RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright © Harsh Snehanshu 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
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Random House Group Limited
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United Kingdom
This book is loosely based on the author’s own life. However, all conversations, characters, events, and happenings have been completely fictionalized and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184003932
To my parents,
Sudha and S.S. Pathak,
for believing and
investing their trust in me
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
The Spark
Sharing the Idea
The Stepping Stone
Affairs Aplenty
The Quantum Leap
Going Solo
Eureka
Mishra
The Rotten Mango
Goodbye, Forever
The Comeback
No Time for Love
The Birth of a Competitor
All Hell Broke Loose
War with Anjali
A Date with Investors
Kanpur Times
The End
Rishabh Speaks
Death of a Child
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Author’s Note
Before I proceed, it’s important to forewarn you that this book is not just a guide to a start-up. It’s also a real life story of two ambitious entrepreneurs who failed miserably. Entrepreneurs, as you might know, are crazy beings. They get excited when faced with a challenge and God forbid, if they find something that poses a challenge to others, their madness turns into an epidemic and inducts many more. With time, we have been made to believe that entrepreneurs are tough as steel, capable of bearing pain, facing countless struggles, and taking everything in their stride for the sake of their ideas. But only an entrepreneur can tell you that there are times when he gets scared, when he wishes to cry, and when he wishes to be enveloped in his mother’s arms, away from the gruelling world. This book touches upon that aspect—the emotional side—of entrepreneurship, where all your relationships stand the test of time as you fight the world on your own.
This book would not have been possible without the turn of events at a critical juncture in my life. I thank all those who have been a part of my entrepreneurial journey, however short lived it may have been. Some of you might not like the fact that the story is being brought up now. But as a writer and a former entrepreneur, I feel this book had to be written so it could be of help to all the budding entrepreneurs and guide them to not repeat the same mistakes that I made. I am still not a successful entrepreneur and so I can’t really tell what it takes to become successful, but I definitely know what it does NOT take to become one. Hope you enjoy the disastrous journey I’m making you partake.
Knowing when to lose is more important than knowing how to win.
Prologue
Patna, Bihar
When I was twelve, I had a very serious conversation with my mother. I wanted to know the answer to a question that had been bothering me for the past few days.
‘Mom, will you and Daddy ever leave me?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, if we find a more obedient boy than you, then we definitely would,’ she said, her serious face increasing my worries with each passing minute. Then she suddenly broke into a huge smile and I knew there was nothing to worry about. She was only kidding!
‘Mom, seriously, please answer me,’ I persisted.
‘No, Amol. We will never leave you,’ she assured me.
But my curiosity was still not satiated and my question was not going to be bogged down by a simple yes or no.
‘Never ever?’ I asked once again.
‘No parent will ever leave his or her child, no matter what happens. Never ever,’ she said. Her eyes twinkled this time.
I smiled, took my cricket bat, and went outside to play gully cricket, imbibing her statement as the universal truth that was never going to change. The question never haunted me again. Well, not for ten years.
A decade later, when I became a parent to my baby—my start-up—the question resurfaced and drilled an irreparable hole in my heart. After raising my start-up from birth for two whole years, I left it. Yes, I left my child. And I never bothered to look back. Never ever.
The Spark
May 25, 2009
Glasgow, UK
Shades of blue painted my laptop screen. Like always, my eyes were glued to the screen. I re-read the address bar for the umpteenth time that day. It said www.facebook.com.
Sign up, connect and share with the people in your life. It’s free and always will be.
I read the above lines twice. It was my first encounter with a mission statement of a company. And I was touched by its simplicity. I logged in, completely awestruck.
There was a dark blue bar on top which contained the logo of Facebook written in lowercase. No flashy fonts, no flashy colors. There was a notification box at the bottom right (yes, it used to be there in 2009!), something known as a News Feed in the centre, a few sponsored ads on the right, and my profile on the left. After assimilating whatever I saw, I came to a realization. That I frigging hated the damn website! Everyone could read my updates, which was so unlike the social network with the funny name that I was addicted to—Orkut. Whatever I wrote on my wall was visible to everybody. And whatever I was writing on my friend’s wall was visible to all our mutual friends. It seemed so sickening! All the privacy was suddenly turned into news for people who had absolutely no connection with it in the first place, thus the name ‘News Feed’.
I cursed the friends who spammed me with numerous mails asking me to join the damn site. Harassed, I wrote my first status.
I hate Facebook. It’s boring, disorganized, and does not respect privacy at all.
And I closed the tab.
‘Hello sugar.’
Priya loved it when I called her sugar. She was the woman I was madly in love with. Back in India, she was counting the days left for my return to the country.
‘Hi boyfriend’, she said in her typically excited tone.
It had been almost one month since I last saw her face. I had come to Glasgow, Scotland, on a three-month summer internship program, and I still had two months to go. Almost everybody at IIT, just by virtue of being an IITian, aspired to get a sponsored internship in the second year, where one hoped of working less and travelling more. I was one of those lucky ones who got a fully sponsored, ‘academically stimulating’ research internship at the Optics group of the University of Glasgow.
‘Have you heard of this thing called Facebook?’ I asked her.
‘Huh, so my boyfriend gets the time from his busy schedule to call his oh-so-awesome girlfriend from the other end of the globe and the first thing he wants to know is whether I know about a f
rikkin social networking site! Aren’t you already too addicted to that Orkut thing of yours?’ she retaliated. Being one of those rare species who preferred the real world more than its virtual counterpart, she completely despised the concept of an online social network. Orkut had been her mortal enemy for getting more attention from me lately.
‘Wow, so you have heard of it! I thought you were technically imbecile,’ I remarked.
‘I always keep myself updated with the arrival of my competitors, especially when I have loyal friends like you who send me an invite to join it,’ she replied sharply, which, as I thought in my head, would have definitely been followed by a wink.
‘Smart. You would be glad to know that I don’t like her,’ I said.
‘Her? Who is she?’
‘Your rival, Facebook. I just posted my first update a couple of minutes ago.’
‘Yes, I saw that. I even ‘liked’ it along with three other people.’
‘Really? Which three?’
‘Pratik, Ravi, and another girl—Mary. Who is she?’ Priya asked curiously.
‘Well, she’s just a woman I have had the pleasure of spending a few nights with,’ I joked, hoping to fuel her anger even further. In the meanwhile, I unconsciously logged into the website that had sent me to hate trips an hour ago.
‘Is she blind?’
‘No, she is dumb like you. I’m going now; have to check my notifications,’ I said, my mouse pointer inadvertently moving towards the bottom right corner where number 3 popped up in a red voice-box. The hatred at first sight was immediately vaporized.
‘Hello, come again? You just told me you hated it,’ she said.
I was too engrossed in what was displaying on my computer screen to pay any heed to her, and so disconnected the call.
A moment later, number 3 changed to 4, with a wall post from Priya complimenting me: ‘You are the biggest jerk on this planet.’
I liked the post. And unknowingly, I started to like Facebook as well.
Two days later, Orkut was history and Facebook became the next grand love affair of my life. Already an avid blogger, I could not find a better place to showcase my opinions, get friends and readers to read them, involve them in a discussion, and more than anything else, get appreciated for it in the form of ‘likes’. Such was my obsession with likes that I started coming up with something outrageously witty, or at times, profound or philosophical, just in hope of getting likes. Facebook became a mini-blog for me.
To Priya, I became a bigger jerk with each passing day since she would come to know about my well-being more via Facebook than through my awaited international calls—although the website did provide her with a medium to keep a constant tab on me.
It allowed her check my pictures in picturesque Scotland, including snaps of my fair-skinned female friends, three of whom seemed quite hot to her, as I could tell from her comments on the pictures.
On one of my only pictures with Mary, Priya made sure I would not be saved from embarrassment, commenting: ‘Why is that gadhi keeping her hand on your shoulders?’ which prompted Mary to follow-up with a question for me: ‘Hey Amol, what does gadhi mean?’ After two minutes of thinking for an apt answer, I replied: ‘It’s a Hindi word meaning “beautiful girl”.’ Mary instantly replied saying, ‘@Priya—Even you are a gadhi honey!’ If Facebook had an option to like comments back then, I would have definitely clicked it.
In the next seven days, I had posted over 25 status updates. More than 3 statuses a day. All of them were original, witty, or profound one-liners and could easily be classified as popular judging by the number of likes they managed to get, helping me outshine every other friend in my list. I wouldn’t be wrong in calling myself a Facebook addict. And the only fuel to ignite this addiction was likes, their number, and the happiness that followed.
However there was one problem. Though now Facebook works on the concept of a ‘timeline’, back then it sucked at archiving data. The chronological organization of the posts meant that my favorite one-liners, if they got too old, couldn’t be traced back immediately. I needed to click on older posts and go on and on to collect data. Even with the new timeline, I need to remember the exact date when I posted a particular quote to check it.
This posed a grave problem for me. And, this was the moment that gave me a sense of a great opportunity. I thought how Facebook was making people exercise their creativity but was unable to archive it properly. Moreover, there was no way that creativity could be monetized. Being a prolific blogger, I valued my creativity and didn’t like seeing it go to waste. I searched for websites where my one-liners could mint money for me; and if not the money, then at least the recognition that I was the creator.
I came across Twitter which was a fledgling website back then but was focussed more on updates and interactions than just quotes. Then there were micro-blogging websites, but none that concentrated on monetization or even giving some recognition to the inventor of the one-liner. I came across quotes websites, all of which archived famous peoples’ quotes. There was no room for the common man. Oddly enough, a lot of them listed many anonymous quotes. This infuriated me further as I realized that some common man who would have come up with that quote hadn’t been credited for it and was now forgotten. His name was probably buried along with an epitaph stating: ‘Here lived the man who would be remembered by nobody in future’.
Can’t common people get a chance to get famous? Can’t they be quoted? Can’t their words become immortal? Why is fame a prerequisite immortalize creativity? Thoughts like these clouded my mind.
Suddenly, I smelled a very viable business opportunity. I was going to do what no one had attempted so far. You see, I had to. The seed was implanted in my brain and I had to make a tree sprout out of it—come what may.
As I explored further, I realized that the time was apt. Thanks to Facebook (and later on, Twitter), common people had started writing one-liners, but there was no avenue where they could be archived or monetized or even recognized. Why would you need to quote Shakespeare, when you yourselves could come up with something apt to suit an occasion? What you say matters. You deserve to be quoted. Your quote matters. YourQuote. I checked the domain. The address was available. yourquote.in. It didn’t even take me a minute to confirm the booking. However, there was a little problem. I didn’t know how to ‘code’, that is, how to develop a website.
I thought that until I figured out a way to get the damn website made, I would run it as a blog. I was already an avid blogger, and knew it inside out. Within minutes, I started a blog and put down all my quotes in it.
I logged in my Facebook account to share the link of the blog with friends. On top of my News Feed was my friend Pratik’s update which struck me with its witty humour.
The root of all sins is…less than 1.
I googled the quote to check whether it was original or copied. It was an original one. I liked his post and immediately, I called him asking him to become the co-author of the blog. I didn’t share with him the bigger picture. He complied, published a bunch of his quotes on the blog. We had two authors now, including me, as I began hunting for more.
An hour later, I pinged my friend Vikram—one of my closest school friends—on Google Talk. He was on the other side of the globe, pursuing Computer Science in Punjab. He could tell from how thrilled I seemed that I was onto something new. Five minutes into the chat, I inducted him on board as the web developer for the website. He liked the idea but asked for some more time, around four to five months, to prepare himself for the task at hand. Having just passed his second year, he still wasn’t adept in programming to undertake the project of developing a social network. I gladly gave him the time he asked for, assuring him that I needed time to ideate as well.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I was dreaming with eyes wide open.
Late at night, Shardul, my co-intern from IIT whom I was sharing the room with, returned piss drunk state and dropped off to sleep. I didn’t need alcohol to remai
n intoxicated for the rest of my college life.
Sharing the Idea
I was intoxicated by an idea. And you know what happens when you are intoxicated? You start talking a lot.
I wanted to talk to someone in person. Though Shardul, my roommate in Glasgow, was very well-acquainted with the entrepreneurial world, I hesitated to share my idea with him. I feared he would mock me or the idea. I felt he was much more aware than me, more well-read, and exposed to the start-up domain as he headed the Entrepreneurship Development Cell at IIT Delhi.
So I figured the person to talk to about my deam was Pratik—the creative, sharp, and trustworthy friend from my alma mater—who was interning in Glasgow itself, at the University of Strathclyde. I explained my vision to him over the phone. He liked the idea and we decided that I would visit his place in George Square the next day so we could discuss it further. Neither of us had any idea about starting up, technology, finance, marketing, or organizational structure. But, we still called our session the next day an ‘Entrepreneurial Meeting’.
We decided to continue with the meeting at my place instead. Despite having no idea of how we were going to take the project forward, our meeting went on for two hours, and we kept thinking of ways to raise the seed capital, an initial amount required to start the project. Ultimately, I came up with an ingenuous plan. We would print our one-liners on T-shirts and sell them as soon as we got back to India. I told Pratik that Vikram, being a Computer Science guy, would handle the technology end of it. Pratik and I would handle the creative, outreach, manufacturing, and team-building part. We figured that selling T-shirts was no small feat and could transform into a big business as our friends Rishabh and Akshay were already selling T-shirts in the college campus and were making big money out of it. We had even heard that they received 30,000 rupees for each order by selling around 300 T-shirts at a 100 rupees each. Our inexperience made us think that after creating a team of around four to five people, we could make over 30 lakh a month by delivering roughly 100 orders a month. The momentous figure stoked our fantasy and we day-dreamt for the rest of the day.
Because Shit Happened Page 1
