Entrepreneurship → Politics → Entrepreneurship

Long long ago, in 2008

I was the Student Union President in NIT Warangal, and against stiff resistance from administration, we were able to get JP garu (a bureaucrat turned politician) to college as chief guest to our annual function!

• I adored him, fully believed in his ideology and he was almost a demi-god to me!
• And I over-did so many things in those 3 days, typical fanboy and childish stuff 🤣 - Waited outside his room when he is sleeping just incase he needs anything, used to micro manage everything - from news papers in the morning to every meal to every interaction, was his body guard etc, when there was no need for any of it 🤣

His speech from 2007, I would have replayed this video a hundred times 🤣 during my college days - “There is no substitue to politics”

Meeting JP garu and Koosam Rajamouli garu (politician who transformed village near my college, Gangadevi palli to a model village), Reading about legends like Lee Kwun Yew, Working for RangDe and experiencing inequality and abject poverty in Bundelkhand had a big influence during my 20’s! They had such a pro-found impact, that my entire adulthood, I used to dream of eventually getting into electoral politics to serve millions!

This is was my blog-post from 2011. Via media intially was NGO’s, then it became activism, and then it became entrepreneurship (Almabase), but what remained constant was politics being the final destination 🤣

Large scale avoidable suffering during covid infact pushed me to pursue it earlier than I originally planned. Due to several reasons - How murky it had become, how excruciating the journey is, the toll it was taking on my mental health and on my family - I had to reconsider my priorities. Basically, I didn’t have the founder-market fit to pursue politics, I was not tough enough🤦‍♂️

After a lot of introspection, several pilots and months of travelling and meeting people, I finally found my ikigai - I’m fully invested in building Shifu Ventures for the years to come. Shifu Ventures includes

• Shifu Studio , a venture-studio to co-build 100 B2B AI startups to $10M ARR each in a profitable & capital efficient way.

• Shifu Foundation , a non-profit media firm to inspire and support millions of young Indians to upskill and join B2B startups - as interns/employees/founders.

After a rough couple of years, things converged and life is so much better now. Found my Ikigai and very excited to build Shifu in years to come 🚀🚀🚀