There is no one size fits all as to when to start your own business, but a prominent — and young — Indian startup founder thinks it’s better to start as early as possible.
Ather CEO Tarun Mehta says it’s easier to start a startup when you’re young. “I now know that had I (previously) worked in the auto industry, I wouldn’t have been able to start Ather,” he said at an event. “So it’s best to start as young as possible. If you’ve found your area of interest, and you want to build a business, which means you are going to take a financial risk, younger is better,” he added.
Mehta acknowledged that some people feel — and there’s data to back it up — that it just as possible to build a startup when you’re older. “There is an argument that work for a few years, get some experience and then start up,” he said. “(But) the more you work, I think it gets harder for two reasons. First, you start earning money. The minute you start earning money, you start getting a fixed salary. Your life becomes too dependent on it. It becomes very hard to give up on it,” he said.
“Secondly, you become very cynical. When we started up, we were stupid enough to think that with Rs. 2.5 crore and 25 people, we’d be able to launch a vehicle,” he laughed. “It took us five years and 300 engineers (to get there). So we were terribly off. But had we known this on Day 1, we wouldn’t have started up. So my advice is start your company before you become smart and you become wise enough to know how hard it is to build a startup in real life — once you’ve begun, struggled, and put some passion into it, things will eventually work out,” he concluded.
Mehta should know what he’s talking about — he had founded Ather within a year of graduating with his IIT Madras batchmate. The company found it hard to get its first vehicle on the roads, but after a long journey which saw it raise funds from Hero group and Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal, it is among India’s best-selling electric two-wheelers, and competes with established names like Bajaj and TVS. And Mehta, who’s still only 34, believes that his early plunge into entrepreneurship played a big role in taking him there.