Indian Startup

Abhishek Sarkar

What is a startup?

Well let me first start this by defining what a start up is. Startup according to me is the most abused and misunderstood word. Every company wants to be called a startup, just because a sense of glamour is attached to it. To me a startup is a company which is looking at disrupting an industry or a segment of the industry and scaling at a rapid pace. Not every founder is a startup founder and not every fund raised is associated with a startup. Again I want to make it very clear these are my point of views and I am no expert.

Why am I talking about startups?

I am able to give my sense of it because I have spent the last few years in the industry and consider myself privileged to be a great part of it. I have spent time building and scaling teams and products at various startups, some really early stage and some at Series C and beyond. This has helped me understand the world at different stages of the startup cycle.

Life at a startup in the various stages

Early stage startups are probably the best and worst place to start your career. Working in a startup itself is very risky because proof of concept is yet to be established and early stage means even higher risk. Early stage to me is defined as any startup that is in the ideation phase or yet to launch the product in the market. At this stage the learning is huge, even better than the Top B schools but the risk of it all failing is always over the head. At an early stage there is no predefined role and this means one can wear multiple hats, learn different aspects of a job which in a traditional set up would never be offered. For instance while I worked in an early stage I designed product wireframes despite having worked in sales prior to it all my life and my job involved working with the tech team to ensure a beautiful easy to use product. This learning helps me everyday till date. So if you are early in your career or if you have a great risk appetite and believe in the product and founder take the plunge. It can definitely build your career.