Ep 79: Tarun Mehta on the importance of keeping to your core vision

Entrepreneurship is hard. No matter what you’re building. It becomes even harder when you’re building something that’s not understood by many, and even worse if the product is clearly ahead of its time. But founders are crazy. They see opportunities when no one sees them. They also get blinded sometimes by it and fail. When Tarun Mehta started building Ather Energy, India’s first electric two wheelers, his startup was being written off even before the pre-orders started. After getting his pitch rejected by 80 investors ( is that a magic number? Even Kabeer of Dunzo had similar number of rejections before getting funded), Tarun finally met Sachin Bansal. “What should I change in this pitch deck?” “Don’t change anything. This is how you’ll build this.” Perhaps only a fellow entrepreneur can empathize with another founder’s dogged optimism. So here’s to the entrepreneurial mafia being led by Sachin Bansal and several others.