Mentoring works?!

Often friends ask me about the difficulties we face trying to startup immediately after graduation. One of the common answer they get to hear is that we have always found the right people to speak openly about our challenges and get their views and insights about it. But I thought it would be appropriate to share something about how such advices have worked for me at least. Because it was very, very different from what I myself expected or how most sources of learning would present it as.

Firstly, I believe no amount of mentoring can substitute experience. And for a non-conformist like me, most advices and insights are not a very natural way to base your decisions on. In spite of that, it has been extremely helpful in a very different way. Normally, we learn the right choices based on our previous cases, when we had to make a similar choice. After a few right/wrong choices you make, most people can pretty much figure out what works for them. Now, having a mentor greatly accelerates two steps involved in the process I stated above:

1. It makes you realize the right choices much sooner than you would otherwise.
2. It helps you understand not just what the right choices are, but why they are the right choices. This makes future learning so much more easy.

Of course, you may argue that there are both merits as well as demerits to this. I agree. But in our case it's been something that has mainly brought out positives for us and I believe it would be so in many other cases where the founders do not have direct corporate experience before. Having said that, things are working great for us only because we enjoy one huge luxury - being able to speak our hearts out with our advisors and get candid opinions not just about encouraging aspects of our business but also about challenges and things that can go terribly wrong. If you cannot speak without any veils with your advisors/mentors, it's no good for either sides irrespective of how much short-term credibility it may bring to your venture.

Like most opinions that I'll be expressing in this blog, some of them have been tested, some of them might just be air. Opinions, beliefs, schedules, roles - everything change so fast in a startup that it makes me wonder if this is the right time to be blogging about it! But then, here I am...

Breaking out of Stealth

To tell or not to tell - is a dilemma which haunts most individuals when a new idea hits them. I won't pretend to have an answer. I'll just take you through how we went about breaking out of our stealth mode.

But first, let me clarify my stand on this issue. Even I am an advocate of the new age culture of democratizing innovation. But I do believe a stealth mode is necessary for an idea, at least in a non-ideal world like ours where most ideas end up being born into their graves. Stealth protects you from losing motivation about your idea even before you get a feel for its true potential. Stealth helps you shape your idea to reflect your own self, before letting it grow freely and rapidly in an open environment. Having said that, I do understand that a prolonged stealth mode is as likely to kill an idea, as letting it out before a wrong crowd.

Fortunately, in our case the idea was born within a team and hence reduced the risk of reaching a stale mate under stealth. The real break-out moment came during the winter holidays. With a 11page white paper, me & Sindhu knocked the doors of every neuro-psychologist, social psychologist, evolutionary biologist and psychology doctors we knew. At the same time, Nakul was speaking to HR directors and business heads of several companies in Mumbai. We even found ways to get introduced to experts in the field of computational and cognitive neuroscience from a few major research groups around the globe. In 10 days, I had 100+ conversations labeled "Vita" in my gmail account and we had personally interacted with 15+ individuals from relevant groups.

What did we get? Insights - loads of it & a very promising network of people who were convinced more because of our energy than the idea, which was still looked upon in disbelief like a magic trick that you could not break. To me, the theory was so beautiful, it had to be true. It probably worked in our favor that our framework was already able to predict a good number of behavioral traits which were only inductively asserted till then.

A few people truly liked our idea and got involved in developing it further, while most others liked us and that gave us the confidence to continue working on the idea. By this time, we were convinced that our idea is well ahead of our time and hence almost stopped working on the business aspect of it. The business was turning into a science project.

[Thank you list: Dr. Anders Sandberg, Dr. Ahalya Raghuram, Dr. Vidyanand Nanjundiah, Dr. Manjula, Dr. Keshav Kumar, Ms. Renu, Mr. Rituraj, Dr. Anita Ghai, Dr. Kusuma, Dr. Shobini Rao, Mr. Vijay Rao and Dr. Suman Kapur]