Wrong Bus

Why I decided to wind up my companies

I was having lunch with a senior colleague at work, and they casually asked me, “Ashish, you’ve been a 3-time founder, what are you doing at Reliance? Don’t you have plans for starting up again?”

My answer was, “I absolutely love it here at Reliance. It was my long-time dream to work at Reliance. Dhirubhai is the reason.” On starting up again, I said, “Yes, it will happen again, most likely soon.”

In 2007, I read a book called Dhirubhaism, and I was completely mesmerised by the legendary Dhirubhai Ambani and his leadership style. I also became fascinated by what he managed to achieve despite having little formal education and how he scaled new heights one after another.

The next question they asked hesitantly was, “What prompted you to stop your business ventures if you had been running them for 7+ years? Do you mind me asking you?”

I immediately said, “I was on the wrong bus,” and we weren’t making much money either.

To elaborate, I added that we started the businesses hoping to have an eureka moment, an idea that would inspire us to build something loved by the masses. In the hope that we would begin with software consulting, little did my co-founder and I realise that software consulting did not get us fired up. Nonetheless, we persevered, even starting a SaaS business on the side; however, we were never enthusiastic about software consulting. To keep us motivated, we open-sourced our code and libraries, which earned us good karma in the community. It was a good motivation.

But, in short, we were on the wrong bus, our energies went into doing something that didn’t excite us to the core.

Together, we concluded that we could take a break from doing consulting and explore what’s outside.

It’s amusing in retrospect how I once thought that my first company would consume my entire life - the sweet innocence of youth.

Seth Godin does an excellent job of explaining the "wrong bus" phenomenon and quoting him verbatim.

“Your first mistake was getting on the A53 bus, the one that goes crosstown instead of to where you're going.

Mistakes like this happen all the time.

The big mistake, though, the one that will cost you, is staying on that bus.

I know it wasn't easy to get on the bus. I know you got a seat. I know it's getting dark outside. But you're on the wrong bus, and staying on the wrong bus won't make it the right bus.

If you really want to get where you set out to go, you're going to have to get off the wrong bus.”