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The Backstory
In mid-2021 just after the Covid pandemic, and I was looking to work at:
- A startup with real impact, early-stage, with pre-seed funding secured and visionary founders
- A startup with real impact, early-stage, with pre-seed funding
- A startup with real impact in early-stage
- A startup with real impact
- A startup
Exactly in that order.
Working in a startup was what I wanted, anything above that was a big red cherry.
So I searched all the Naukris and Indeeds that India had to offer and quickly understood that these were the places where dreams go to die. LinkedIn wasn't of much help either. That's when I found AngelList, now renamed Wellfound. It's a directory that lets you look for startups and startup jobs around the world—think of LinkedIn for the startup world.
After speaking with several that I found interesting, I was interviewed by Fernando and Enric, founders of Vermut. They needed someone to take on the product from an external agency and bring its development in-house.
It was a match made in heaven - A startup, with impact, in the early stage, had just raised funding plus the vision was there. And most importantly we three clicked.
Initial Beginnings
After all the formalities I joined. Remotely, of course, I working from Pune and the rest of the team from Barcelona.
At that point, my job was basically this:
- Take over the MVP-style web app as a solo developer
- Rapidly iterate to achieve product-market fit
- Build an engineering team
The way it was set up was that an agency in Latam was supporting product development. The idea was to bring it in-house to move the development faster and cheaper. When I reached out to them for KT, I discovered that none of them spoke English. So KT was out of the question and in the end I had to comb through the entire codebase line by line. This was pre-chatgpt era and copy-pasting to quickly get up to speed wasn't an option. However, I have to mention that they'd commented the code well, so that helped.
Once I grasped the situation, I teamed up with our lead designer and we implemented several improvements. Within a couple of months, it became apparent that I couldn’t accelerate the pace alone, so I started building a team.
I brought on two additional developers, and together we began working on the development of our current app. We built the necessary backend, developed the app itself, and continued to support the existing production web app. After four weeks of development and another of testing, we were ready to launch the app on the app stores.
But the app store overlords took their time and after one more month, at the end of November 2021 the app was finally live. At that point, we had couple thousand users on web in Barcelona. Today we serve more than 100k users across entire Spain. And bear in mind that these are not the people born with a smartphone in hand. They come from the age of landlines and phone operators.
Our Moat
We have and still start from a point that we might not know our users. Every day we are building tech for people who are 30-40 years older than we are. So we try not to foster any preconceived notions about what they want or need. This has allowed us to build our products counterintuitively, like making our login funnel longer, not shorter. The way we reach such decisions is by constantly talking to users (every week for almost 200 weeks) and measuring a lot of stuff. The very second thing I did once I took over the project was to create a tracking plan and set up our data stack (Segment + Mixpanel at that time).
Moving Forward
I am inspired by the problem we are solving at Vermut. Its long overdue that people see the impact that social isolation has on mental and physical well being, especially in seniors. Loneliness is worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It raises the risk of dementia by 40%. Finally the world is now understanding that social prescription is a viable treatment plan for healthy aging and we’re on a mission to make social connection a standard part of healthcare.
Feminism means embracing your womanhood, recognizing your innate talents, and celebrating the differences that make you strong. I see this kind of feminism in all the incredible women around me, and I’m lucky to be surrounded by such women.
I see it in the single mother who, after losing her husband, raises four children on her own. Each child grows up to excel in their chosen field—one studies electrical engineering and eventually builds a company, another pursues law and becomes a respected attorney, a third studies mechanical engineering and rises to lead a major Japanese firm, and the fourth studies civil engineering to become the COO of a prominent Indian developer.
I see it when I see my grandmother.
I see it in the young woman in her early twenties who marries because her dying father wishes to see her married. Despite her wish, she does it to make him smile and later goes on to establish a huge contracting company with the support of her husband. Over twenty years, her company generates millions in value and employs hundreds, all while she builds a family of her own.
I see it when I see my mother.
I see it in a woman who, as a child, dreams of becoming a doctor and against all odds becomes a dermatologist. She sets up her own clinic which eventually expands into a chain of skin clinics across Pune. She marries the love of her life. They build a home together in the city and enjoys a fulfilling life together.
I see it when I see my sister.
I see it in a woman from a small town in India who travels all alone across multiple states in search of a job. With sheer hard work and tenacity, she gets the job she loves. After couple of years, she realises she wants more out of life. Determined, she travels all alone, again, but now across multiple countries to pursue her master’s degree. While living in a different country among people speaking a different language, she receives the heartbreaking news of her father’s passing. As the eldest child, she becomes the de facto head of her family. While working and supporting her family from abroad her ambition pushes her to take on another project. And she embarks on the journey of turning her startup dream into a reality.
I see it when I see my wife.
This is the brand of feminism I respect—it isn’t about bashing men, but about partnering with them. It’s about understanding that differences make us strong and that extraordinary accomplishments are often the result of teamwork.
Here's my salute to the real feminism. Happy Women's day to all women.
One of the practices we have followed through at Vermut since the very beginning is our weekly all-hands. In a startup, as you slowing grow you'll find that it gets exceedingly difficult to keep everyone on the same page. This can be easy when you are small and fit in a single room. You can just call out someone and tell them what's important for the day, week or month. But as the team grows this very critical part becomes challenging. Even a small misalignment will at best cause you to lose tons of time (which for a startup is a rare resource) or at worst would be the cause for your eventual death. To make sure that none of this happens a weekly all-hands or just "Weekly" as we call it, is super important.
We have structured the weekly in a way so that the most critical parts of the business (the 2 Ps) - i.e. People and Product are highlighted in a short span of 1 hour.
We start our weekly always but celebrating the people and the teams who help us do what we do. This part is called as celebrations/achievements slide. Here each team member brings a celebration or an achievement of theirs from the previous week. These can range from professional achievements (maybe you solved that pesky bug that was causing the whole UI to shift on render) to something personal like I achieved my personal best lap swimming. We feel that cheering for your fellow workmates with whom you spend almost a third of your life is very important. It also sets a good tone for the meeting and makes you see others as humans and not resources (the way some tech companies like to call it).
The next part is the insights slide where each member brings something they found insightful. This again doesn't have to be professional. We define insights as any knowledge that improves your understanding or makes your life easy in some way. There have been multiple instances where we found that these insights have helped us build a far better product. Here everyone can see the things we do from a set of new eyes. For eg, customer support team might see some part of the user experience that the engineering team never sees.
After the initial brain-picking session, we jump down to business. The first slide here is about our high-level KPIs. Here we go over where we are in terms of our monthly goals (I'll talk about our Monthly in another post). This allows us to chunk down our monthly plan into week-by-week momentum. It also puts everyone in perspective on how much we need to push to hit our month.
The following slides are to get highlights on each department's focus - product, engineering, marketing, operations and customer support. This helps departments to take absolute ownership and acts as a sneak peek for others. Our best coordination efforts are clearly seen here.
Finally, we wrap up with questions. We follow a model of transparency in the way we manage and run our operations. So no question, absolutely none is out of scope here. Everyone is free and rather encouraged to ask things they might have on their mind.
We keep all this under an hour. We do this each week. And we have been doing this for 4 years now. This is how we build culture - one week at a time.
Although India's unemployment has fallen since the peak during Covid, it is still higher than that of the United States and probably also that of neighbouring China (although I couldn't find metrics on that).
Assuming the numbers I am looking at are correct, it means in India you are fighting harder for the same jobs vs your counterparts in these countries. That is also what I have seen from the significantly higher number of applications I receive when looking to hire someone in India vs here in Spain.
From the hundreds of CVs I read, I saw that candidates in India are making their task of finding a job significantly difficult because of how their CV is done. Looking at that made me sad because some of them do have potential but their chances of getting a shot at an interview are low.
So here are some of my pointers on how you should build your CV. You'll notice that some of them have already been said before but I continue to see candidates make the same mistakes over and over. So I am going to say it again anyway.
Starting from the basics. When uploading your CVs, always use pdf. It not only helps you to maintain the formatting but it's also the most widely used format.
For each experience you mention in the CV always mention a couple of points on what you worked on there. And don't use generic lines like "Completed all tasks in a timely manner". That gives recruiters zero insight on whether they should schedule an interview.
Your marital status is not important for evaluating your professional skills. Plus you probably don't want to work at companies where that's an important hiring factor.
Mentioning personal details like the name of your parents or your spouse or your passport number (have seen that a couple of times) is not important and does not help.
If you have some gap in your work history, don't worry. Employers want clarity on the reason more than the gap being there in the first place. Most employers will be okay with it if they see efforts during that time. If you can, try to mention those in the CV itself.
Your aim needs to be to transfer your eligibility to the person reading your resume as fast as possible. So it's better if you skip unnecessary things like your hobbies unless those are relevant to the job profile you are applying for. For example, a social media manager applicant could be running an Instagram page on the side as a hobby.
Don't go for quantity when applying for jobs. Optimise for quality. More so if you are applying for SMEs or startups where more often than not your resume will be read by an actual person rather than a software. In that case, every personal touch you add to your CV will increase your chances of getting a reply that much more.
Something that has been said enough but surprises me on how many applicants still do it is... spelling mistakes and formatting errors. There is no excuse why you cannot get your resume checked. Heck you can just upload your resume to ChatGPT and ask it to fix errors.
Marks, grades, GPA. Only mention those on your resume if they are good. A simple rule of thumb would be above 80% until the 12th standard and above 70% during graduation.
Lastly, don't include your profile photo in the resume. I have to be honest here that I don't have any real basis for this recommendation. But in most cases, it'll work against you if recruiters judge you too quickly on things which are not relevant due to their prejudices about how you look. And in cases where it does work in your favour, it'll be for all the wrong reasons and you most likely don't want to work at a place where they hire you based on your looks.
Having said all this it's true that finding a job in India is a difficult endeavor and there will be times you feel like accepting whatever job you get. But be cognizant of the fact that the job you currently accept will be a stepping stone for another one down the road. So make sure you are stepping on the right stone.
Recently, I talked to ChatGPT about my lunch options. It gave me a few good ideas on what to eat and where to go. Not exactly what I was looking for, but in time it could get there. OpenAI and others are building the next developer ecosystems, the new Android and iOS if you will.
I can easily imagine starting my day by putting on my earbuds with some kind of generative model, right along with my glasses.
Then in theory I could have one interface to consume all my morning needs. The possibilities will be endless:
- GPT for a meditation app think Headspace.
- GPT for a news app think Inshorts.
- GPT for a commute app think Cabify/Uber.
- GPT for a food delivery from apps think Glovo/Doordash.
- GPT for an audiobook app think Audible.
The list can go on and on...
Going ahead, future products might not be traditional apps anymore. They will be APIs, built to integrate seamlessly with GPT models. If you’re thinking of developing a new idea, consider how your APIs can integrate with all the available GPTs instead of focusing solely on building an app around it. That's where the value will truly lie.
