I had the pleasure of sitting down with the founders of Pollination, Art Studios, Take Moments, and Life Of A Rider, Jagrit Pratap Singh, Pranav Rastogi and Muhammad Ali to discuss their upbringing.
Here is what they had to say:
I know this is not an easy job. What drives you?
Being an entrepreneur is a lot like being a parent. It’s not an easy job, it’s way too much taxing on your mental strength and you often doubt yourself whether you made the right choice or not. But in the end, it all seems so much worth it, when you see something you helped create achieve so much. This feeling. This is pretty much what drives us.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? What lesson did you learn from them?
Over the years, we met a lot of people. Some of them doubted us and thought we were all throwing our careers in the gutter. Some of them believed in us too much and thought we were the next Bill Gates, a pedestal which we certainly don’t deserve yet. Some of them simply didn’t care about us at all and only meant business.
It’s the collective experience of interacting with these people that taught us the value of true friends. Friends, who believed in us and our vision but never shied away from showing us the mirror, no matter how harsh the truth. Friends, whom we could count on and know who have our backs. Friends, who genuinely cared about us and wanted nothing more than to watch us succeed, even if it meant a lesser financial reward for themselves.
So to answer your question, no, there’s not a particular person who helped us get where we are today. Instead, it is the collaborative effort and love of each of these friends that have helped mold us and define where we are today.
How do you push through your worst times?
Sometimes in life, even when you put your heart and soul into something, do it with a hundred percent perfection, everything still falls apart like a domino tower. Nobody or nothing can be blamed, except for the winds of time. It is these times that are truly the worst, because there’s nothing you can do that will save your domino tower going down piece by piece.
We push through times like these by taking our time off from the game for a while. We indulge in our guilty pleasures. A few rounds of PUBG, pizza and chilled beer with our friends and we’re ready to build our tower once again, only this time it’s made of steel and concrete.