Pranesh - The Journey Will Not Begin if You Don’t Put That First Brick in Place (Founder & CEO - Zunroof Tech)

The smallest milestones/battles won will lead to the bigger picture eventually (I read somewhere there is no sunk cost in life, so if a few battles are lost and it is not going in the right direction, move on).

Tell us about your background, journey, and upbringing.

I grew up in Muzaffarpur, a small town of Bihar, born to a government clerk father
and homemaker mother. A very cliched 90s childhood at Kendriya Vidyalaya followed, with 2 elder sisters as buddies. 

I was quite good at studies, especially Mathematics, which led to preparing for IITs, and eventually, I did my engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 2005-09 (the best 4 years one could have with friends made for life). Got married to my childhood sweetheart, who is a Doctor at Fortis Gurgaon, in 2012 and have a 7-year-old son.

What inspired you to take action in your direction and what are your future plans?

For all the Harry Potter fans out there- here is a tweaked version from a quote I am sure you are familiar with - ‘Inspiration can come even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the lights.' 

I derive inspiration from the smallest of things, but if I trace back to the times when I felt a strong desire to solve something, it was in the many hours of the day when Muzaffarpur saw electricity cuts and our lives seemed to come to a stop. 

I believe, having experienced this personally and realizing that electricity expense is a costly affair for households, inspired me to ensure that no house in India lives without affordable electricity. We have come a long way in this quest, and it has inspired us to move towards the smart utilization of this available electricity. 

In the future, I see us fulfilling the twin problem of demand and supply of electricity around the world using IoT and exciting upcoming technologies.

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What does your typical workday look like?

I am a strong believer in a start-up being a marathon and we need to run every day and that is what my typical day is. Also, building a startup is a lot about fire
fighting your way through the day. 

Amongst all the chaos, I declutter my day by keeping the first half of the day to work on my personal projects and the second half for usual day-to-day meetings. Other than that my day includes the exclusive time that I spend with my founding team members to catch up with/without agenda.

And I keep sneaking time during the day to refresh all the million dashboards that we have created in our journey thus far.

Several global companies have come out and thrown their support behind not needing a formal education. What is your opinion about this?

I humbly believe that I’m not qualified to answer this question.

How do you handle someone who has lied on their resume?

Ah. Over the years, having interviewed 100s of candidates, I have realized that
everyone exaggerates on their resume. Mostly in the corporate world, people are in the business of putting up the best foot forward while getting hired- exaggerated foot if I may! 

Despite knowing this, I believe that every individual learns something new in a project, no matter the expertise or involvement level. So the exaggeration may be excused up to a certain degree. 

However, we are intolerant towards outright liars and our strong HR team carries out thorough background verification checks to filter such folks out.

How has covid changed things at your workplace & which of these changes do you intend to make permanently?

We are a tech-first startup and our day-to-day processes were anyway quite automated and over the last year, we have improved those further. But, the
lockdowns have had impacts on our supply lines as well as some of our offline
customer awareness campaigns.

Even otherwise, I would stick my neck out against the remote-only work that is
being advocated currently. And the biggest reason I have is that we are forced to
do our celebrations virtually too in the remote-only phase. 

We miss the noise of an in-person party, the clinking of glasses, and the casual chit-chat being there in person leads. Hopefully, as soon as we recover from the pandemic we will get back to our regular celebrations.

                             

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs or those eyeing the top job?

Before I answer that, let’s put an ‘and’ instead of an ‘or’ in that question. The advice for either would be stark different from the other.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, I would say you must make a plan and start somewhere, anywhere. The journey will not begin if you don’t put that first brick in place.

Secondly and most importantly make sure you have a co-founder - things will (not might) go messy and you would need a comrade then. And lastly- break down the war into small battles with objectively defined timelines! 

The smallest milestones/battles won will lead to the bigger picture eventually (I read somewhere there is no sunk cost in life, so if a few battles are lost and it is not going in the right direction, move on).

For those eyeing the top job - well, are you willing to pay the price. It will take a lot out of you; getting to the top through the ranks in any organization is a mix of luck, upward management, politics, timing, etc (goes without saying that you need to be incredibly talented and skillful to be even in the mix) and then you might realize at the end that the top is very lonely. 

An easier heuristic would be to look at your boss’s boss and see if you want to lead his/her life. I must add this part of the answer is only observation-based and I might not have the right qualifications to suggest to others a path to the top job.

Which is your favorite book/show and why?

Silicon Valley - I have watched every episode of every season at least half a dozen times; it has so much going on in it which is a good approximation of our daily challenges in building and running a tech startup.