Ashwin Upadhyaya's Blog

As I jogged with my friend yesterday at the lake, I suddenly got this thought that I would never be here jogging if I had kept my concentration intact during a fateful day of my life. I would never have been his friend and never would I be jogging in Mysore.

In the 2nd week of May 2001 on a long awaited day, I started marking the answers. The subject was maths and it was the CET examination. The mind was trained to be a machine then. Even before the end of the stipulated time, I was done. As I came out of the hall with the entire 60 questions still hovering like planets around my head, an asteroid struck me with tremendous force. I suddenly became 100% sure that one of those planets was destroyed. I scrambled through my answer sheet copy and became sure that the answer was wrong.

So, I was destined to not get into KREC (NITK now). And in SJCE, this 2 digit CET rank was my primary identity. Now the rank has one primary purpose. It is stuck with my gmail ID for ever.

One thought after the end of a week is: “It feels strange not to be paid immediately for working so hard”. Anyway, this was a choice I knowingly made. Yet, it feels so strange, it can only be experienced.

If anyone needs a business idea, then you just need to get out of your home. For example, I needed to get a business card printed and had a few ideas about it. First of all, I needed textured paper and not the usual stuff cards are made out of. Second, my logo has a color gradient in it. Now, it seems most of the printers here in Mysore cannot satisfy both the requirements simultaneously. Offset printers provide all types of paper but they cannot print gradients. Digital printers do the opposite. So, I started to google for online printers. The online printers only provide photo solutions. Nobody provides business cards, brochures and other office related stuff.

Not all offices can afford as much time as we did. The only solution people with less time do is they compromise about quality. If there is someone providing quality with convenience, then that someone would definitely do great business. Think about it. The online printing business is a great opportunity waiting to be exploited.

Other than that, I found that google is continuing to create amazing stuff. Google reader is one product to which got hooked to this week. Although this is there since a long time, I only found now that it has the amazing features it has. And Orkut will shortly have gadgets inside it which users can share and I found that the apps are pretty easy to create provided you know some programming, html, java and xml. Apps were always present in igoogle. Now, there will be a programming frenzy in the orkut community. Developers can see what it is even now through sandbox. Others though will have to wait till end of February.

 A new lesson I learned is “reality has to be experienced unlike thoughts and ideas”. Following list is an echo of this statement where each thought gets re-estimated during the real action.

• Before startup thought: We will build a website.
• After starting reality: php bugs, mysql database problems, web-host support tickets, 100s of images to find, layout designs, color combinations mismatch, payment gateway integration,……

• Before startup thought: We will register a company.
• After starting reality: Auditor fees, Name approval problems, government apathy, delays in registration,……

• Before startup thought: We will meet corporates, government officials etc…
• After starting reality: Corporate contacts hard to find, government officials come to office at 11AM and leave before 3PM and best of all, it starts raining on a day you have a meeting with someone and you don’t have a car…

Many more such realities hit you in the face. Some more interesting realities are power cuts for 50% of the day on some days.
The entrepreneurial mindset is to not bother with these issues and somehow manage to overcome them. None of these should ever matter in the long-term. In the short-term though, they always create some level of delays and frustration. More than all, these issues tend to disrupt the focus of an entrepreneur’s mind.

One and a half months after quitting software, I once again had the opportunity to look at some html and css. Although not much logic is involved in these scripts, it still fits into the software realm. Fortunately, the more intensive work is being done by the other co-founder of my company.