First week at Sineflex

To begin with, it is a bit unnatural to call the week of 14th May as the first week of Sineflex, esp. because the preceding weeks involved many afternoons of meetings, sometimes even on weekends. So work (or what we call work for now) had already begun. Even then, 14th May 2018 will always be a special day as the official start-day of Sineflex. What had started as a casual conversation on a car ride home has turned into a high-risk, high-satisfaction entrepreneurial journey in seven months.

So how did it go? Obviously no welcome message, no orientation and no salary account to be set up! Or for that matter, no ribbon-cutting! There were calendars asking to be filled up and incomplete pitch decks that needed attention. But surprisingly, there were no nerves in leaving behind a long stints in rewarding jobs and diverse roles. We all proudly wore a Sineflex t-shirt (yes, our HR surprised us with one!). And we dove right into what needed to be done for the day.

Many things remained the same. We still started each day at 0830hrs, and went for breakfast together at 0900. We still continued to have intense discussions, which to an outsider might look like arguments & few minutes later we would be laughing together over a cup of coffee. But many other things were different. We had to do things we had never done in a long time, like visit a bank to open a current account, looking for the nearest printing vendor and whole bunch of other operational things needed to get Sineflex up and running.

We spent some time together in thinking about our goals for the remaining year. It was a challenging but superbly thought provoking discussion. At once, we were thinking of blue-sky scenarios and the same time, trying to be realistic about the deliverables. More on this soon..

The first week was not all talk. We started our work on our first project, to mentor a smart bunch of start-ups as part of the MedTech Accelerator program at IIITH. It was one of the first times we were using the Sineflex way of evaluating competencies of such firms and the data we gathered will be very useful in planning our next steps of domain mentoring for these firms.

Amongst the many things that the three of us have absolute agreement & one we think most significant is our desire to contribute directly to people around us. With this in mind, we spent some unforgettable moments on the evening of 14th May with the kids at St Jude India ChildCare Centres. While coming out of the centre, all the kids wished us luck. And with a start like that, we will definitely be able to do whatever we want….