As much as I like my job, or like being an engineer, one thing I have become pretty clear about recently is, I somehow am not passionate about it. There is something in me which just needs more ownership, responsibility or basically skin in the game, for me to give my 100%. Everyone loves the idea of having a well paying job, where your duty ends the moment it is 5 PM on the clock (on most days) and I am no different. I love that I have a great job, and I do like it very much.

But the thing is, I have been reading far too much about this flow state ideology. The state where your work no longer seems like work and you get so engrossed in it, you do it with all your heart.

The First Experience

During my masters program, I took up a couple of interesting courses. One of them was “Software Engineering”. I am really grateful I did take up that course because somehow after a lot of trial and error, I realized that I finally felt I reached that level, where I was really interested in what I was doing, did not mind staying up for longer and actually put in almost everything that I had to excel in the project that we (a team of eight) worked on. The course actually gave us the opportunity to interact with a real client and deliver a product for them. It was a lot of fun!

This was the first experience personally for me to feel that okay, even within the tech arena, I could find something that I am really passionate about because as you might have guessed, I am not an engineer by choice. I am an engineer just because I went with the flow. I took the decisions that felt right or more importantly lucrative at a particular moment and somehow, here I was, pursuing a Master’s program.

At that moment, I understood I thrive when I have responsibility and in high pressure situations. Tell me you just need to get this one thing done and I will take the whole day and still manage to not do the one thing that I was supposed to do. Tell me you have a hundred things to do, and I will be on a roll. That is me. You can imagine, this is not very helpful. Because, fortunately or unfortunately, my life right now is pretty basic and normal.

The Entrepreneurial Bug

So, from the above information, you gather that I like pressure and responsibility. Couple that with a lifetime of observing how much freedom my father had all his life because he was self-employed. Growing up, I have always seen my father enjoying the fruits of being self-employed. He worked hard in the initial years, but I have never seen him compromising on his life because of his job. Seeing his life, both the highs and the lows, I have always wanted that freedom for myself. Always.

Signing Up For The Competition

This time around when I was looking around for the new thing to do this week, I landed on an event. The title of the event was “GoVertical Startup Creation Workshop”. I was super intrigued and I had no idea what it meant or what was the event about. After reading a bit more, I understood that this was an event for anyone who was interested in learning about how a startup can be created and how the actual process is.

Obviously, the event was paid and it was not a small amount (a little over 100$). But then, I was like yeah whatever, it seems too interesting. And also, a random dinner now in Seattle costs like 35$. So, I guess I will learn something and of course, investing in yourself is never a bad idea. So, I clicked that sign up button and with a very heavy heart (lol) paid the hundred bucks.

The Kickoff Event

So, this was a regular Friday. When I had stopped working around 3, and then I was just sitting at home. The event started at 6 PM, but they asked us to arrive at 530 PM because they had arranged dinner. I went in. Very very nervous. Not knowing anyone, not knowing what to talk about. But I got in.

And well, the networking time was fun. Met some people. Everyone looked very old. They looked like at least a decade older than me. I have understood it is tough to hold a conversation when you are just trying to guess what the opposite person’s age is or rather after you know they have been working since the year you were born. Okay, everyone was not that old. But they were just highly experienced and been in the industry for several years.

After the networking time, was another scary time. Now the idea behind this kickoff event, was for everyone to pitch startup ideas to work on over the weekend. So basically, you create teams of 4-5 people and work on a presentation for the idea. The presentation talks about what problem your idea would be solving, what is the solution, the financial model, go-to-market strategy and other super scary high level ideas.

Of course, having no business background, I had zero knowledge of what these terms meant and how to actually pitch an idea and anything actually. So I was sitting there, with one faint idea in my head but really unsure if I should pitch because that was so intimidating. Sitting in a room with unknown people, who are almost a decade older than you, who have done this a couple of times at the very least, is very very intimidating as you can imagine. But, the thing is, for me, it was like that was the whole point of signing up. The whole point of this was to push myself and if I was not going to do that, what was this all for.

So, I gathered all the courage that I had, and with my heart beating faster than I have noticed in a while, I decided to pitch an idea. I was the last person to stand in that queue for pitching since I decided after hearing a couple of pitches. And then the icing on the cake was one of the women pitching, kind of forgot what she was saying in the middle of the pitch and that got me more terrified. But I was already in the queue, there was no way of going back from there.

I did end up giving a very good pitch at the end. After the pitches, everyone gets like three votes and the top 5 ideas are the ones that get picked. No points for guessing that mine was not picked. But it did pretty good, actually. The top five ideas stopped at like 6 votes and my idea got 4. Felt pretty good about that but then had to pick another team.

I chose an idea that resonated with me a lot. “EldersHappy” – the idea was to build a platform that immigrants could use to manage and monitor their old age parents back in their home country. The idea seemed like it would solve a problem for everyone living far away from their parents and help them to not be that worried about it. We formed a team of five. I was very excited to see what was going to happen over the weekend.

Over the weekend

We worked on the idea for the whole of Saturday and Sunday approximately till 2 PM. Writing down everything here might not be too interesting but just a general gist of what happened. We discussed answers to a lot of questions – all possible features that we could have in this product, how would we attract customers to buy the product, is there a real need, do other solutions exist, what is the future scope, etc. You get the gist. All kinds of discussions around what the product could be and how it would be helpful for customers. Got to learn so much.

Just to give you a general idea of the people who were in my team. The team captain was an Indian and he had worked at some major tech firms and currently was running his own tech consulting company since about 10 years. One team member was a woman who was a co-founder of another startup.

Another team member had worked at a major tech company for quite some time and now was the CFO for a couple of startups. The last team member was a person who worked as a freelancer and was super experienced in UI. You can imagine, I was the youngest and also the least experienced. In the beginning I was not sure how much I would be able to contribute, but since the idea was so close to me, I was able to contribute quite a lot.

All through Saturday, we had mentors coming in. They listened to our idea, made suggestions, and helped us develop the idea in its entirety. It was such a satisfying experience. Listening to different point of views, listening criticism, understanding how different customers could require completely different features. As a team, we stuck to what made sense to us, but it was nice to get feedback. Post that, we made our presentation and kept refining it until the final moment.

Oh, before that, the female team member in my team was so supportive. We had like seven minutes to present, and then the Q&A was for another 8 minutes. We were already having one transition during the presentation since both the team captain and her were going to present, but she asked me to still present. She was like, you should take this experience. And then, as always, I was like, okay, how bad could it really go.

The final moment

Ah, we gave the presentation. And it went perfect. Exactly as we had planned. I did not stutter or screw it up. It was nice. I also actually ended up answering some questions in the Q&A. It felt like real world Shark Tank. Very exhilarating and also super fun at the same time. And guess what, WE WON! Our presentation was the best, and the work over the weekend was rewarded. I was so happy 🙂 A small but important win!

Final Thoughts

One of the coolest things I have been a part of. I am so glad I took the chance. Met some really cool people and I probably will always remember this as a fun, new experience that I had. Also, the idea that I pitched, I might actually work on it. Got feedback that it is actually a good idea. Who knows, one day you would see an app on the app store that says “Feya Shah” as the creator. That is the beauty, anything can happen.

Okay, okay, one more final quote. Actually, it is a title of a book. The female team member that I was talking about. She suggested that book to me, which I am definitely going to pick since the title resonated with me so much. The quote is “What got you here … won’t get you there.” So powerful and inspiring right?

The title basically says how each phase of your life demands something new from you and how when you are moving between phases, you have to understand that you need to put in a bit extra, you have to be willing to unlearn some and jump in to learn some.

This was one of the most fulfilling weekends in a long time and I am sure it would be helpful when one day I am self-employed and have a startup under my name. Okay, might be getting ahead of myself. But well, adding just one more in my endless list of dreams.

Here is where you should go, if you want to read about my other “first” experiences. Here is where you should go if you want to know more about the challenges I am currently working on. And well, if you want to just know a bit about me, well here it is.

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Feya Shah

Living life one day at a time and on the side, telling you about it!