Convincing people to believe in startup

Gaurav: How did you manage to convince those so-called people with ideas? So how did you manage to convince them to look at this new world called startup rather than joining a bank or joining an organization, which is the government?

Chalinda Abeykoon: I think it was just us going and talking every day, you know, preaching about it. At that time, I mean, even companies like Facebook were slightly larger, but then everything else like Uber, orWhatsapp didn’t exist. None of these big companies, Airbnb had just started. So we haven’t really heard of these things.

We didn’t even have success stories from the west to leverage. But we did have a few, like the Microsoft’s, the Google’s, and so that was the first generation. I think the next part of it was the fact that we had this massive faculty of people, you know, very successful business professionals on overseas companies like Microsoft and all of them. Being there with us really helps build confidence.

And even to this day, you know, when I speak with entrepreneurs, for me, it’s never about selling entrepreneurship. You can’t sell entrepreneurship. You need to have it in your unit.  You need to realize that you want to do something, right. It’s not a commodity or other. I don’t see it as being a commodity that can be sold, they need to come, it has to be internalized, and you need to kind of create that environment and facilitate that thinking for the individual. And if they realize it, brilliant.And the challenge part is that, if you do it, suppose for 400 people, each person will get it at different times. 

So let’s say you do a training workshop or whatever session for 400 people, when you start measuring your results, let’s say one month, you’re not gonna see much. One year, you might see some. But then when you start measuring them five years or 10 years later, then you see a lot more conversion happening. I see that now, as some of the people that I met, you know, 10 years ago, they’re now coming out because we encouraged them.

Challenges faced by early startups

Gaurav: What are the initial challenges faced by the early startup companies? 

Chalinda:  I think there’s a lot of the main challenge is essentially, how do you know you’re solving the right problem? You know, that’s a lot harder. 

You know, it’s a classic example of this picture of this iceberg where you see the top and majority of it is below the waterline, it’s similar to that, right? When everyone sees problems, but then, is that the core problem? Or is it the real problem? So, um, you know, identify, and that is, I would say, the biggest challenge, and everybody sees the most obvious part and starts chasing that. And sometimes it’s not the problem. So you end up wasting time, you know, money effort in all of that.

In addition to that, when you’re an entrepreneur, I think, everything is a challenge. I don’t think anything comes easy, right? Every single thing is a challenge. And, as an entrepreneur, you will always have, the amount of resources that you have access to, it will always be much, much lower than what is required from you, what you would expect, not just that, it’s about the things that you need to do.