5 years of seagull in me!!

yes the same seagull in the book “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach that inspires all of us

It’s been little more than 5 years since I moved out of college to choose entrepreneurship over placement @ NITIE. I came back to Hyderabad in Jan 2009 with the “Guru” style thought “mai biginess karunga”. Though there were many ideas shortlisted to work on and a little prize money from b-plan competitions, I had no plan laid out. Coherendz was started while in campus and had completed more than 15 projects by then. The idea of alumni portals existed back then, but I wasn’t very particular about choosing a sector. I knew, whatever I work on would be a first step that would prepare me for a long haul, so I started!

After 6 months of experimenting with various ideas and decided to pursue building our product – vaave, we setup our fulltime office in November 2009.

The first 10 months were so good that made me sometimes wonder why people said: “entrepreneurship is tough”, everything looked smooth as a cakewalk… later realized, it was all beginners luck.  Within one year of full-time, the first team I built collapsed, almost everyone I started with, left. Soon Sanjeev & Aparna joined. Sanjeev, with his dedication to work and strong business acumen stood as a backbone for me. He kept on taking more responsibilities one after the other and the relation became so strong that even without any formal acknowledgement he became my co-founder. Aparna took up reins of the half-baked vaave code and started rebuilding afresh. She stood strong behind vaave development that allowed us to keep working on product.

the first 2 computers we bought

As we moved on we kept attracting really good people and projects; Ravi, Sarat, Yasaswy, Jaipal joined over next one year and at one point of time we grew to a team of 20+. However, the next 3 years were the most turbulent times. For every exciting moment, there were at least two hard punches. From acute cash crunches to teammates leaving in critical phase of projects; from to losses due to non-timely delivery to team conflicts, we had it all. We had at least 3 instances when the “TIME” pressed a “Team Refresh” button, few left due to personal problems, few chose better opportunities. We lost a few really good people, but the core team stayed back.  Each of them grew their capacities and became stronger.

Yes, there were team conflicts as well, differences in thought process is bound to happen when 6 eccentric & entrepreneurial people come together, however that in fact is the strength of our team, it is diverse and connected. The beauty was that each of us fought always with an intention to make things better, it was that realization that kept us together.

With the vision to solve the quality and infrastructure problems of education sector in India by connecting back the alumni to their alma mater, we moved our focus on our product “Vaave”.

There would be lot more I can share, will do in subsequent posts.

All I can say about last 5 years is “we survived”. The difficult times made us stronger and demanded the best of our personalities. They ironed out slightest gaps and more importantly brought us close to each other. #failures now are part of our daily routine… smiling at the failures gives us courage!

The biggest achievement for me is bringing a team together that can now work & deliver independently; they are resilient, hardworking, skillful and closely knit. They are here, focused on building Coherendz 2.0 – a new journey with aspirations to build one of the finest of product companies in India.

Every day is a new surprise; sometimes it builds hope, sometimes strikes me hard. It’s been so for the last five years. It will be so for years to come. There wasn’t a day I repented choosing the path or a day that wasn’t exciting enough. All I did in part is that I kept working and so will keep working. With the team taking on more responsibilities now allows me to work on things I love most – to design & code!

I had an advantage of starting at an early age; it prepared me for the exciting journey that’s yet to come. I know that journey ahead will be tough as well, how tough? I’ll have stories to tell

Originally posted here:
http://blog.vaave.com/5-years-of-seagull-in-me/