Luck, Pluck & Arjun’s Dharma
So, you happen to be ‘the right person, at the right time, at the right place’? Lucky, right? But was it only luck? Arjun Pillai reveals the secret sauce that fueled his serendipitous entrepreneurial journey: CAGR
Thiruvalla, Kerala
It’s 6 in the morning. The sun had grudgingly begun its languid ascent, casting a faint, golden shadow over the expansive paddy fields.
From a nondescript house perched on the edge of the farmland, an eight -year-old boy hurriedly woke up. Though a little groggy, his eyes were filled with anticipation. A fleeting second later, he swiftly settled into his daily, and much-awaited ritual. The boy leaned his forehead against a squeaking window and gazed out at a distant tin-roofed structure. His eyes scanned the horizon for a sight of his idol. “My window opened up to the rubber band factory,” recounts Arjun R Pillai, sharing the predictable morning schedule of his father who used to run a modest rubber band-manufacturing venture. The child was enamoured with the unerring discipline of his father.
The man, indeed, followed a regimented routine. Arjun recalls. He would leave for work at 6, come back at 8 to take a shower, eat breakfast, and would leave again for the field. He would be back at 11 to take a long swig of black tea, return to the factory, and take a lunch break at 1:30. Half-an-hour later, he would resume and finish his official working hours at 6 in the evening.
The ‘unofficial’ work, though, would continue even after dusk. For the next sixty minutes, after 6 pm, it was time to absorb Malayalam news on Doordarshan, and concurrently work on half-cut rubber bands, which the diligent entrepreneur would invariably bring along from the factory. “He would pluck them and work till midnight,” recalls Arjun. Pluck and pluckiness turned out to be directly proportional. Both stretched, and tested, the resilience of each other.
Take, for instance, the rubber-band business. Though it bled during the formative years, his father persisted. “What would happen to the people who work for me? Life goes on, all survive, and I too would,” the patriarch would vehemently dismiss all ideas bordering on shutting the venture. “Things would work out. I won’t give up,” he would reiterate his unflinching resolve. His wife, a bank employee, supported her life partner in living his dream.
ORDINARY & EXTRAORDINARY
Meanwhile, life moved on. Over the next few years, the business laboriously inched from losses to one that fetched wafer-thin margins. The father continued with his passion and dream. The diligent son too had his dreams, and inherited the industrious strand from his father. Even years later, “things would work out” remained firmly etched on the mind of the son who ended up studying electronics and communication engineering. “In India, we finish engineering and then decide what to do,” Arjun bursts into a loud guffaw, as he reluctantly shares his story with us.
The interview starts with an intriguing question: why me? “I am just an undergraduate from an above-average college,” he reckons, and wonders what makes The Grit Stories take a stab into his stodgy entrepreneurial life. “I don’t have any pedigree. There is no chip on my shoulder. I am not entitled. There is nothing that makes me extraordinary,” he exclaims. “So, I don’t know what pulled you guys into my story,” he asks.
Meanwhile, we too remained adamant in our insight. “The only reason,” we tried to drill our point of view into the sturdy head of the serial entrepreneur, “that makes us talk to you is your CAGR.” And, interestingly, it has nothing to do with Arjun’s two successful exits — Profoundis was bought by US firm FullContact in 2016, and Insent was acquired by ZoomInfo in 2021 — and a rocking third innings with Docket AI in 2023.
“Then, what is the CAGR,” Arjun gaped in astonishment.
We answered with an enigmatic smile. “We will come to it,” we underlined.
But before we come to it, let’s go back to another question that Arjun popped up to his three friends in April 2012.
After one-and-a-half years of his maiden stint at Infosys, our lad from the ‘Rice Bowl of Kerala’ started brewing entrepreneurial plans. The trigger? Blame it squarely on the parental genes of ‘doing something of own,’ and an ingrained college experience of “you can do something of your own” because of volunteering for IEEE.
But if that ‘something’ happens to be a venture that audaciously aimed at building a better mailbox than Gmail, then you can’t kill the Goliath alone. You need more Davids. So, our greenhorn warrior called up his three college friends. “Let’s do it,” exulted the first musketeer.
LET’S DO IT. HMMM…
The second one too mirrored the buoyant sentiment. “Let’s do it,” he whooped. The last one completed the trinity. “Let’s do it,” he too roared. “That’s how we started. It was all serendipity. We wanted to do something, and something worked out when my friends agreed,” recounts Arjun, who joined hands with Jofin Joseph, Anoop Thomas Mathew and Nithin Sam Oommen to start his entrepreneurial innings. “Let’s do it” became a clarion call.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be a terrible call. “Let’s do it” soon morphed into “let’s not do it.” Reason? Fear. There were biggies like Outlook and Thunderbird. Though egged by a sudden rush of adrenalin — call it a quintessential ‘youth’ syndrome — the friends were soon gripped with natural fear. What if the venture fails? What if there is no demand for the challenger brand? These were legitimate questions, and the friends didn’t have an answer. “It was a bad idea. We shelved it,” recalls Arjun, quickly auto-correcting himself. “It was not a bad idea. We lacked courage,” he confesses.
To be fair, Arjun did exhibit courage by not giving up the idea of starting up. It takes loads and loads of ‘bravery’ and ‘bravado’ to jump into the chaotic world of entrepreneurship. Arjun tells us why ignorance — of not knowing the nuanced difference between the two terms — was a bliss. “I got into the world of startup because I was too stupid to understand what I was getting into,” he confesses. And if you don’t know the flipside, everything would be upside. Right?
Two years later, Arjun and his gang stared at an inevitable flipside. “In the first two years, we built four products. And in all, we successfully failed,” he grins, and talks about his outrageous bets that bombed.
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The first attempt was to build a financial analytics’ product for SMB (small and medium businesses).
Great idea. But there were two small problems. First, the Young Turks didn’t know anything about finance. Second, SMB was an alien concept. Next, the second attempt was to build a social media engagement platform. Again, there was a miniscule problem. The space was cluttered, and Arjun lacked the differentiator.
ZERO VALIDATION, ZERO SALVATION
Now, the friends moved on to the third attempt. This time, the plan was to build a social testimonial management system. Again, nothing wrong with the idea. But it was again bugged with one small problem. There were no takers!
Four products, four failures, and one realisation. Arjun deciphered the common failure thread among the four failures. “There was no market validation,” he reckons. “There was no feedback from the potential customers,” he adds.
The failures, though, didn’t deter our rookie entrepreneurs. Why? Simple. “We didn’t look at them as failures,” says Arjun. You need a certain level of intelligence to realise that you are failing. “We lacked that. All we had was passion and a determination to keep trying,” he says. “That’s why failures didn’t look like failures,” he smiles. At times, in the life of an entrepreneur, bravado takes the front seat.
But how did they survive? After all, it was a bootstrapped venture. Arjun shares the secret sauce: an intoxicating mix of bravery, bravado, and naivety. It’s a story of four friends, unadulterated camaraderie, and one Pulsar bike. “We survived on Rs 13,000,” says Arjun. If a low cost of living in the God’s Own Country kept the friends agile, then sharing one Pulsar bike — three would ride, and the fourth one would walk in rotation — kept them mobile. Absence of a VC funding was not seen as a challenge. Lack of valuation was not viewed as a handicap. And shutting oneself from the external noise was treasured as a blessing. “We measured our happiness by the number of laughs every day,” he says. “That was our happiness index,” he adds.
The happy gang persisted.
Profoundis, an email intelligence startup, started making sense, money, and news. In 2013, it raised a modest sum from ‘Startup Chile,’ an initiative by the Chilean government. “We were one of the three companies to get selected for ‘StartUp Chile,’ claims Arjun, adding that small wins kept them motivated. In fact, there were a series of ‘not-so-small’ wins. Profoundis was the first company from Kerala to get selected to the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme. It raised its maiden seed funding after 65 rejections. It was another ‘not-so-small’ win.
SMALL WINS, BIG GAINS
In fact, every small win kept accumulating, and compounding. In August 2016, an American company — FullContact — bought Profoundis. This time, it was a big win. Arjun explains why. “It was a first-of-its-kind acquisition in Kerala’s startup community,” he claims.
A successful exit resulted in two priceless things. First, it bolstered the confidence of every stakeholder in the fledgling startup ecosystem. Second, it made young and wannabe entrepreneurs dream. And this was the biggest outcome. “Nothing is more powerful and intoxicating than a dream,” says Arjun.
The entrepreneur, meanwhile, continued with his dream. After two years, he cofounded Insent.ai in September 2018. Almost three years later, the startup was snapped by ZoomInfo.
Two startups, two exits, and a lot of questions. We started with the first one. “Is it easy to sell,” we asked. How does an entrepreneur keep emotions at bay and give preference to practicality? Does one build to exit? Arjun underlines the virtues of continuing with a founder’s dharma and looking at the bigger picture. “Yes, a startup indeed is one’s baby,” he says, explaining how he looks at a buyout proposition. Everything, he underlines, boils down to two things: product and the team. “But if you introspect, the product is part of the team,” he says. If the team is in good hands, then one is mentally and emotionally sorted. “As long as the team is fine, I am fine. That’s how I got over the hump of selling or not selling the venture,” he reckons.
Both the exits, fortunately, took care of the team. “My team took on great roles, grew in ranks, and did amazingly well,” he claims, adding that the only thing that an entrepreneur can control is the inputs. “That’s it. Inputs are all we have. So, it’s better to focus on karma and not on the results,” he says.
Our next question focused around the timing of the exits. How did he manage to get it right, both the times? Arjun reckons he had little role in the outcomes. “My life is nothing but a series of serendipity,” he says. One thing led to another and things kept happening. He explains his life by dishing out the analogy of football. “I was one of the players on the field. Somebody passed on the ball to me, and when I was taking the shot, the goalie looked somewhere else,” he smiles. “It’s all serendipity,” he says. “There are people who are much smarter than me, more hard-working than me, but I have been more fortunate,” he confesses.
LUCK, PLUCK & CAGR
Okay, but can life be viewed from the lens of luck? Is life nothing but a series of serendipitous episodes? And what does it take to be ‘the right person, at the right time, at the right place’? Is it only luck?
Arjun might be modest in not taking credit for his successful journey, but the unpretentious founder underplays his dharma. An entrepreneur’s dharma, all would unanimously agree, is being relentless. An entrepreneur’s dharma is to get up after every sucker punch. An entrepreneur’s dharma is to play a grinding and long innings and block the outside noise and distractions. An entrepreneur’s dharma is to play the game, so that when the ‘right time’ comes, when the ‘right opportunity’ knocks, and the ‘right place’ beacons, the entrepreneur just presents herself.
To win a jackpot, you need to buy a ticket. To be a winner, you need to forget about the losses and stay focused, relentless, and resolute. This is what builds an entrepreneur’s CAGR (compound annual grit rate). It’s your CAGR that finally rewards the pluck by bringing in luck. “Success happens because of the people around you. Somebody will connect you with somebody and that’s how things work,” says Arjun.
Grit is not only about persisting, but also embracing one’s limitations. “At times, you will not have all the answers. It’s okay,” says Arjun. Success, he reckons, depends on how openly you can talk about what you don’t know. He dishes out a profound philosophy of Sadhguru. “Knowing what ‘you know’ is a finite possibility, but knowing what ‘you don’t know’ is an infinite opportunity,” he says.
Well said, Arjun. An entrepreneur’s dharma is to have a laser-sharp focus on CAGR. That’s why Arjun has continued his entrepreneurial journey with Docket, his third venture. Just focus on CAGR, and the rest, as they say, will eventually fall in place.
