December 31, 2022

State of the year

my recap of 2022 in a state of the year format

I tend to write a state of the year personally for how things panned out across the year. Keeping it with the spirit of finishing 25 posts of this newsletter. I plan to do it over here.

I started “on the side” newsletter because it resonated with the type of person I like to be associated. The main work you do for a living should be associated with the notion that you do on the side. I am averse to calling myself a startup founder because that’s what I did for the past 3 years but it does not reflect who I am.

Shooting Star

At the start of 2022, things couldn’t have been better on the startup front. We got the flywheel on graded produce adoption kicking and we were growing fast. But, it all came to halt in the month of January.

The entire month of Jan and Feb was spent winding down the operations. Helping team find their next stints and put up a brave face while you are at it.

The reason being, the next tranche of funding didn’t turn up and we ran into cashflow issues all of a sudden. I decided to publicly pull the plug and prioritise the transition of the team. They were the real deal when it comes to Subjimandi.app.

The outcome of this was outpouring support by people who we have met all along the way. Venky who runs the famous agribusiness matter newsletter lend his support and it opened doors for us.

Most of the operations team quickly slotted into subsequent roles. Even though we had distributed operations. We decided to bring them all together and make them apply. Until we went public, the interest was little in their profiles. But once the word went out about the team, they were approached by multiple companies and each one of them had settled into their roles by the beginning of march. The product team took little longer but slowly by late June all of them found their next stints.

In February, I along with my other senior member, Anvesh who headed our entire operations took a road trip to each of our locations and help wind down the operations. The toughest part was closing down Pune office. We invested capital and time in opening this region just 3 months back. We traveled more than 1,800 kilometres in less than 5 days and ended our trip back at Hyderabad with no physical trace of Subjimandi.app. I believe the asset light mantra was taken too seriously and driven in all our team members by Anvesh.

There were many more people who helped me and the team during this transition. Folks like Anurag, Sneha and Twitter mutuals who lend an ear when I reached out to them. Special mention to Gokul who shed some light on the entire ordeal of closing and transitioning into a job.

To sum this phase of the year. The one person who stood with me during this tumultuous time and for the past 8 years happens to be my life partner, Diksha. The things about her is that she never took this change as an end of my career but as an another obstacle that I need to overcome. People often tell you in success speeches, how critical was the support of their loved ones. I am here to tell you that they are the ones who see you beyond your work role and tend to view all professional wins and losses as minor triumphs or losses. This helped me be grounded and not view myself just as this failed entrepreneur.

Transition

We closed down the negotiations of my next stint and couple of more folks from the team in February end. It was an acqui-hire with an another startup in agri space, FarMart.

I am still at FarMart and spent the good part of last 9 months setting up logistics division which is headed by Anvesh. It culminated with us rolling out a product built on a no-code tool and making it central to our work.

In the same period, I shed my role as a founder and started working as an operator. The difference is that as a founder, you are privy to knowing what you are not good at very quickly. This helps in either finding someone to delegate or prioritise learning it. Where as in the role of operator, it doesn’t matter what you know or not but what the people working with you understand about your skills and competencies.

You will also have to come to terms with things you can impact and things that are out of your purview. The constraints while being a founder are all external like capital, time and resources. Whereas the constraints come in titles, org structure and internal dynamics at play.

During this time, I also moved from Hyderabad to Gurgaon for the first time. Cities are important in one’s life and Gurgaon so far has not grown on me. It’s an urban jungle where people who commute by walk are penalised by not given any place to walk.

Picking things on the side

In April, this very newsletter started. I have written 24 posts ranging from reciting my startup journey to talking about concepts in logistics. I have a mind map of interests that I would like to pursue using this newsletter. The other goal I set out to do is that for the 100 posts. I will write them before focusing on who is reading it.

I am also working with fellow operators in the space of agri to run a community called agripreneurs. It is focused on changing the overall narrative of agri-space from one that helps farmers to one that is solving real problems. We also want to increase collaboration between startups currently operating this space.

I also made significant efforts to meet more people that I follow on Twitter. I went to meet-ups that they hosted. Hit people up when I get to know they are in town. Reach out to folks when I am in their town. There was only one outcome to it, interesting conversations that were memorable.

Course Correction

Prior to this year, I spent significant amount to time figuring how to make things work at my startup. This year I tried to take a step back and focus on things that will help me elongate my working career.

Dabble in complicated skills that I couldn’t work on as a founder. I am learning how to become a better operator, how to become a good trainer for faster learning development of teams and designing teams structure.

On the skills front. I have written more words than ever before due to asynchronous nature of our team communication, more tweets and cold emails to people I wanted to connect. I am learning more about being data driven in my work. The inherent benefit of working on product development revolves around making sense of data through proper analysis.

Closing Remarks

Multiple times in this year, I was asked “when are you starting next?”. I never had a good answer to it.

It’s not that there aren’t ideas that are not interesting for me to pursue. This piece on economics of data businesses by Abraham Thomas has changed my lens of viewing problems.

It’s not that I lack people to collaborate in starting a venture. I have connected and interacted with many skilled and interesting folks who could become future co-conspirators.

Yet, I have decided to shut down the idea of starting up for the next couple of years at the least. I want to focus on honing my skills as a product operator. Engage and learn from talented folks I come across. Become a good and supportive life partner to Diksha as she pursues her mastery as a social science researcher.

I want to leave you with the scene from my recent favourite show and character, Ted Lasso.

Just as Ted mentions about curiosity. I want to now pursue my curiosities about work and not judge myself on success or failure in my career.

Signing off till next year,

Vivek, prepping to become a middle school football coach.