All In

I don’t know how Cala­ca­nis felt on bet­ting his startup Mahalo’s shares in a game of poker or while los­ing $204,400 pot to ten-time World Series Of Poker cham­pion but I know how it feels to pay a semes­ter fee for a B School out of your pocket. I’ve found myself adven­tur­ous when it comes to tak­ing risks — be it stand­ing tough for the guy I loved or quit­ting a sta­ble job. The time has come for me to go all-in.

As I wrap up things at work and pre­pare to re-experience the state of  ‘no income’, I find myself smil­ing. I remem­ber the day at office when I had sud­denly stood up in my cubi­cle and looked around in des­per­a­tion. I won’t go into the details but I was look­ing for answers and I had got none. But I had real­ized some­thing — I did not belong there pro­fes­sion­ally. This week is my last at work and as I stand at the brink of start­ing my MBA later in the Fall, I could not feel any more assured of my deci­sion and my future. And I do not mean money; I do not mean sta­tus; I do not mean suc­cess — I mean pro­fes­sional and per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion — the plea­sure of doing some­thing you are pas­sion­ate about. I feel a step closer to that feel­ing of accom­plish­ment one senses on see­ing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, hear­ing Beethoven’s 5^th sym­phony, read­ing Ayn Rand or watch­ing Fed­erer win 16 Grand Slams.

For almost a year now, I have been involved with some­thing cre­ative on part-time basis. I have worked with Richard, a ten­nis pro on his ten­nis startup, My Ten­nis Fash­ion, as a blog­ger and media helper. I am cur­rently work­ing as a media con­sul­tant with Sar­b­jit on his sports and social ini­tia­tive called Sports Doing Good. And if every­thing goes well, I will be work­ing on an undis­closed new tech startup this sum­mer and Fall. The only rea­son I could man­age to do these is the love I have for energy of star­tups. It never felt like doing ‘work’, it’s been so effort­less. I am pick­ing up on busi­ness strat­egy devel­op­ment side and it is my intended area of spe­cial­iza­tion. I am in touch with some of the cool entre­pre­neurs in NYC and I just feel like I am enter­ing finally into a world where I belong.

MBA will be the inevitable plat­form to learn VC financ­ing, basic mar­ket­ing and entre­pre­neur­ial eco­nom­ics with­out which I feel shaky about jump­start­ing my tech ven­ture. I know the stakes are high but from where I stand, the pos­si­ble rewards heav­ily out­weigh the finan­cial risks involved. So, I am all set.

One thing I will miss about my job is my team. My team mates were truly phe­nom­e­nal and I have enjoyed every moment with them. The world of bank­ing and finance some­how failed to entice me but I will take the great lessons I have learned from my ex-Manager and Busi­ness Head. Work wise I had much to desire for and that is what I am going to keep in mind while choos­ing my MBA intern­ships. So, its an end and its a new begin­ning — the glass, for me, always remains half full.

I will leave for a (well-deserved and desired) vaca­tion now but I’ll be back soon. I wish every­one a great sum­mer. So long.

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