Startup With Shashank
I didn’t begin with confidence
I failed and I learned. I failed and I learned…
Where it started
We spoke Telugu at home.
I grew up in Hyderabad. I spent the first half of my life there, all through school and engineering. We spoke Telugu at home. I knew English fine, but the moment I had to speak it out loud, I would freeze up. Not because I didn’t know the words. Because I wasn’t confident. That’s really where everything I teach today started. I didn’t begin with confidence. I had to build it, slowly, like everyone else does.
Growing up, I was the “good” kid in the family, the one aunts and uncles pointed to and said, “be like him.” I studied hard. I played sports hard. I never said no to anyone. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I was too scared to. People called it good behaviour. It was actually fear.
Then I joined engineering. I joined because my friends did, not because I wanted to. And here’s the best part. My parents never forced me into it. Nobody did. I walked into it entirely on my own, just by being another sheep in the herd. I spent most of my time outside college, not inside it. When the results came, everyone used one word for it: failure. But that’s not really what happened. I didn’t fail because I couldn’t understand the subject. I failed because I never really tried. That’s very different from not being smart enough.
People called it good behaviour. It was actually fear.
What failure taught me
A degree can get you a job.
That failure taught me something no classroom ever did. Our whole education system runs on fear. I still remember 8th grade, the one time I got the courage to ask my teacher to explain something again. She scolded me for not paying attention instead of just answering. That’s the moment a kid learns it’s safer to stay quiet than to ask a question. Fear of being judged. Fear of chasing marks instead of understanding. Fear of getting rejected the moment you speak up. That’s when I decided success was never going to come from a mark sheet. A degree can get you a job. It can’t teach you to go after a dream nobody handed you, or walk up to a stranger and walk away with a friend. Nobody has ever asked me for my degree before deciding to trust me. The only thing that’s ever mattered is what I’ve actually done.
At 24, I started my first company. What I actually wanted to build was a finishing school, teaching the real skills that help you get a job, the skills nobody teaches you in a classroom. I wanted it to be the opposite of the classroom that had failed me. It didn’t work. A year or two in, I had to admit something harder than that old “failure” tag: I hadn’t built a business. I’d just given myself a job, with no boss and nobody to blame but me. So I shut it down.
When I went back to studying, I picked carefully this time. I did my MBA at the Asian Institute of Management, Manila, because of how they teach. No lectures, no theory off a slide. You’re handed a real business problem and you have to argue your way to an answer, in a room that will pull your logic apart if it’s weak. AIM was built this way on purpose. It was founded in 1968 with Harvard Business School.
Nobody has ever asked me for my degree before deciding to trust me.
The only thing that’s ever mattered is what I’ve actually done.
What I built
I quit anyway, on purpose.
After the MBA, I had two big offers to work outside India, one from Accenture, one from Tech Mahindra’s Global Leadership Cadre, a programme that only picks people from the top IIMs and AIM. I said no to both. I hadn’t done that MBA just to leave the one country I actually wanted to build something in. Instead, I took a harder path, Regional Director of Sales at Luxury Escapes, hired to build their India business from scratch. Five years. I hustled so much, and building that business from nothing was an invaluable experience, nothing a classroom could ever teach me. My role covered business development, marketing, and customer service. I onboarded hotels across the country and built the kind of relationships that made me one of the most successful people in the company. Honestly, it was probably one of the best jobs in the world. Great pay, and I got to travel free, all over the world, on the job. The kind of job anyone would kill to get. The day my education loan was finally paid off, I quit anyway, on purpose, to go build something of my own again.
That something was Nerige Story, which my wife, Pooja Nadig, and I built from nothing into a business doing seven figures in sales every month. It’s the thing I’m proudest of. Alongside it, I built Social Hippi, a marketing agency for boutique luxury hotels, and Trips To Luxury.
Three years ago, I couldn’t sit in front of a camera without freezing up, the same old fear of being judged. I made myself do it anyway, again and again, and that channel, @startupwithshashank.telugu, has since grown to over 35,000 followers in the span of months.
No godfather, no godmother, no one opening doors for me. I earned all of it by failing first, more than once, and getting back up each time.
And I’m not done. I’m not a coach who read a few books and started teaching, and I’m not a coach who learned all this from some mentor either. I’m still running these businesses while I teach you this. The day I stop building is the day everything I teach starts feeling stale.
You are not going to feel ready. Start anyway, and let the practice make you ready.
What I teach
Three courses, so far
Communication first, because it is the thing that matters the most. Then business, and then sales.