Beware of entrepreneurship

Deep inside, an entrepreneur is someone who is very lonely, whose struggles are only known to him, and whose hardships are only known to him. It’s like a ghost fight. You’re fighting with your own ghost every day, compromising and winning over the ghost, and telling the ghost, look what I did today, and so on, so forth. It’s not a struggle with the world, it’s a struggle that you have within yourself.

When I first met Shiladitya Ghosh a few years ago while researching this story at FactorDaily , I realised the deep scars entrepreneurs carry, battling alone, from term sheets to their personal lives, so much riding on them, and so little control.

As I have been writing in the past, entrepreneurial journeys are like space missions. They combine bold vision and fearlessness with the drudgery of operations. Add to that the millions of tiny pieces of execution that must work in tandem and exactly as prescribed for a spaceship to land successfully. External and internal factors define a space mission and are sometimes too unpredictable to plan.?

If you're a starry-eyed, first-time founder drinking all the cool playbooks in the ecosystem, please find time to listen to Sunny.

“There’s much to learn from Sunny’s entrepreneurial journey, including his hardships and resilience. While aiming to build rocketships and unicorns, the ecosystem sometimes forgets the role of founders in creating value." Says Avinash Raghava

If you care for entrepreneurs and their startups, engage with the story and share. Startups and entrepreneurs are shaping the world around us. We must nurture and protect the societal value of these journeys. Remember, there's a human who's building the enterprise.

It takes a lot of courage and an undying spirit to share tough lessons. My salute to Sunny and the doers who share their lessons in failing, so others become stronger, wiser

Too much obsession with how to get things right, too little about what to do when things don't work out.

The way it works is you are running at a certain speed, and then something in your life happens, and you break down. And that speed kills you; the same speed you’re used to running kills you.

You can also download beautifully crafted PDF version of the full interview here.

I am grateful to Avinash Raghava and Ralph Vaz for helping me tell this story. Of course, my salute to Sunny again for coming forward and sharing his journey lessons.

A huge shoutouts to my amazing colleague Somesh Kumar for breathing visual life into this story project. And Shadma Shaikh Sehar Dabur for being on the FactorDaily's journey of telling stories that matter.