Circumstances forced me to take a 15 hour bus ride from Bangalore to Mumbai. Although not very uncomfortable, restricting a startup person to a seat with his brains running but not any means to convert them into something can wreak havoc. The ride made me realize a fundamental difference with how a startup mindset is laid (with all due respect to everyone). Be it a founder, a startup employee with his or heart in the job or anyone even overlooking the startup space, there some rudimentary points that drive his psyche:
1) An obsessive knack to fix things
A startup mindset is obsessed with fixing things. A 14 hour bus ride is not frustrating but a gateway to a gazillion gaps that exist in the process, be it logistics or services related to the journey. Time at hands can only mean looking for problems and finding ways to fix them. The condition might turn annoying sometimes but there’s no way to curb it. This thought process is very juvenile at the onset but evolves over time. It’s jittery and short sighted at the onset but grows and becomes more encompassing over time. But still, the aim is to fix things.
2) A sense of agitation
I wanted to use the word urgency but agitation is better suited. A moment spent without being productive in some way seems like time that will never come back. A startup mindset does not believe in the concept of “doing nothing for some time”, A startup mind is always at work, always chugging along. And that strong sense of ‘doing’ underlies the thought process. It is not mere castles in the air.
3) Joy
Obsession, agitation, all these words might have a negative connotation associated with them but if one sieves through it all, there is joy at the bottom. The residue of all the action is plain and simple ‘joy’. A startup mindest never lets a person be bored. You’d never see him or her looking to do something. 'I’m bored', is something that a startup mind will never utter. Even if you give it 48 hours in a day, it’d be less. Call it inefficient or thinking-too-much types, but all of it is pure ‘drive’.
So, these were my midnight musings sitting in a bus while people in the surroundings quietly sleep the night away. No, this is not considering the startup species to be a higher or anything of that sort but it is the fundamental differentiator. A startup mindset is obsessed, whatever or however small the idea might be.
Do you agree? Do you belong to the same species? TechSparks is a good meeting ground.
