot of time and the risk factor is low. You also have the opportunity to meet co-founders. However, one thing that I find missing in young entrepreneurs is a holistic approach. They should have one experienced person onboard as soon as they find that their idea is doing well. Find someone who is genuinely interested in the product and keep him/her in the loop for top level strategic decisions. I have also found that engineering guys are poor at sales, they struggle at that front, they should take help in that.

It was that time of life which I know will never return. Wild, ecstatic times and yet I wish I had utilized it better. The freedom was there, the transformation to what I was in 12th to what I became was immense. I miss that time and the headspace I was in. Disclaimer: Entrepreneurship is very tough, it is one of the toughest things you will do ever. Studying is easy, giving Compre exams is easy. In entrepreneurship, you will get hit everyday. There are more lows than highs, the lows are hitting on your ego. It is very tough, but when it pays, it pays well. It is a high risk high return thing.