The first thought of running my own business probably came to me when I was an undergrad. That was in mid-90s when the field of Information Technology was just opening up in India. By that time I was pretty sure that IT was the professional route to me. My jobs in the software industry gave me the needed exposure and experience. But it did not open any avenues to satiate my quest for entrepreneurship. Thankfully I found a like-minded person as my life partner which kept the fire alive within me.
We both had various thoughts of how we could go about it but nothing was concrete. Whenever we read/ heard some news one of us would have an idea. Then we used to discuss it for couple of days and later forget about it in our daily routine. A few weeks later we used to read/ hear about exactly the same business idea started by someone else. We knew that our thoughts were in line but we did not know how to start acting upon them.
We invested in a cold storage chain and got to know about the franchise model. Our bitter sweet experience taught us that we should build our own brand from scratch and not rely on someone else’s name.
After an year, we thought that we needed either good financial credit or excellent resume in order to get the needed confidence to come out of our comfort zone. We choose the latter.
We worked hard for almost 5 years before we entered the sacred community of IIM. All these 5 years we strategized about how to get the maximum out of our two years on campus. (More latter about this phase)
Since we both were from the software industry we thought we should take a look at the latest technology. After our graduation, we tried our hands on the internet technology. But we learnt that traveling on two boats is not possible. One cannot learn swimming without getting into the pool. So we quit our cushy corporate jobs and sat down before the drawing board to decide what to do next.