Thank God I Failed
8.
DIVYASHISH JINDAL
Take Three
In June 2009, Divyashish Jindal
started his first startup for skills development called WiseStep Employability.
It didn’t prove too wise a step, and shut down in November 2010. Two years later,
the IIT-Delhi alumnus tried again, this time with Appytab, a mobile application
development startup. It didn’t quite have a, well, appy ending, shutting down
in less than a year. Two down, but Jindal was in no mood to pack up. In
December 2014, he fired up TestRocket, an online test preparation startup for
competitive exams like IIT, medical and engineering.
Prod Jindal about his setbacks, and
the 29-year-old pulls out a quote from Thomas Alva Edison, his childhood
inspiration: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”
Jindal ascribes three reasons for
ventures that did not work: lack of funds, a demotivated team and ideas that
were ahead of their time. His first two ventures were selffunded. Raising money
in 2009 was the biggest challenge as investors played safe after the 2008
global financial meltdown. Till 2012, funding was a big challenge, which meant
most of Jindal’s time was spent in firefighting, trying to convince his team
members not to quit. While there were no takers for his skills development
startup in 2009, India is going gaga over skills development now, he says with
a wry grin.
Jindal, however, has no regrets. His
startups taught him some priceless lessons. One must always evaluate whether
the product or service is a ‘must have’ or ‘good to have,’ he says. Jindal also
realised that it is always better to invest time when finalising one’s team.
This time around Jindal says he is
putting all the lessons learnt to use. TestRocket has a well thought out team,
the business model is promising as thousands have already enrolled for the
service, which starts at `200 per student for a month, tie-ups with offline
coaching centres have been sealed, and the firm is in talks to raise funds.
So is TestRocket going to be work?
Jindal once again falls back on Edison: “Many of life’s failures are people who
did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.” He does,
though, have a more direct answer: “I will try again if this doesn’t work out.”
FROM STIGMA TO STIMULUS
The fear of failure is ingrained in
most of us right from our school days --the ultimate rap on the knuckles.The
notion that failure is bad travels from school, to higher education, to our
professional lives. And presto, what do we have? Workplaces in which highly
educated wonks are destined to spend the best days of their lives either
micromanaging or staring at Excel sheets. And then NR Narayana Murthy wonders
why there's been no `big idea' out of India in 60 years.At the other end of the
spectrum, failure has lost its venom. Big corporations go belly-up but their
promoters at worst get bad press. The industry perishes, small shareholders are
left holding the bag but rarely the industrialist.Somewhere in between these
two extremes is India's new breed of entrepreneurs, willing to risk it all.
Being branded a failure for them is a stimulus, not a stigma. And unlike the
big guns, they don't enjoy the luxury of going bust, and then going on a
permanent vacation. Their only option is to come back.
ETM26JUL15
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