Changing the World!

Many entrepreneurs take the untrodden path of starting a company with a gutsy intent to change the world. It is an incredibly hard journey, and most people would not choose to pursue if they realize the effort that it takes. The struggles that we experience can only be overcome with dogged determination and extreme focus on the core mission, irrespective of the number of rejections, detractions, and naysayers.

As if the challenge is not enough, we have to now deal with a 15-gene RNA molecule called COVID19 that has disrupted world order in just a few months. My thoughts, and best wishes for the well-being of everyone in the world and prayers for those enduring personal loss and dealing with despair. This post is a reflection of my two months of shelter-in-place and what this has meant to me and our business.

I wrote a disaster recovery and business continuity policy three years ago for Ushur to handle Force majeure related events - things like an earthquake or some natural disaster and this policy even listed a pandemic event. Little did I know that we would have to execute on that policy. The short summary of our business is that like most other tech companies, we have been able to carry on our work and in some weird way, more efficiently, because we are not spending travel time to get work done. It has come with the challenge of blending in work-life and home-life into one endless block with no time boundary and more importantly, exposing my family members into my varying mental states during the day that a startup CEO has to juggle given all the ebbs and flows of running a business.

Our business will likely be all right, thanks to the amazing team we have. We will also likely do well, thanks to the core value proposition of delivering cost savings and Opex reductions to our customers while delivering great customer experiences. We have closed several new accounts in the middle of the pandemic and I tend to look at this as a leading indicator of the need for digitization and automation, all of which we deliver for our customers. Check out one such customer win that we announced today:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tower-insurance-partners-with-ushur-to-digitize-customer-engagement-1029224129

Like every other business that has to focus on absorbing the impact, we have had to re-target some of our GTM initiatives and re-tool our teams to engage with our prospects and customers through virtual meetings. We did not let any of our staff go but everyone contributed to a slightly lower salary to extend our ramp. We have conducted multiple workshops remotely to onboard new customers. We took advantage of the new normal to focus on some improvements in our core infrastructure. Our release trains got more automated and we are able to complete tasks that would take days and weeks in minutes and hours for ourselves and our customers. We promoted two of our leadership team members - Vandana Rao and Michael Fisher. They have grown remarkably fast and helped me to focus on more strategic activities by taking a lot of busy work off my plate.

Despite many things that are going well for us, I am thirsty for social interactions, the small talk, the banter, and the camaraderie. I have connected with friends and family on more virtual calls than I can handle and even celebrated my birthday over a virtual meeting with my college besties, that was a surprise that my wife arranged. We are all grateful for being together in the house despite my 14-hour workdays.

My heart aches for people who can't work remotely, for businesses who can't still get the assistance they need from the CARES act, people who are struggling to put food on the table for their families. I wish for all of the suffering and pain to end quickly but realize that it takes longer to (re)build than to break something.

To change the world back to the order we had, we will need patience, compassion, and togetherness rather than isolated self-preservation. We are in an interdependent world, and if we don't collectively take care of each other, everyone loses. I want to end this post with a fitting Sanskrit prayer:

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May all be prosperous and happy

May all be free from illness

May all see what is spiritually uplifting

May no one suffer

Peace, peace, peace