Krya Origin Story
After 15 years of brutally hard, focused work, I threw it all aside, to start afresh
After 7 years of college across IIT-M & IIM-B & then 8 years of resultant work experience in FMCG , I came to the unhappy realization that I was very un-happy with who I had become at work
My first & only job after IIM-B was in FMCG sales + marketing.
Externally I was doing very well – it was a very high paying job, I had great colleagues & was on the fast track to CXO level
But internally i felt really hollow.
I was deeply unhappy with the state of the industry I worked in. The FMCG world was built on superficial products that harmed customers in the long term. Relied on tall product claims & clever advertising. And to make things worse, the products were an environmental disaster
The lucrative corporate track that I was on , had also put me knee-deep in sticky moral & ethical conflicts.
And I realized sadly that even if I changed jobs, my expertise would only lead to jobs with similar moral conflicts.
So if you are deeply unhappy with who you have become, you need to take drastic measures
My specific answer was to build Krya , a business based on sound first principles and strong values.
So January 31, 2009 was my last day at my high paying job. I did not have any concrete business idea or serious savings or any back-up job. Just my convictons and and the promise of a fresh start. To make things even more interesting , I had also convinced my wife Preethi to quit her even more high paying job to become in my co-founder in whatever we were going to build together.
On 1st February 2009, Preethi wisely suggested that we fire up our laptops and brainstorm business ideas
Instead I suggested a gap year
After some convincing, Preethi & I took a year off.
We then commenced a program of deliberate un-learning & carefully curated immersive experiences.
We spent several months in Europe , literally having moveable feasts of art & cinema in London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Florence ,Barcelona & Madrid.
We were then lucky to have deeply mindful moments while living in Rishikesh & Haridwar while plotting our future course of entrepreneurial action.
Long before we started Krya, we first wrote down our guiding principles & baked them into the design of our products & processes
Ethical values are very hard to add along the way. They must be hard-coded at the start itself. In fact we had a very clear “No-List” , the list of things that we would not do in whatever business we were going to build.
There was some pain & a great amount of risk for me in quitting a job & going the self-funded start-up way
And then a whole lot of pain in actually building said start-up
But the process of making myself a better human being has also given immense satisfaction. And zero pain on account of moral conflicts
An important measure of a career or life path is what you become as a result of it
Yes, there will be other measures like money, shiny objects, technical skills, fame, network, podcast invitations etc that you will accumulate
But if you pause and reflect about who you have become, and compare with your younger self – are you really happy with the progress & change ?
Are you truly thrilled with how you have been moulded by the forces of life at that point in time ?
What have I become ? What has my career made of me ? These are good questions to ask yourself
And if you are un-happy with the answer , it is more than OK to throw it all aside & start afresh
Only you can work on becoming the best version of yourself