Entrepreneurial Karma

I was talking to an investment banker friend, yesterday, brainstorming about his problems with a healthcare investee. I pointed out rather wryly that despite checking off all the entrepreneurial boxes he was highlighting, novel concept that addresses a felt need; systems and processes that ensure scaleability, replicability and expandability; ample proof of concept (12000+ patients, 120000+ interventions, data, publications); economic viability and ability to survive the pandemic, even positing a profit in a challenging year; indeed even growing and launching new concepts, products and services in that time frame, our enterprise was not able to excite investment bankers like him. I also showed him an article in “Inc” where a start-up with similar objectives as ours, posted (quite proudly) annual revenues, which represented one-eight of its accumulated losses. In a latent way, I was asking him, what made his tribe tick; why would they pick companies to invest in that had zero track record, rather than a company like ours that was seemingly checking off all the boxes.?

He made two interesting observations that provoked me to write this post. The first was “its often easier to secure investment if you do less rather than more”. The second, “its a pity that good entrepreneurs don’t get rewarded many times, but its not too bad a situation either, because investment comes with strings and I am not sure I would recommend that to my friends”. On the one hand, here I was, feeling rather hurt that my efforts to grow, having built with determination and integrity an enterprise that was highly evolved in both professional and corporate terms. And here was a friend who occupied a space that should be interested in companies like ours, hinting to me, that we may be unsuitable for precisely the reasons we were patting ourselves on the back for, and perhaps we were even lucky not to have secured the investments we had been seeking.?

In our 12 year journey as Buddhi Clinic, I have always operated in the belief that?entrepreneurs should benefit society through the enterprises they build, while creating wealth for all stakeholders; and (perhaps mistakenly) investors should catalyse this entrepreneurial journey and derive benefits. Suddenly, I found my latter belief about investment challenged through this conversation. The penny dropped that the pain and sacrifices of bootstrapping an enterprise to sustainable maturity were mine as the entrepreneur; the rewards may not be in the investment, valuation and inorganic growth I was seeking; rather, the rewards could well lie in the journey itself and in the potential road ahead, a traditional journey of organic growth, reminiscent of companies in the yesteryears, when investment bankers were an uncommon breed.?

Three wise whispers also echoed in my head:

The matriarch of a large industrial family telling me recently, “small is beautiful, don’t expand’?

An entrepreneur friend saying “you have a good thing going; ask yourself if you really need to take in investment”?

The Bhagavad Gita’s “the work is yours, not the fruits”

As my work day ends, I was concluding that perhaps my failure to secure investment for growth was not a problem in the way I was perceiving it and that I should embrace “my entrepreneurial karma”.?