Because Shit Happened

by Harsh Snehanshu

  I announced the internship offer to each and every friend of mine, though they were more excited about the nude beaches that came free with it and turned green with envy. As I knocked on Rishabh’s door to share the good news, he had something else to tell me:

  ‘Amol, I needed to talk to you. I was just about to come to your room.’

  ‘I was…’ I was interrupted.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said excitedly, ‘I’m in.’

  ‘What? Where? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m in for YourQuote.’

  At first, I could not believe it. How did he change his mind so suddenly?

  ‘What happened? How come such a drastic decision?’

  ‘I just consulted my senior. You know what my CV looks like. I’ve got a 6.4 GPA and there is just one position of responsibility of secretary, SAC, that I have which, frankly speaking, isn’t of much value. Starting up a venture would brighten my chances of cracking into good companies,’ said Rishabh.

  ‘You want to get into a start-up for getting yourself a job?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. That’s what you want to do too, right?’

  ‘I don’t know. I want to do it because…I want to do it,’ I said in a contemplative tone.

  ‘You seem unclear about it. It’s good that I’m clear then. So what will be my designation and share of equity in the company?’

  My mind went blank. I had not given much thought to it at all. My mind raced with all kinds of possibilities—from I becoming the Founder and CEO taking a major portion of equity, to being co-founder with equal designation and equity. I fast forwarded my mind into an imaginable future. The thought of Rishabh taking orders from me seemed repulsive. I thought I would feel really awkward ordering Rishabh, my batchmate, my dear friend, about anything. I thought that the motivation to work would be equal if both equity and designation were divided equally between us.

  ‘Co-founder, Director. 33 percent each.’

  ‘That’s great. So, your friend Vikram would be working from Chandigarh, right?’

  ‘No, he’s backed out. I have found a more experienced person. Suresh Boddeda, Rajiv’s elder brother. I have even talked to him.’

  ‘You have given him 33 percent as well?’

  I hadn’t, but I lied about it to avoid the uncomfortable equity talk.

  ‘Great! Let’s get done with this semester and we’ll rock the hell out of our YourQuote in the summer holidays. I know so many guys in the campus that we would be able to set up a big team out here with ease,’ Rishabh exclaimed. I had not failed to notice the ‘our’ that he had put before YourQuote. It came as a pleasant surprise to see him so involved.

  ‘I have an internship at my father’s company in Lucknow. So most of the time I’ll be free,’ Rishabh explained. I suddenly realized that there was a problem. I had forgotten about the internship in France which I’d got after sending around almost five hundred applications across the globe. I just couldn’t miss it, now that I’d announced it to everyone in my family and my hostel. It just meant losing credibility.

  ‘I’ll be in France. I just got an internship there, so we’ll try and manage things over the net,’ I said, though my voice did not sound convincing at all.

  ‘Uh, okay. Should we postpone it till you come back?’

  ‘No. We can’t delay anymore. We’ll have to manage somehow,’ I said as I left his room, contemplating on what to do next.

  I was in a fix. I knew that if I went abroad for an internship, I wouldn’t be able to do anything significant. I had to be here in India if the start-up were to see fruition during the vacation itself. Otherwise it would get delayed by another semester for we would not be able to involve students till the next big vacation.

  The thought of calling my parents or talking to my friends or even Priya wasn’t going to help as France was too lucrative to let go and they would definitely convince me to not let go of the opportunity. As I entered my room, I found Rajiv waiting there for me.

  ‘Hi buddy, what’s up?’ I asked, faking excitement in my voice.

  ‘I have got something for you. I just saw this poster stuck on the board in the campus,’ he said and handed me the poster of xIncubator—India’s premier start-up incubator of IIM-A. I was not aware of the concept of a start-up incubator, so Rajiv, who had googled it on his laptop by then, explained that incubators offered seed money (5-10 lakh rupees), office space, and mentorship to promising ideas and prepared them for getting funding. The whole concept seemed really intriguing to me and I immediately grabbed hold of the poster and read through the details. The deadline for the application was just five hours later.

  I thanked Rajiv and called Rishabh to my room. As Rishabh went through the poster, he questioned me, ‘The result comes out on May 20 after which they call us to IIM-A for a ten days’ workshop. How are you going to attend if you’re going to France?’

  ‘Simple. I won’t go,’ I said in an impulse. Little did I know that this was what I had wanted. I wasn’t made for engineering. Two months in France would anyway not add to my career as much as making it to xIncubator would have. Whenever you are stuck between two choices, both lucrative, choose the one that brings you closer to the future that you have imagined for yourself every day.

  As both of them sat next to me, I opened my laptop and subsequently, Photoshop. Five minutes later, as I doodled my heart out, the company’s logo was finalized. Next step was writing the business plan. None of us had any idea about it. But it was the task that brought synergy to all our energies. We spent the next hour discussing and answering the various questions that were put up on the xIncubator website. Though Rajiv wasn’t the co-founder, he represented his brother’s side and offered us keen advice. When they left, satisfied, the idea was left to me, its real father, to type out the answers until I was content with them to click on the ‘submit’ button.

  I submitted our answers just three minutes before the mentioned deadline. The wheels had been set rolling. There was a wide grin on my face as I looked at myself in the mirror. After stupidly smiling at myself for a few minutes, I carried out an important task. I mailed the professor in France who had offered me the internship, saying I wouldn’t be able to make it because of some personal reasons, and referred Rajiv to him instead. The professor replied within minutes, irritably mentioning that it was unprofessional on my part and even rejected Rajiv’s reference. I could just mumble a sorry to both of them.

  A bit lost, I looked at my cell phone, which was stranded in the silent mode at the other corner of the bed. It had seven missed calls. All of them being Priya’s. Unprepared, I lazily dialed her number.

  ‘Do you have any idea what happened today?’ Priya screamed at me.

  ‘I had a baby, that’s all I know,’ I said.

  ‘Jerk, I almost fell from stairs in the college.’

  ‘Oh, did it hurt?’

  ‘No and yes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No, because it didn’t; yes, because all my seniors laughed at me.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ I wasn’t the nicest boyfriend out there.

  ‘Go to hell!’

  ‘I’ll go there tomorrow, okay? C’ya outside Vishwavidyalaya station.’

  I intentionally didn’t tell her about the team completion or xIncubator because she, much like my parents, had boasted about my France internship to all her friends and if she had come to know that I wasn’t going, she would have been disappointed.

  The next day I met Priya and informed her about my backout from the France offer. She was shocked, but when I assured her that it meant that I could get an internship in DRDO, near her PG, and could spend the entire vacation being near her instead, she was more than happy. It was just a matter of changing her perspective with the basic art of persuasion that would be of immense help to me in the time to come.

  She made me call up my mother who shocked me saying she knew I had backed out.

  ‘I was so worried how you were going to manage t
hings all alone, that too in a place where people don’t even know English. I was inwardly praying for you to not go and see, Saibaba has heard my wish. We’ll go to Shirdi in the summers to thank him, okay?’ my mother said.

  ‘Okay, Jai Sainath,’ I said and disconnected the call with a smile.

  Two weeks later, Suresh stood up to his words and launched our basic website, with a bright colorful logo shining at the top, an about page, a careers page, and our introductions on the team page—something that I was very proud of. I had called my mother that day and asked her to check the website. Though she didn’t have the faintest idea about what yourquote.in was there for, she congratulated me by saying, ‘Wow, someone has put your name there and added Co-founder & Director after it.’

  I could not be happier.

  Apparently, what we didn’t realize was that Suresh had started a web development company called Brilliant Pals and we didn’t pay him for the work. So he had gone to seek other work instead, and owing to his talent, there was no dearth of it—he got work for which clients actually paid him, unlike penniless entrepreneurs like us. As two days passed by and we failed to hear from him, we panicked. We went to meet one of the best developers of our college, nicknamed Bhallaji, who later got recruited by Facebook. He was pursuing Civil Engineering yet he was a better web developer than most of the CS guys out there.

  ‘Bhallaji, we need your help,’ Rishabh began his persuasion. We had found him sitting in the canteen. We told him about our idea and about Suresh as well. The first thing he did was google Suresh on the net and he was appalled to find no significant links or websites having his signature, which meant that he was a novice in web development as were we in entrepreneurship. Upon realizing the evident hole, Rishabh went ahead and asked Bhallaji to join us, which he politely refused, as he was working with another start-up which has now become a major restaurant listing website.

  We realized that a long distance relationship with Suresh wouldn’t be possible. And we had to break up from our own side. My side, specifically, as I’d been the one dealing with him.

  ‘It has been two weeks and he has been holding us up. What should we do? Get Suresh out of the scene?’ I asked Rishabh.

  ‘What would happen to the equity then?’ Rishabh asked. Apparently, his primary concern was equity.

  ‘We will divide it fifty-fifty,’ I said naturally.

  ‘Yes, we should. I’ll get in touch with Animesh. He’s in first year CS, a very bright guy.’

  ‘Perfect!’

  Since I was dealing with Suresh, I had been given the daunting task of getting rid of him. Awkwardly, I called Suresh. He picked up the call.

  ‘Suresh, I’m sorry, it’s not working out,’ I said.

  ‘What? The website is working pretty fine,’ he said. The cultural and linguistic gap between us was too big to make understanding easy.

  ‘I’m talking about our coordination. We are facing trouble in communicating our thoughts on design and all, and also, in understanding what’s going on in your mind.’

  ‘Amol, it’s okay. I know perfect English, I can explain things again,’ Suresh replied. He mistook my call for an apology for the communication gap—the majority of which was from his end.

  ‘I know, I know. I mean that we have to find a…’ I began and realized that I missed the tact there. I immediately modified my statement to, ‘I mean that it would be great if you can shift to New Delhi. We three could work together then.’

  I knew I had hit the bull’s eye. He explained his situation saying he couldn’t leave his hometown for two not-yet-graduates pursuing some completely new idea. I sympathized and immediately paid for the expenses from Suresh’s side to Rajiv so as to not affect our friendship in any way. Now we were back to square one, with no developers on our side. The search continued…

  April, 2010

  Noon. The pleasant morning sun had just transformed into a big ball of fire. In Delhi, spring departs even before it has fully arrived. I was sleepily returning from one of the most boring lectures I’d ever attended when my cell phone buzzed. It was an unknown number. I have a strange fascination for unknown numbers; whenever one flashes on my cellphone, it sends my heart pounding.

  It was a girl on the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello, am I speaking to Mr Sabharwal?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered excitedly. It was the first time my name had been taken with so much courtesy.

  It was a call from the xIncubator team of IIM-Ahmedabad. They had asked us to reach Gurgaon the next day and give our elevator pitch to their panel as a part of the shortlisting process. I jumped with delight and ran like a lunatic with dishevelled hair and a big smile to Rishabh’s room.

  ‘We are going to…’ I said, panting, ‘Gurgaon tomorrow. xIncubator guys called us.’

  ‘Awesome!’ Rishabh yelled, a little unconcerned though.

  We decided that we would divide the work. I was to prepare the ideas, concept, and plan of action slides, while Rishabh would take care of the T-shirt revenue forecasts based on his experience. I had to work on the slides that night, and since Rishabh had the next morning off, he chose to work during that time by waking up at 6. By 1 o’clock at night, I was almost done. I sent the ppt to Rishabh and went to sleep.

  Our presentation in Gurgaon was scheduled for 10 am. We had called a cab at 9 am, which cost us five hundred rupees—the first extravagant expenditure for our venture—the next day. I got up at 8, went to brush my teeth, and chose to see what my able partner was up to. The door was locked from inside, the fan was on, the lights were off. He was still asleep! I panicked. I hammered on the door and woke him up. In that one moment, I got the glimpse of future—he would never be punctual.

  As I got dressed in formal clothes for the first time in my college life, my mind had lost its serenity. I couldn’t believe the ease with which Rishabh had taken the entire matter. Thanks to the distance to Gurgaon, we had forty five minutes in hand, and fortunately when we reached our destination, we were ready for the show.

  ‘Who among you is Amol, the author?’ said Praneet, one of the organizers.

  ‘That’s me. Hi,’ I introduced myself.

  We engaged in a discussion on our way to the conference room, which had two investors already seated. Seeing Rishabh less involved, I introduced him to the panel. We hadn’t decided who was to present the plan till the very last minute. Just before the presentation, Rishabh had asked me to present it. I couldn’t decipher whether it was nervousness or lack of preparation from his end and I charted my own course. Though I was nervous, my passion for my idea helped me speak up. I passed the baton to Rishabh to talk about the sales forecast which he faltered through. His voice showed that his heart wasn’t in it.

  We completed the nervewraking Q & A session as I answered most of the questions with my fledgling knowledge about entrepreneurship. Rishabh bumped in with his views in between. They seemed concerned about whether we would go ahead full-time with the venture or not. We tried to answer them to the best of our ability. But we couldn’t tell if our answers had impressed them or not.

  Just as we were about to leave, Praneet said to us, ‘Guys, you are the sellers of T-shirts with quirky quotes. Next time, wear your brand instead of these boring shirts!’

  We smiled.

  ‘How do you think it went?’ said Rishabh as soon as we came out of the conference room.

  ‘Good, maybe…frankly, I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt if we will make it. Did you see the look on that investor’s face? He didn’t know what Twitter was,’ Rishabh retaliated.

  As we returned to the campus, we decided to go to the wind tunnel, one of the most prominent hangout spots for IITians. My eyes drifted towards a girl with medium height, dark complexion, oily hair, and a wide grin, who was running towards us. The only fact that comforted me was that she wasn’t smiling at me. As she neared, I observed that she had a burn mark on her neck.

  ‘How was it? How was it?’ she boom
ed in her shrill voice, and jumped across the hallway towards us. She looked at Rishabh while speaking, and subsequently at me. There was a naivety, a rare innocence in her personality, a characteristic that was lacking in other girls in my college. Her demeanour was not very feminine, which showed that she had been raised along with brothers and she was also slightly boyish herself, her speech embellished with too many ‘yaars’.

  ‘Hi, I’m Anjali,’ she said to me in a rather shy tone. Anjali Yadav, the one who liked my novel; the one who was a part of Pratik’s dramatics society; the one with whom Rishabh had been spending a lot of time recently, I thought.

  ‘Hi, Rishabh keeps talking about you,’ I said shaking hands with her. Her bashfulness disappeared like smoke in thin air.

  ‘Yes, I’m awesome, I know. How was the presentation?’ she asked again, this time to both of us.

  ‘Good,’ Rishabh assured her. I wondered whether he really meant it since he had told me otherwise just a while ago.

  ‘Great. Let’s go outside and eat something,’ she said grabbing Rishabh by the hand.

  ‘Amol, do you want to join us?’ Rishabh asked. The tone of his voice told me that he was just saying it out of compulsion, not his will. I asked him to carry on without me and chose to call on someone who had been waiting for me.

  The next day, after classes, we took out some time to brainstorm. Just during the middle of the discussion, Rishabh asked me, ‘Would you mind if I involve Anjali in our discussion too? She is very creative and can give great inputs.’

  Looking back in hindsight, I feel I should have said no. It was two directors talking, two founders discussing, and any third person, no matter how creative or fruitful he or she is, should have been shut out. But back at that time, unaware of professional etiquette and rules of the organizational game, I had said yes. Rishabh immediately turned back and called out to her to give her the news. I was surprised to find that she was sitting right behind him.