5 things Santa Can Gift Founders Like Us

‘Tis the season to be merry, but here I am, tasked with writing a wrap for our year.

As I buy a game off Blinkit to slide under my kid’s bed, so he can wake up and promptly thank Santa, I wonder what I might want from Father Christmas.

Now me is not just plain old Shreya, mother, wife and daughter, reader and k-lover, writer sometimes. Me is most often the entrepreneur, the identity I wear like a second skin.

So inevitably my thoughts turn to what we founders can ask Santa for. And here is my list -

The Off Switch

I am no therapist but one tool I have in my mental health arsenal is to compartmentalize and switch off. The founding journey is hard, as we have experienced in no small measure last year, and while it is all-consuming, I don’t want it to consume all of me.

What helps is the fact that I am usually able to separate the different threads of my life, and focus on the one that matters in the moment. Usually, not always.

Dreading an interaction that’s bound to be difficult? Let’s tackle it when the time comes. Having a problem-solution approach and confidence that a solution can be found, helps too.

May the good Saint Nicholas give all of us a well-oiled off-switch and roomy compartments in which to store our multiple tangled balls of yarn.

Cutting-edge reflexes

Even after getting funded, we changed growth plans a few times this year. With one ear to the ground and an eye on runway, we didn’t shy away from shelving something that didn’t work.

We used the same agility in tech builds also - our most ambitious so far - launching our Marketplace alpha version within 4 months, choosing to learn from it rather than wait for perfection.

We want to continue to use our reflexes, tuned toi market changes, the funding environment and other uncontrollable factors, to do the best for our business.

Optimism

Is there a more valuable quality for founders? I doubt it.

With one foot on a half-finished present and another on a future often only we can see, we keep our balance, assisted by unnatural quantities of that magical drug - optimism.

Call it delusion or over-confidence, it is necessary even if not sufficient.

May the universe continue to fuel our optimism, our delulu, as lovingly as it has been so far.

Self-assurance

Imagine a room full of nordic venture capitalists with wintery expressions, each a foot taller than yours truly.

Your task is to break into their conversations, your tiny self in your company t-shirt, with a charming ice-breaker that makes an impression and then follow that with an elevator pitch that REALLY makes an impression.

No, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario, it is the setting of a conference we attended in Berlin this year; although I admit to having taken certain poetic liberties with the ethnic composition of the room and the winteriness of their expressions. Nordic or not, they were all pretty cool, no pun intended!

The point is that being a founder means being able to put yourself front and center, not annoyingly so but certainly so.

I can’t say I have mastered it, but I am getting better with every conference, every conversation. What helps is confidence in the business and knowing that the world will be a better place because of it.

So may we all get enough stores of self-assurance to last us a lifetime of entrepreneuring and beyond!

Unlimited time

And for the final one, something personal.

We are founders but we are also people. With families and - shocker - hobbies! The founding journey is not only hard in the intensity of it, but also in how much it demands of us in terms of sheer time and energy.

So I wish, I wish, that we had a way to multiply - or even just add up - our hours such that we had more. More time to give, to be there for family and for ourselves.

And with this lament I come to the end of my letter to Santa.

But Santa, even if he did exist, would have steered clear of us lot. Not so easy to please, are we? I can imagine Mrs Claus shaking her head at this letter, sending up a silent prayer for our sanity.