A Startup is your own Personal Utopia

A conversation with Kamrul Khan for the Bengalis of New York podcast

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I feel like part of building a company is all of those connections that you make. Your

company is this ideal utopian world that, this is how I wish the world was, and I get to

create it.

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And in that process, you get to pick who you work with, which is essentially like

picking your friends. And instead of friends that you go out grabbing a drink with at

happy hour, it's friends that you hang out, build stuff and, make money together. You

get to develop those connections and create your own world and work with really smart

people.

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And selfishly that's also the best part about it. I get to surround myself with people I

genuinely respect, people that push me and I push them, and we repeat this process

and, it becomes is our world now. Our little bubble.

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Back in the day, pre-internet, you just knew your coworkers, your neighbors,

your family, friends, whatever.

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Now when you publish something on Twitter and someone sees it and they'll DM you,

and then you'll meet up in person. And you've never known them before. And there's

customers that we met in San Francisco just like that, and we ended up grabbing dinner

with them.

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There was no other way for us to have met aside from that process. So there's all these

relationships that intertwine and is able to get created from creating a company. And

I'm not advocating everybody should start a company. But I can't think of a better way to

get all of these benefits.

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Obviously there's the stress of it and all of that. But if you're truly into the art of

creating and starting a business, all of that is just part of the process. But the upside

that you get from it is really amazing. And you're not going to see that upside in the

first year. You're not going to see in the second year, you might see it in the third year,

but it is just the long haul process of coming in and showing up day in and day out.

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Not because it's a habit, not because it's like, oh, there's some morning routine to how,

like, what is a morning routine of millionaires? Let me go repeat it. And maybe now

I'll have a successful startup. It was like, no, you just have to figure out what it is that

society wants, but doesn't even know yet how to get it.

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And you have to create that and you have to keep trying to create that. I think

interesting stuff happens in that process.

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You and me are recording this podcast and you're going to put it out there on the

internet. And there could be hundreds of thousands of people that listen to this. And

it's not going to cost you anything for that to happen. We could have easily just done

this in the coffee shop and I just talked to you for an hour or whatever. But nobody else

would be able to hear it. So it's an amplifier. It's one of the greatest wealth creation

machines ever invented to date.

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I can't think of something…maybe in a hundred years there'll be something else that's

different. So I feel like might as well just take advantage of that.