Had Sandwich at Open Coffee Club meet @ Core Objects Bangalore!

I reached an hour late for the OCC meet that happened today at the Core Objects cafeteria. But I guess that I didn’t miss much because many were late and I reached within 10 – 15 mins of when the interesting conversations started. The theme was “Co-Founder”. Make everything you wanna make of the word and discuss.

It was fun as usual. Prateek of Muziboo, Ram of Kasenna, Rahul, Harsha of adventure and Amarinder of Core Objects shared their startup experiences. Abhishek spoke a bit about Venture Capital and I had a big chat with Ram about Seed Funding and Market Research.

I got some interesting insights.

• Co-Founders are not necessarily the best of pals.
• Chemistry and wavelength may go for a toss if you are not open to ideas.
• Bootstrap it baby. But if you have the money, its best to do it fulltime.
• This girl, I don’t know her name said that if you are < 25, you’ve got a friggin good chance to succeed. I think this statistic was pointed out by Marc Andreesen Zuckerberg.

I had the opportunity to speak to more than half of the 20+ people who were there. And I had a few interesting conversations. At one point of time during the discussions Vaibhav asked, “Who is searching for a co-founder?”. I raised my hand. I am in fact looking at implementing one of my ideas that I recently brainstormed with Saurabh at BCB6. I also met Deepan who is making educative games and stuff. Though what he is doing and what I intend to do are completely different. But the motivations are similar. I shared my ideas with him in significant depth. Spoke of the market and money. He is full time into his own venture, yet I offered him to club his ideas with mine and start off together. He said he was interested and took my number. Lets see if he calls up!

I had a whole big adventure after OCC, but that calls for another post later!

Oh and I completely forgot about the sandwich, but let it be!

How I overcame my inauthentic fear of failure?

I had a crunch time today financially. I gotta pay my bills and I don’t have the money. All the guys I had lent money to, are unable to pay me right now. In the background of these conversations I was glad that they couldn’t pay me back. This way I have an opportunity to utilize my dormant potential of creating money!

Then came idea no 4 – “Handwriting Analysis for free and for a fee”. Since I am already working with handwriting analysis, I thought I gotta make money with this only. It would be a good motivation for me to learn more on the subject. I decided to place “Drop your handwriting Here” boxes in some of the retail shops near my house (after talking to their owners of course) and place 100 posters all over my layout. But somehow I just kept hovering around the shops and didn’t speak to anyone. The shops were so congested that no one had any chance to write properly. Then I saw a big big mall. I thought of approaching the manager of the mall, but a weird feeling of fear gripped me. A fear of rejection I guess. So I didn’t go inside the mall and came home instead. After coming home I spoke to Mamta and she cleared my mind out. Then I went again. Man it took me a 5 minute talk to get a ‘yes’. I have so much of practice of getting a ‘yes’ with the registration conversations taught in SELP . This is one more added to the list.

So the point boils down to “how to overcome your fear?”. Well whatever fear we have is inauthentic 99% of the time. In my case I was afraid of the rejection that existed nowhere but in my imagination. How authentic is that??? So whenever you have a fear, ask your self.. “is my imagination playing the game or is it reality?”. If it is imagination then just chuck it off and go ahead and do whatever is needed. Chances are you might fail, but failing is much better than not trying. Its like playing a game and loosing rather than not turning in the field itself.

Overcoming this fear has been an important breakthrough for me! Thanks Mamta.