What I learned from my 7 months in Powai Valley

Powai Valley — apparently the Silicon Valley of India — is the place where I have been living a ritzy-glitzy life for the past seven months and a few days.

Counting this short span, one might grimly consider it as an overvalued narration if I was to tell I have acquainted myself with countless friends to call my own community and thereafter kept on expanding it levels after levels.

The dreams, at inception, were rich and I had very adamantly made up my mind about what I wanted when I first came to this place in June last year. Candidly speaking, I had not the slightest hint of the feverish expectancies and the surprises that awaited me hereafter.

There were three things in my mind in my initial days. As I prepare to leave this place, I wish to forthrightly speak about them without sounding too modest or simply making clamorous hustles.

First, being an introvert that I was, I was highly agitated with the idea of being around new people and I didn’t know how to change that.

Second, I wasn’t very sure about working in a startup because in the first place, they weren’t (then) as big a game as projected and also, gambling with new ideas that too with people who weren’t experienced enough to be sure about their strategies and plans had its own set of risks too.

Third, I knew that come what may, I had to learn how a startup worked whether by being a part of it or by being around people who could help me understand the mechanics of it, step by step.

During the first quarter of 2015, startups in Powai were starting to catch pace although by then there were already big names like Housing, Tiny Owl and Toppr.com — I had my share of experiences with all the three, to say the least.

If you look up to someone in this ecosystem as the poster boys of startup, also consider the ‘why’ of it, not just because you see the crowd shouting their name.