Guest Author
By Sagar Shukla
Nearly every immigrant knows someone who has started or runs their own business. It might even be you. After all, isn’t that one of the driving factors of coming to this country? The “American Dream” is about pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into manifesting your own destiny. If you endeavor to do so, you’d be following in the footsteps of countless others trying to make something greater of themselves by imagining a whole new world of possibilities.
Keep at it day after day, and with enough time and elbow grease, you too can be the next great entrepreneurial story they say. Some may say even the pilgrims were a part of this endeavor, leaping off the Mayflower in pursuit of beaver pelts and greener spiritual pastures. But let’s talk about the reality undergirding this narrative preached to the masses. What’s unsaid about this grease? What mentally and emotionally goes into all the blood, sweat, and tears? What makes starting a business so hard? We’ll get to that in a minute, but first some context.
About 15 years ago I left home to attend a residential high school, my first personal foray into the unknown. The school’s motto was “Accept the Greater Challenge.” This, for better or for worse, has stuck with me throughout my adult life. Imbibing this mantra for the next decade took me on a journey across entrepreneurial America. I worked for multiple tech startups, riding the unique waves of each business and helping to grow these companies through acquisition and an IPO. I was a loyal company foot soldier, until one fateful day when it came time to quit helping write others’ success stories and begin writing my own.
One year into the pandemic, I gleefully put in my two weeks’ notice and birthed the company Foresight with my co-founder Nigel, our very own freshly minted tech startup. Wide eyed and bushy tailed (albeit with a slight chip on my shoulder), I entered the vaunted realm of being a Founder and getting to build a company every day. To say we were in for a hard reality check is an understatement.
Here’s what nobody shared about what was coming our way:
Hiring our first developer and relying on him with our survival over the course of a year, only to discover he’d started a job at another company without telling us (finding out just two days before a major product release).
Spending six months painstakingly recruiting our first three salespeople, only to spend the next six months having to part ways with each of them after they couldn’t get the job done.
Crisscrossing the country and traveling from conference to conference selling our first 15 customers, only to lose them all a year later and start over from scratch.
Convincing a C-suite executive at a large and successful corporation to sign a deal with us and awaiting with bated breath for months for the deal to sign, only to hear back before the end of the quarter that there was no more budget left to spend on our project.
Staring down an empty bank account and feverishly sending emails from India at 4 am, while there on a business trip, to US investors, pleading them to send their wires in ASAP so we can process our next payroll.
Managing your emotions
Starting a company is like the movie Castaway, where Tom Hanks is stranded on a remote island and must keep himself alive by keeping a fire alive in the middle of a typhoon with no fire starter or little wood to be found. Starting a company is not actually at all about business. It is an emotional marathon that happens to revolve around business milestones. It is a test of managing your emotions for long enough, so you can survive to see the day when the sun shines in your favor.
What was so emotionally challenging about this? I dare say it was not the events as described above, but my mental and emotional state surrounding each of them. I allowed my self-perception to control my reality.
I assumed our developer would be with us from Day One through an IPO. I expected our salespeople to perform as if they sold our product every day of their lives. I believed that the result of all the toil earning the first 15 customers would mean they’d stick around. I presupposed that getting approval from the C-Suite was a surefire way to close a big deal.
I assumed we’d be successful so quickly that we would never have to raise money again from investors and be well along the path to an IPO. Simply put, I expected us to succeed. I expected that since we were smart, capable, and hungry people building the company of our dreams in the most entrepreneurial country on earth, that “making it” was inevitable. This web of perception woven together over the years replaced the truth with illusion. The agony wasn’t in falling down, but the feeling that we should never have fallen in the first place. And if there’s one thing this journey has taught me, is that the only thing I should expect from myself is resilience. Learning how to get back up again is less about recovering from a fall – it’s realizing that’s the only way up the mountain.
So here I am, writing this, four years into this entrepreneurial adventure. I wouldn’t say that we’re running a “Company” quite yet, but we are still alive, and I have finally accepted the greatest challenge of all: choosing to face my emotions every day, unlearning every expectation, and relinquishing any attachment to success along the way.
At the end of the day, all I have is the ability to get back up. The belief that we will be alive when the clouds part, and the sun shines once again.
Sagar Shukla is a Charlotte native and the Co-Founder and CEO of Foresight. When he’s not running his business (or writing about it), you can find him on the tennis court or kitchen cooking up a new recipe. Contact: [email protected]
