Being an entrepreneur made me a ‘failure,’ but I listened to my inner voice

Photo credit: Taylor Nicole.

For most middle-class Indians in the 20th century, life was all about conforming to societal standards. Your acceptability, respect, and position in the society depended on how well you met the established and “proven” definitions and milestones of success.

Unfortunately, by choice and sometimes by pure chance, a series of three-letter abbreviations (TLAs) played spoilsport, and I always stood out.

The first TLA

The first TLA of my life was my name (RSJ). While most Indians have a one-word first name, mine consisted of two words. Raja Sekhar (both first names) and Jamalamadaka (my surname) meant that my acquaintances constantly struggled with my name. They called me either Raja, Sekhar, Rajasekhar, or any of its countless variations, ensuring I always stood out. That my 12-letter surname needed an Einsteinian level of intelligence to pronounce let alone recall didn’t help much.

As I progressed in life and made peace with my name, new TLAs took over and my non-conformance continued.

Academic woes

To bag a job in India’s dismal job scene during my academic days in the 1990s, you needed to have an engineering degree from the notoriously competitive IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology). I wanted to conform to this TLA, but it only took the first diagnostic test to reveal that IITs and Jamalamadaka didn’t have much in common.

Without this, I was advised that nothing short of a degree from the IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) could help me excel in life. This time, I was determined to fall in line.

I dutifully trounced the CAT (common admission test), the dreaded entrance test of the IIMs, with a near perfect percentile. But the timing wasn’t right, and I had to quit my hard earned seat at the IIMs.

If the previous line didn’t shock you, you probably don’t know a lot about IIMs. With a 0.1 percent acceptance rate, they are the world’s most selective management institutions. Quitting a seat at the IIMs was (and is) so unheard of in India. This made me such an academic outlier that for years after I quit, most of my acquaintances thought I was mentally ill.

An unusual next step

I entered India’s tech industry in the 1990s when most were shifting to the US (every Indian techie’s dream destination). I chose to stay in India because I believed in its growth story.

But what was worse was this: I became an entrepreneur while everyone opted for a job at a tech MNC in the US. I also knew full well that the demands of entrepreneurship and the expectations of middle-class Indians were as different as chalk and cheese.

By now, I was so out of conformance with societal norms that I was deemed a failure.

Years later, when my well-educated, happily married peers were scaling up the corporate ladder and were planning to start a family, I, now in my 30s with a kid in tow, made it to the Harvard Business School (HBS). This was my life’s next TLA.

So unaccustomed were my acquaintances to see a family man studying instead of caring for a family that scores of people descended on my house to “console” my parents. One particularly “wise” person wondered if she should write to the US consulate to deny me a visa. Thankfully, such wise decisions didn’t come to pass.

Choosing startups over MNCs

Taking the road less traveled by