What are you?
What do you mean, what am I?
You are beer. And this bottle, is your company. You think, you’ll get into that glass. You’ll have fun. Isn’t it? But look at this [trying to pour the capped bottle in the glass]. Can you see? You actually don’t want to leave the bottle. For the beer to get into the glass, it needs to leave the bottle first. Once you’re out of the bottle, then you can get into any glass you want. In this glass, if you want. Or you can get into this glass. Even in this glass..
It’s a wine glass.
How the hell do you know that? You are beer.
This conversation opens the cap to the protagonist’s entrepreneurial flow in Pitchers, a web series aptly named as a frisky notion of friends drinking pitchers of beer while discussing their startup pitches.
Despite my absence from blog writing due to the slothful comfort-zone of ‘sound bite sized’ tweets and a disgraceful decline in long-form effort, I’m hoping to find time and reclaim my desire for musings and rants, partly thanks to my sister who recommended that I watch Tripling, another web series from the same outfit about siblings on a road trip.
What nudged me, and resonated with me about these web series’ created by the team at a digital media startup — The Viral Fever (TVF), is not just the content, but also the creator. They’re real, honest and funny. At a time when original content from the likes of Netflix is disrupting digital media as well as the appetite of a binging audience, TVF is creating interestingly fresh content and building a monetizable platform in the form of TVF Play for other creators to leverage.
TVF is an interesting venture in itself. Its founder, Arunabh, an IIT alumnus, had worked on a drone image processing project for the US Air Force, before realizing that probably he is ‘beer’, capable of a different sort of envisioning. In a chat on the Founding Fuel channel, he had some interesting views to share on entrepreneurship:
The desire [of starting-up] was stronger to prove myself right, than prove others wrong.
I have a very counter-intuitive opinion [on your office being a workplace or a fun place].. I don’t think offices have become fun or become cooler because of colorful beanbags, that’s the worst thing that Google did.. everybody thinks that it’s a great culture.. it’s not. Culture is not defined by beanbags in any office.. in-fact our office is a great balance of formal and informal environment, and if you take any of that out, it will fall like a pack of cards. We don’t believe that if we’ll be having fun and we’ll be smoking up, we’ll be getting great ideas.. the ways of working have been misconstrued and defined very wrongly. When somebody walked into this office and said that writing is my passion, then dude I don’t really need to make my place fun to make you passionate about your passion.. in-fact the litmus test would be that I should be throwing you into one cave and still you’d be writing because it’s your passion.. so we would rather have people who anyway know what’s fun for them is doing the work that they love, then that’s it, we don’t need to have colorful beanbags.
I read somewhere.. the only three things certain in life are death, taxes and competition. I feel that competition is a good thing.. competition always keeps you on your toes.. competition shows that you’re not the only guy playing the game. The big guys aspire.. and have our name in their PPT’s, so I think that’s a great thing to be proud of. So there are two ways to live life, there’s an abundance mentality and there’s a scarcity mentality. Scarcity would be that there are only so many brand, so let’s try do something, otherwise there’s competition, what will happen. And then there’s an abundance mentality that humanity could have survived without Apple devices, and Apple is the most valuable company in this world. Humanity didn’t need Apple devices, but the guy believed in it, and the company believed in it, and then the entire team thought that let’s make something awesome that everybody would want to own it.. so I think when you come with that abundance mentality, then there’s so much of money and so many opportunities to have that the universe is waiting for you to give it something, so that it will give you that sort of wealth.. so I never consider competition.
We need to keep disrupting ourselves. I wrote some 5-7 rules, when I started.. one of the rules was that we should be doing one scary thing every three months, and if we’re not doing it, then we’re not really moving in that direction. When expectations increase.. you become cautious, and experiments fail and succeed, but you get unpredictable result only when you experiment. I feel that if we’re able to imbibe disruption as a habit, then that’s something which will sail us through.
What do you do to make a community.. you just make great product. I think there’s no shortcut to that.. and you just have fun with it.. and that will resonate. If ever I could write a thesis on the whole definition of “cool”, coolness is nothing but anything that has shocked, and given shock & awe to people, and that when starts to get accepted, becomes cool. When it becomes slightly mainstream, it stops being cool.. so there’s a very fine line between the birth of something cool and the death of something cool. A very good line comes to my mind, from Dark Knight, which says, `either you die and become a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.’