Learnings As A Founder

I have been asked a number of times in last 24 months - about how I stumbled upon the idea of Arthan, a social business aspiring to transform the human capital landscape in the impact sector while simultaneously preparing underprivileged children for the future of work.

Arthan was not born in a flash of inspiration, rather it emerged from my decade-long social impact career that started with an internship in rural Kashmir during the disastrous earthquake in 2005.

Through the last decade, I spent my time in leading education non-profits, scaling programs and institutions. During this time, I became increasingly aware that key elements in the human capital strategies implemented by social impact organisations were missing. Majority of these organisations underestimated how hard it was to recruit the right talent, irrespective of the stage of the venture. Further, while hiring great talent was one challenge, ensuring that people grow in their careers was another. I realized that many of the organisations didn’t invest any time in building the next line of leadership.

Arthan was born, as a solution to this and seeks to work with mission-driven organisations doing phenomenal work, helping them achieve their mission by focusing on implementing right human capital strategies, as their long-term partner. From a simple idea in 2016, Arthan has worked to become a trusted partner for some of the leading social impact organisations like (Central Square Foundation, Samagra, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, etc) in India.

Here are 6 lessons I have learned from my experience of building a social business.

Lesson 1. Be ambitious

“Ambition is the path to success, persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.”- William Eardley IV

At Arthan, since we began, we've always set challenging targets. These ambitious targets pushed us, and enabled us to grow, from working with two organisations in 2017 to over 60+ social impact organisations in 2018. I remember writing an email to our board, mentors and supporters in January 2018 stating that we will work with 240 organisations in 2018. By the end of the year, we ended up engaging with 60+ organisations offline through our human capital consulting work, 45,000+ job seekers and had 929 jobs posted on our jobs platform. Further, out of our target of preparing 5,000 children for the future of work, we achieved the goal of working with 3,000 in the last 12 months.

Lesson 2. Build a trusted, stellar founding team

“(In a startup) you need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.”- Sam Altman

The success of any organisation does not always come from its mission; it is, in most cases, the relentless pursuit of the founding team to make it happen, that determines its long-term success.

At Arthan, the organisation would be nothing without a brilliant founding team. It took me almost 10 months after registering the venture to bring together the core team members. I remember reading how AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people. We were 4 in Year 1 and are now a team of 11. No one can achieve any meaningful social impact at scale without the support, collaboration and hard work of a lot of trusted partners.

Lesson 3. Build a stellar board and leverage it

“Creating the right advisory board for your startup can be the single most important step you take in building a new business.” - Jay Samit

I remember Menno (founder of THNK and ScaleUpNation) talking about his experience of building the board for the THNK school. Learning from him, I invested significant time and energy in building the founding board Arthan. While majority of the board members knew me as an individual and believed in what we were aspiring to solve, I had to relentlessly pursue some of them and that persistence and persuasion paid off when they agreed to come on board.

Every founder should aspire to create a board within the first 12 months, it can be made up of those people who were interested in your mission early on and should have a mix of people with core competencies that could include financial, marketing, technical, entrepreneurial, legal, social service skills and so on.

Lesson 4. Measure the right type of impact

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”- Peter Drucker

It's easy to be sucked into wanting to be the next big thing to watch out for. However, making an impact is not the same as getting the public's attention. Nor is it how much money you have raised, how many awards you have won, the number of visitors on your website, the number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers your page has.

Resources in social businesses will always be tight – and it is the duty of the founder to make sure that every ounce of every resource has the greatest possible impact. I think creating a robust and pragmatic impact assessment framework is essential for any young mission-driven organisation.

Lesson 5: Compete with yourself

“I’m not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to bear my last performance.”- Celine Dion

At Arthan, we decided to compete with ourselves. I honestly believe this is the best form of competition. Doing better than we did last quarter is a sure sign of growth while self-competition is the best stimulus for motivation.

Lesson 6. Build a movement

“No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand – demand – demand change.”- Joe Biden

Over the last decade, I’ve come to understand the social entrepreneurship movement from many different angles and repetitively realized not just how remarkable it is but also how important it is to address some of the biggest challenges we are facing in India immediately.

We live in an era where, finally, the sector has access to multiple avenues of funding, with more in quantity than ever before and a young, enthusiastic generation willing to devote their lives to work in this sector by opting for social impact careers early on rather than transitioning later on in life from corporate careers.

Although, we have begun to connect the dots, we need to come together and respond to urgent needs in creative, strategic and sustainable ways. We need more collaborative approaches to address societal problems that cannot be solved in isolation or by any one institution. Let’s join forces with each other, while constantly breaking down old silos and stubborn structures to collaborate across different sectors, public and private.

Lastly, I would like to tell to every social entrepreneur that they will have instances of failure as well as success in their journey. And the failures might at times outnumber the successes, especially when creating something from scratch. The true key to succeeding will always depend on how you meet the failures.

I’ve launched new initiatives in the past that failed miserably, been often wracked by self-doubt, had would-be partners move on and found some of the most amazing people around the world to support me in my journey, thanks to the THNK tribe.

In the long run, it all came down to inner clarity of purpose and mission, that helped me decide what to do and gave me the strength to make the right decisions. That’s because life wants us to grow and continually presents us with new challenges that help us live up to our responsibility and potential.