How I was able to successfully find a great co-founder with complementary skillsets?

Many of my college friends have asked me the following question, and they ask that because it's really surprising for them (& for me as well), that from being a stupid moron in college, a backbencher & someone who had to lose one full college year for disciplinary issues, (as a matter of fact, since childhood, I had been a spoilt brat and in college that reached to a new level, I was actually thrown out by the college at the end of 3rd year but was lucky that it was turned to one year suspension only), to onboarding an extremely intelligent person with very high academic + professional credentials as co-founder (he is an IIT grad, with 6+ years of cumulative professional experience working as computer scientist for 3 of the top 500 fortune companies i.e. Yahoo, Adobe & Qualcomm).

Q: How were you able to find and onboard Ankit Gupta as CTO?"

A: Well, first of all, I was very lucky to have found him through our mutual friend, Raveesh Madan who is his college mate & my school + childhood friend. Since I had no technical background, I had to outsource the development of #Fotonicia to a small IT firm based out of Jaipur. A 3-month project turned into a 6-month one and we were facing quite a lot of technical challenges due to the complexity of the architecture we were trying to build. I was in touch with many of my friends who were in the tech industry and going to them for all kinds of problems. Some helped, some didn't.

It's around that time, that I was first introduced to him, and out of my desperation to solve these problems, in our very first meeting, I asked him to assist us in solving some of these challenges on a pro bono basis. He readily accepted, and very soon after that, we were able to ship the product version 1.0 and then Version 2.0 and then version 3.0 to consumers.

During this period, I had a very close opportunity to understand him and analyse his skillset. Him being a full stack developer and with an attitude to understand the problem at its root and coming up with innovative solutions helped us navigate through many of the very difficult technical challenges. I found him to be extremely smart, with a great attitude and a desire to build a great tech product. (we were discussing many business ideas he was thinking to work on, continuously evaluating them on the basis of scale, execution & sustainability).

In short, he was a very passionate coder, a highly skilled one with an entreprenurial mindset.

I shared my vision for #Fotonicia and how we will be creating millions of economic opportunities for millions of people, here in India. He asked tons of great questions and I had a very very hard time communicating my vision to him (Here I would add, if you can document your vision, that really helps in bringing the clarity as well as it helps a lot in communicating the same effectively.)

Anyways to cut the story short, I feel our interests aligned to a great extent, and he could really sense the opportunity to build a great tech product out of India which has the scale, can be executed using the initial skillset we both had and will be a sustainable model in itself.

After almost 15 months of knowing each other and the growing clarity on where we are actually heading, made him resign from his cosy, high paying job at Adobe and join us full time to fast speed Fotonicia to its vision.

My answer in 5 words is

luck played a major role.

If you reached until here & if you consider yourself or know someone who is really smart, innovative and with a great attitude to learning, and highly technical, then connect with me and we can sit over a coffee and take the discussion on Fotonicia forward. We are at a great juncture and truly believe we will be creating millions of economic opportunities for millions of people.

#Fotonicia is an enterprise solution built on a consumer-facing platform (similar examples can be Linkedin, Facebook etc.)

(In some other post, I will share vision and mission of Fotonicia and how #JeffWeiner has helped me clearly thinking about it.

I am sure everyone knows who #JeffWeiner is :-)

His talks are super amazing and gives a lot of food for my thoughts.

Thank you #JeffWeiner.