Celebrated my 30th with the people I didn’t really know

Celebrated my 30th with the people I didn’t really know well a year ago. And I wouldn’t want to celebrate it with anyone else.

Here’s why:

1. I moved back to India 11 months ago to run a dwindling business with challenges that I wasn’t prepared for or knew of. These were the people who stood by the company and helped turn things around.
2. Entrepreneurship is hard and painful. It took toll on my mind and body, but at the end, this hunch helped me survive through it all by taking extra ownership, showing awareness for the situation, and not leveraging the bad times for their own good.
3. When my own family was torn apart owing to a painful partition, these were the very people who stepped up to the task. We bonded during the most challenging phases of our professional lives (for me, this was all very personal too). I will forever be grateful for each one who helped me get through this phase.
4. I’ve spent 70% of my waking hours with this bunch, worked 6 days a week, and kept them on their toes. Sometimes, we forget how much of our joy and pain comes from coworkers – this last year taught me exactly that. The year went by in no time, and while we haven’t achieved anything significant compared to our competitors, we have come a long way in terms of building a culture of compassion, transparency, meritocracy, and most importantly, learning.
5. Change requires some painful yet stern decision-making, and my partner Pratik and I had to make a lot of painful decisions from systems and SOPs to firing people. This team absorbed and accommodated all of that, even while I lost my cool as the pressure got to me.

I am immensely grateful to these people for having given me the opportunity to lead and learn with them. And I can finally say that I’m optimistic about the future at Milagro Universe. Whether we capture more market share or not, we will definitely win hearts wherever we go, because we are a passionate bunch that cares.

Thank you, team. Get back to work, don’t waste your time looking for another job on LinkedIn. That’s not the objective of this post. Haha.