I want to be different!

How do I stand out?

While I resolved to write every week, Week 6 was a week of just trying to get back to work. We don’t realise the impact of someone leaving us, till the time they are not there for us anymore. It still feels unreal to me, but as they say - “the show must go on!” Missed Week 6 and now on Week 7.

The 3rd week of February - a month of love expressed. It’s Valentine month - so let’s talk about what we love. For me, among others, my venture is my valentine as I pour my love and passion everyday in building something that will create value for all stakeholders. 

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I want to share a small back story from last year - In April 2022, I decided to work with a remote village in Darjeeling. A village that is 100 years old, has about 65 families only, about 35 school going kids, and 10 graduates. Average income of the families in the village is 150$. We launched a small project to help the village kids with education, healthcare, and put some systems for the community to come together to support each other. As an interesting info - This village has India’s best mountaineers, climbers and trekkers and is called the “Everesters Village”. So it was natural that as a next step, we decided to launch a company - a travel company that could provide the best local experiences and create sustained livelihood to the trekking community. Conscious travel delivering local experiences and supporting a community is our tagline.

This became a great opportunity build a play book to create a model of entrepreneurship in remote villages. Seemed like a win-win.

We started the process of launching an adventure company. One step at a time.

Team : We carefully picked the people to be part of the core team. Remember that this team comes from a village, with most of their life spent within 25km radius of the village. Interestingly they all speak good English, and know more about the world around (thanks to the penetration of Internet). What I loved about the girls in the village is that none cited marriage as a goal. They all aspire to be independent and be financially independent!

As we started working on the concept, we realised how hard it was to support a team remotely. Ideating and coaching remotely has its own set of inefficiencies. We decided we need a team orientation of sorts - if this were a startup, we would have called it the “ideation phase with an offsite”. We decided to do a pilot and run a trip with some close friends who would be more empathetic to flaws, and faults. We chose a small trip of 4 days near Darjeeling (Sandakphu trek) - an easy trip, as it gave us time in the evenings to ideate with the team.

As founders building companies, don’t rush through the “Why”. Take time to answer the Why. Why did you decide to be a founder? Why are you solving this problem? Why are you the best team to solve it?  Why, Why, Why.

We started with answering the “Why”- getting each team member to answer why they had decided to part of this company. What emerged was each one of them had no backup option in life or an answer on how they could break away from their current reality. This company was the gateway to a new, better world. Honest, vulnerable admissions which was refreshing. If you talk of measuring founders on their adversity quotient, this team would come up on top. They come from broken families, see very basic amenities in life, with some still paying their education loans. And as a team they are hungry to succeed. Coming from the north east and a community which has never got privileges, they come with an amazing sense of positivity, gratitude and just a simple way of approaching problems.

As an investor and a founder myself, they fit my first framework on team - ability to face adversity and stay resilient, with a hunger to be succeed.

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The next question on my list was how. And the revelation for me was when the team, unprompted, asked : “how can we be unique and different?”. “how can we create the best experiences”. “ how can our brand be known among the best travel companies?” We think differentiation is only taught to us in MBA schools!

Look around and you realise that everyone wants to be different. Everyone wants to stand out in their own way. No matter what you do, where you come from and what the context, each of us has this innate desire to be different. To stand out, be unique and differentiated.

Interestingly not one of the them defined money as the goal. I am still trying to understand what drove the team to come to this thought process. For someone who has not traveled more than 25km their entire life, the internet is the shiny world beyond. They know the latest products, know the latest trends, and know a lot more about the world than what we think they would. This broke all stereotypes in my head, as I try to learn and map psychology and entrepreneurship. While we talk of digital detox, we don’t realise just how the internet is shaping lives.

Next time you talk to a friend -understand their context. Listen deeply. Each of us has a story to tell. And a story we want the world to know. At the core, that’s what drives people to aspire and create something different in their life.

To new beginnings , sharing some pics from the trip.