San Francisco. Sep 1, 2017: The alarm goes off at 5 am. I realize that I fell asleep while reading my son to bed again. I get up even though dawn hasn’t broken yet, mornings are my favorite time to get a head start on the day.
It has been a year since my husband, Prateek (also from IITB) and 6-year-old son, Abir, moved around the world from Bangalore to San Francisco, to support me in growing my education startup Springboard. My co-founder Gautam and I started the company in July 2013 to solve the skills gap and unemployability problem for India. We quickly realized that online was a more scalable model, and held the promise of larger impact globally. We built Springboard with the global student in mind from day one, with me taking charge of Bangalore and Gautam holding fort in SF. Soon, the business grew to a scale that necessitated my move to SF. We learnt so much about scaling a business, the team and ourselves along the way that I could write a tome on each of them. However, I will save those for future posts or a coffee conversation. For now, let me rewind to how entrepreneurship came about, almost by accident, for me. From the outside, it might look like startups are a result of lifelong passion, or come about in a flash of sweeping inspiration. In my case, it was more of an unglamorous but persistent pursuit for impact. Hopefully this alternate perspective will be interesting for you. (more…)
