The founder series: Ready to start?

This is a true story. I am taking his name without asking because I know he won’t mind. Pawan Gupta is married now to my cousin. Several years back, when he was still dating her, he was in a big corporate bank earning in my view a massive salary for a fresh graduate. He wanted to be an entrepreneur and called me for advice. My advice to him was - “don’t do it, just continue with your job”.

One year later, he called me again and said - Bhaiya (Big bro), I started a company! Well, I did this time give him whatever advice I could, specific to his business. The story eventually ended happily, he is now a successful serial entrepreneur, sold his first company Curofy Doctor network and now is running Fashinza

I became an entrepreneur while still in college. So you would wonder why I advised him to not do it. I did because entrepreneurship is really hard. When you are ready you know it and you just do it.

The media narrative of entrepreneurship is way too glamorous. There is talk of massive funding rounds, unicorns and so on. But like everything else, the real work is extremely challenging and the odds are stacked against you. As an angel, I invested in 28 companies between 2011 and 2018, before we started investing as a fund. Out of these 28 companies, I would say a third completely failed. A category which is even more challenging than abject failure is hanging in the middle. There are startups that have been continuing in a very resource constrained environment for several years - it’s hard to give them up, and it’s hard to break them out. And my portfolio are companies which got some sort of funding, which itself is in the vast minority.?

I am all for building a society which is tolerant of failure, supporting entrepreneurship etc. It’s a win-win for you and the society in the big picture. However, when the dust has settled down, a founder should become a founder when they are ready. It’s never too early or too late. Never is also a perfectly acceptable answer. They would know when the time is right and that is the right time.