Yesterday was my last day at IonLab, the company that I built with a few friends. It has been a wild ride but I could continue no longer. I am leaving due to internal differences on the progress and transparency in the company.
We have been well-supported in our experience, right from a Govt. of India grant to being one of the few to be selected as a TiE Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program mentee. We owe special gratitude for the people who made that happen and supported us.
But as any been-there-done-that startupper would expect, we delivered on technology, but we sorely lacked in maturity of management skills.
Simply put:
“Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.” —
I can’t explain more because it would then amount to washing dirty linen in public.
Anyway, time to move on. Hopefully second time will be better!
I have been reflecting on many of the experiences I’ve had. So I thought I’d jot down the biggest lessons I learned as a startupper:
For every hour that you read, you must gain 3 hours of experience.
I read so much about entrepreneurship, although only after jumping into the startup. One and a half year later, we had made all the mistakes that those articles warned us about. The problem is not in the reading or understanding, the problem is in internalizing what you read. Wannabe startuppers read all the Paul Graham essays and say “Nah, that’s not going to happen to me, I’m going to be awesome and successful”, but when I read his latest essay What Startups Are Really Like, it felt like he crept into my head at night, stole my experiences and wrote a letter to me. Yes, really, it felt like that. But, of course, you won’t believe me. Until it happens to you.
What was the most common response from the YCombinator startups to Paul Graham?
When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said but way more so
Read those last few words repeatedly 6 times.
And I repeat, my warning to you is that simply reading A-Z of books and essays is not important, you have to internalize the learnings by testing it out on the field and realizing the value for yourself instead of saying “that makes sense” and forgetting about it a few minutes later.
It is funny how most people will discourage you from doing a startup, and, today, perhaps because things have changed now because of all the media hype, most of my friends were discouraging me from leaving it now!
There are two aspects to this. First, read The Dip and you will know why I decided to quit. As Seth Godin says in the book, “The old saying is wrong – winners do quit, and quitters do win. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt – until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.”
Second, as one of my friends observed, I talked to about 7 people (both acquaintances and friends) whose judgment I trusted. 3 of them sympathized and agreed with my decision and 4 of them admonished me and asked me to “hang in there.” You know what was the clincher? The first 3 had done startups themselves and the latter 4 had not. The latter 4 did not really understand the context, even though they meant well and are intelligent folks.
Imagine that a decision like this was so hard for friends-who-know-you to understand. Imagine how much empathy you should have for the motivations and work life of your customers!