It’s been about 3 months since Vidya and I landed in Bangalore’s shiny new airport. I remember being welcomed by Bangalore’s cool air, and feeling a great sense of optimism about the life that lay ahead of me. That Thursday morning, the 14th of May, was the start of a new life in a city that was unfamiliar and strange in a way, yet warm, forthcoming and very familiar other ways. I suppose it was not very different from how I felt when I landed in St. Louis on the 20th of January, 2002. In an unfamiliar country all set to start a new life, I was beside myself with excitement at the novelty of the life I was about to experience. Seven and a half years later, in Bangalore, I’m getting started again.
I think it can safely be said that in the months I’ve lived here, I am now as much a feature of 6th Main, Indiranagar 2nd Stage, as the local chai shop, the security guards blowing their noisy whistles as cars whiz in and out of basement car parks, and the stray dogs that congregate in front of our apartment building every night and howl like their ancestors 
I live at one end of 6th Main and work at the other end. One end of it is secluded, with apartment buildings that house the urban rich and as prosaic in their design as they usually are in most urban parts of India. At the other end of 6th Main is a busy, noisy street, what they call Indiranagar Double Road and at that intersection lives my cofounder and partner in crime, Sharat. Every morning, I make my way from one end of 6th Main to the other, without being run over by honking cars, passing a cow or two on the way, sometimes a vegetable or fruit cart, before showing up at our office, which we currently run out of Sharat’s apartment.
As bootstrapping entrepreneurs, Sharat and I work out of a one-room office which serves as everything that you’d imagine we need – conference room, cubicle room, server room, war room, you name it. Out of this office we work to build our company one day at a time.
Sometimes I think about how far we’ve come from that day in October when I first had the conversation with Sharat about working together on a little idea that just may be something we could make a company out of. With me in DC and Sharat in Bangalore, and with Skype to help us out, we started putting together what we called an investor “teaser” presentation.
It took us nearly 6 weeks before we had a first working draft of our 6-slide deck. Another 10 weeks of vigorous brainstorming and revisions based on feedback resulted in a version that we had a lot more confidence in. By Jan 2009, we decided that we were getting closer to what seemed like a real idea with a defensible value proposition. It was time to start reaching out to investors and raise money for our venture. By February 2009, all Sharat and I were doing in our time outside of our day jobs was connecting with potential angel investors to drum up support for our idea. While we did the bit on pitching to investors with our slide deck, we also reckoned that it was important to put together a working prototype that would demonstrate our idea more directly. It was also real proof of our commitment, since we were pouring our time and money into making this real, not just peddling a slide deck to gauge interest in the investment community. Through the months of March, April, and May, we continued to seek money in what (we were told) was possibly the worst economic climate since the tech bubble burst in 2000, and in spite of being told by numerous people that raising money for a start-up at such a time didn’t sound like it would go anywhere.
It helps that Sharat and I both share a healthy disregard for the impossible. We kept ploughing ahead, pitching to investors, refining our business plan continuously, and always listening to the feedback we got but making our own judgements. Today we have a real company, an (albeit small) office, a solid business plan, and funding committed from angel investors who believe in our vision.
Clearly, this is only the tip of the iceberg and a lot remains to be done. But at least we’ve made it this far from being merely a thought that started in my head as I drove home each evening on the 495 Capital Beltway in DC.
You know what they say about succeeding in golf? It’s the direction that matters, not how far you hit the ball.
I think starting up is a little bit like that.
