The journey that is a startup…

Its taken me 5 weeks of — should I write this or not. And years of observations, learning's, evernote’s and discussions. To write this blog. At the end, it was all about — let’s write it, why not :).

For folks who live in silicon valley, or have visited silicon valley, or know people who live here. There are few topics that always emerge in our discussions:

• The weather is great(hell yeah it is)
• Housing is expensive(imagine buying 5 mansions in texas compared to a tiny apartment in here)
• Company X is hiring and paying like crazy(vc money yo)
• I want to move out of bay area(i heard austin is good, i heard portland is great)

And talks about few more topics, mostly about food(i am sorry world, silicon valley has some of the best & diverse restaurants).

Amidst all this noise, what silicon valley is known for:

• People who truly believe, the only limit to what you can achieve, is what you can imagine.
• People who want to challenge the norm.
• People who are not afraid to be bold.
• People who are not afraid to fail.
• People who want to change the way technology is used & build new pathways.

All of the above sounds amazing right? Who doesn’t want to be part of that journey! I said — SIGN ME UP!

The next part of the journey was identifying what i was looking for. For my benefit, I had participated in several hackathons before, attend meetups, conferences etc. I had the opportunity to meet a LOT of diverse people. People who were about to raise funding for their startups, had failed at their startups — but were starting another, people who were exploring the startup world & lot more. So i took all of those conversations as a building block and started asking myself the questions:

• What do i want to learn in the next few years?
• What areas do i want to learn/build my skillset around?
• Am i interested in just tech, but also business side of things?
• Do i want to contribute to the culture of the company?
• What kind of monetary/benefits stuff am i okay with?

The last question, tbh, i realize the importance of it even more now. For people who have many other roles & responsibilities, its an important one to consider.

After a lot of deliberation, i joined a 3 person health care startup as their first engineer. Journey had lot of ups and downs, failures and success along the way, but a journey i would not trade.

Note: I drafted this blog many years ago ! Better late than never to publish it :-)