The Last 9 Months: India, Antler, and the Start of a Puzzle

December 2022.

“So, do you want to see the doctor?”

”The doctor?”

”Yes, the doctor. He is available. Or do you want to make an appointment?”

“I am not sick”.

“Well, this is a hospital!”

It was not exactly what I was expecting while drinking milk with a straw from a coconut, but this was the funny start of my trip to Kerala. Unintentionally, I ended up booking a room in an Ayurveda retreat centre, where patients from all over the world were being treated with traditional medicine by local doctors.??

I was in India for a couple of weeks as I was lucky enough to be invited to two weddings, and used the time to switch off as well as to reflect. In those same days, I was interviewing for the Antler program in the Nordics after a very positive recommendation about the experience from a friend.

Already in the application process, I had some doubts: was it the right format to find a team and start a company??

The trip to India was the perfect opportunity to reflect on all this.?

A particularly inspiring experience was to see the Taj Mahal, which is a mix between a love story (was built by a king for his wife), history, engineering, but most of all, a masterpiece example of what mankind can create at its best.

When I was a child, I wanted to be an inventor, my hero was Leonardo Da Vinci, and I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur at some point. But was it the right time? Was I ready?

At the end of the trip, none of my questions was answered, but I just decided to take the leap. A few weeks later, I left everything in Munich and moved to Copenhagen for the Antler program without a back up plan.?

The program per sè is what you could expect: a lot of content, group activities, meeting many people. At the beginning, almost everyone has their own startup idea, so there is a situation of funny Mexican standoff: no one wants to consider anything else.?

Towards week 4-5 (halfway through), as teams start to be formed, something interesting begins to happen: without any external push from either Antler or the other founders, you truly start reflecting about what you want to do, why, and with whom. Answering these questions is painful. The reason is not that they are difficult to answer per sè; the reason is that you are challenged to ask yourself if you are truly ready to risk failing for what you want to do as a founder, and ultimately what you are ready to give up for it.?

The program is somehow a mini-simulation of what happens in the real world: you have to convince talent (your fellow founders), clients (seeds of early traction) and investors (Antler) to bet on you, and none of them will say yes that easily. Convincing them is a gradual (and sometimes long) process.?

This also happened to me. I knew I did not want to compromise 1) on my co-founders and 2) on the topic / purpose of what I would work on (helping consumers save), and I knew 100% that I was ready to fail at Antler, go back and look for a new job without those two.

At some point in the experience, I felt completely stuck. I simply decided to take it as a gradual process and kept moving. It paid off.

With Ranveig and Hamid, we started working together and, after months of hard work, this week we are incorporating Puzzle to make the economy more collaborative, democratise access to products, and enable consumers to increase their purchase power by buying together.?

If I think about this experience that started about 6 months ago, and especially focusing on the teams that received an investment, there was a common factor: who got the investment was not necessarily the smartest individuals, nor the best ideas, but it was those that did not give up at the first, sometimes painful no (either from Antler, from the other founders, or from clients) and kept ongoing in a way or another, beyond achieving progress week by week.?

We start our journey with the ambition to build a world changing company, and with the humbleness to know that we have to grow and learn a lot along the way.

So if I look back at where I was on that trip to India, I definitely miss some coconuts, but I managed to answer some of those questions I had back then.?

At the end, it all starts with a journey.