The speaker shares their entrepreneurial journey, focusing on the concept of bootstrapping. Emphasizing that bootstrapping is typically born out of necessity rather than choice, they recount their personal challenges, including being orphaned at a young age, and how those challenges shaped their perseverance in business. Learning to stay the course despite adversities, they built a successful business called Fyers serving a million customers, all achieved without external funding.

The core theme is the advantage of being an underdog, exploiting negative perceptions and lack of resources as motivations to succeed. By leveraging an "underdog syndrome," the speaker argues that bootstrapped startups have unique strengths, such as agility and emotional investment. Founders are encouraged to prioritize focus over speed, and caution against early fundraising, which can dilute control and ownership.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. bootstrapping [ˈbuːtˌstræpɪŋ] - (n.) - Building a company from the ground up with personal savings or operating revenue without the help of venture capital or angel investment. - Synonyms: (self-starting, self-sustaining, self-financing)

The test of bootstrapping.

2. orphaned [ˈɔːrfənd] - (adj.) - Having lost one's parents, either through death or abandonment. - Synonyms: (parentless, destitute, bereaved)

At age nine, I was orphaned.

3. demotivating [diːˈmoʊtɪˌveɪtɪŋ] - (adj.) - Causing a lack of motivation or enthusiasm. - Synonyms: (disheartening, discouraging, dispiriting)

The answer was always a no. It was demotivating for me.

4. underdog [ˈʌndərˌdɔːɡ] - (n.) - A competitor thought to have little chance of winning a contest or fight. - Synonyms: (dark horse, outsider, long shot)

The underdog syndrome is real and it works.

5. syndrome [ˈsɪnˌdroʊm] - (n.) - A group of symptoms that consistently occur together or a condition characterized by a set of associated symptoms. - Synonyms: (condition, disorder, situation)

What is the underdog syndrome?

6. testament [ˈtɛstəmənt] - (n.) - Something that serves as a sign or evidence of a specified fact, event, or quality. - Synonyms: (evidence, testimony, proof)

Our story is a live example of what bootstrapping is and a testament that it is possible.

7. embodied [ɪmˈbɒdid] - (v.) - To give a tangible or visible form to an idea, quality, or feeling. - Synonyms: (personified, incarnated, represented)

This is something that we try to embody with every new milestone.

8. critical [ˈkrɪtɪkəl] - (adj.) - Expressing adverse or disapproving comments or judgments. - Synonyms: (judgmental, censorious, condemnatory)

Just an endless laundry list of critical statements that should have ideally demotivated us.

9. vulnerable [ˈvʌlnərəbl] - (adj.) - Exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally. - Synonyms: (susceptible, defenseless, open)

Be vulnerable, because there is no way around it.

10. trajectory [trəˈdʒɛktəri] - (n.) - The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces. - Synonyms: (course, path, direction)

Focus on the long term trajectory of the business.

Bootstrapping Startup in Hard Mode -An Entrepreneur's True Test - Tejas Khoday - TEDxChristUniversity

Today, I'm here to talk about the road less taken as an entrepreneur. The test of bootstrapping. Does anyone here in the audience want to start a business someday? A show of hands. Wow. Well, that's almost 50% of the crowd. Impressive. Well, I hope some of you at least go out there, shape industries, create new jobs, and make our country very proud.

Today I'm here to talk about startups, as you all know, but not the typical kind. The typical startups that you generally hear of in the news, billion-dollar valuations, massive fundraisers, and just unrealistic overnight successes. Today, I'm here to talk about something different. How to build something valuable out of nothing at all. It's not easy. bootstrapping isn't something that entrepreneurs choose to do by themselves. It's what circumstances force upon them. Like it did for me.

I learned some of my biggest life lessons many years before I started a company. At age nine, I was orphaned. I lost both my parents in one go. My father, a real estate businessman, a very dynamic man, was fighting a severe financial crisis. A crisis which he thought he would overcome, but he could not, because of which he decided to give up not just on the business, but also his own life.

It was life's way of telling me that fortune favors the brave, not just those who have the courage to do it outwardly, but those who can stay in the game when things get tough in life. So years later, when I started my own business, I took this lesson very deeply. It was very deeply embedded in me that we should, at the end of the day, as an entrepreneur or just people in life facing challenges, try to stay in the game. Because if you don't stay in the game, you're not going to win the game.

So with that big lesson, I, years later went on to start fires. We didn't have money, we didn't have investors. Neither did we have any mentors. All we had was a band of brothers willing to face challenges. We had a very small team, a very small team and a huge vision to create the best investment platform in the country.

I approached every investor out there, from the rich neighborhood uncle to a professional venture capitalist, and the answer was always a no. It was demotivating for me. But the lesson that life had taught me early on was so important and so deep in me that at that point in time, when we had two choices, I chose the more difficult one. The easier one would be to simply give up like my father had once upon a time, and choose a comfortable life, get a good job and lead a good life.

But instead I decided to put everything on the line to pursue my dream and to see what we are capable of. And that's what I'm going to mostly be telling you about today. Fast forward to today. We have approximately 1 million customers that we serve. We employ around 400 people, all very skilled people in India, definitely not cheap, and we've been consistently profitable for five years straight.

So have we been funded? As of today, no. Our story is a live example of what bootstrapping is and a testament that it is possible. It is doable by anybody who is willing to take the road less traveled. I learned many lessons in these journeys, many journeys. But largely the last 10 years in which I have been leading fires, I have learned many lessons.

The biggest lesson of them all is that extinction is the rule and survival is the exception. This is a famous quote by the late great Carl Sagan who said that 99% of all species that have ever lived on the planet are now extinct. If you come to think about it, 99% of all businesses that were ever created, if not more than that, are now extinct as well. At least nine out of ten startups fail and yet there is hope because there are few who manage to survive and thrive in the long term.

So what is it about really? What is the basic ingredient or the fundamental ingredient for long term success? Is it to keep the eye on the prize, to become number one? Or is it to stay alive, to explore opportunities as they come along? For us it was the latter. We felt that the longer we could survive as a startup, the more opportunities would come by and we would be right there to take them.

The key takeaway? Stay in the game. Because if you don't, nothing else matters. The next big lesson I as a bootstrap startup that I learned personally is that the underdog syndrome is real and it works. What is the underdog syndrome? When everybody looks down upon you, when everybody writes you off, when everybody thinks that you barely have a chance to win, you are an underdog.

For us it was, oh, they haven't raised money, how will they survive? Oh, these guys don't have a marketing budget, they definitely won't be able to compete. So on and so forth. Just an endless laundry list of critical statements that should have ideally demotivated us. But me being me and my team being the team that it is, it worked as a negative motivation because we had nothing to lose.

We were already more or less broke because we worked with interns, just a bunch of misfits trying to achieve something meaningful together. So we had nothing to lose. And everything to prove this, my friends, is an advantage. The key takeaway from this lesson is that being an underdog is an advantage. You must use it. Why? Because you can work longer, you will work harder, and most likely be smarter.

Because those with a lot of money and resources have fewer reasons to take those extra steps in life to go out and achieve the things that they are set out to do. The third lesson, something which is scoffed on by young entrepreneurs, my peers, and many others that I have come across. Startup founders usually try to raise funds as soon as possible, get the resources so that you can build the business, you can hire people, you can do all of these things and achieve the success that you always wanted to.

But ironically, the more money you raise, the less you own. The less you own, the less you control, the lesser you control, the less likely you are to succeed, because you are no longer the captain of the ship. You are just in the ship. You cannot steer it in any direction, and hence you lose out. Now, I'm not saying that you should never raise capital. There is a time for it.

But when a baby is born, it is important for the baby to take those first few efforts to learn how to crawl, to learn how to stand and walk, to communicate. That's what the early years of bootstrapping are like. You must learn how to do these basic things, feel vulnerable, face the adversities, and only then will you be able to deal with the bigger challenges of the future. Easy come, easy go.

So the more you own in the beginning, the more likely you are to not just create value for yourself to all the other stakeholders around you in the future. So be the captain of your ship and take ownership. And never be afraid to be vulnerable, because there is no way around it. With or without mentors or investors.

The next big lesson, lesson number four. Focus beats speed in startups, as we have seen, and as you might have read, is all about speed. It's like you're running a sprint. As soon as the gun is shot, you're sprinting to the end line. But are you sprinting in the right direction?

What would happen if you're speeding in the wrong direction? You could not just waste your own life, you could also waste a lot of money. And backtracking all the way back. Trying to find the right place to start from is a huge challenge. So as a bootstrapped startup, you must focus on speed. Not just speed, but more Try to get things right.

Prioritize focus over speed actually. Why? Because it's not about speeding in the direction, it's about charting the direction you want to travel beforehand so that you don't make the mistakes, waste resources. And this, my friends, has helped us as we have navigated many challenges, able to surpass many revenue thresholds, which stopped us from scaling up simply because we were focused as a group of people, focused on customers.

We would really get down to the ground, speak to people who we want to build products for, build it for them, and know that they might like it and not just go around speeding all directions, hoping that spraying and praying works just because you have money to throw and that you are able to afford it. So focus beats speed any day of the week. Move with purpose.

Precision is always better than chaos. And you won't have the luxury to choose if you're a bootstrap startup. So inherently it is an advantage for you. You must look at it like that. You must try to find these positives among the many negatives, the seemingly negative circumstances that you will be faced with.

Last, but definitely not the least. You guessed it right, you can see it on the screen. Profit unlocks freedom. When I was growing up, I used to read the newspapers. I had other peers running startups. Profit was a dirty word.

People would scoff and laugh at you if you said, why isn't this startup making money? Or why aren't you attempting to earn money? Why you're just burning the investors' money instead. It was all about growth. You see, the faster you grow, maybe the day you start to make profits, the numbers would be so big that it would dwarf anything that you make today. Maybe true.

Maybe. But the thing is this, profit is not just about money. It's also about mindset. A mindset. Something that can impact your psyche, the psyche of people around you. If you're constantly making losses, it could demotivate you, it could stress you out, things which could change the direction of the company.

But if you earn profits, you not just earn money. And by earning, I don't mean earning revenues, I mean profits. You don't just earn money, you earn freedom. And with that freedom, you can experiment, you can invest in research, you can diversify, you can hire more people. And most importantly, you can focus on the long term trajectory of the business instead of always prioritizing.

Now profit, my friend, is important because it is the logical conclusion of any business. It is why business are primarily started for. And the sooner you realize this, the better, better off you will be and more mature in terms of how you approach building your valuable enterprise. So the key takeaway with this is make money. Not just.

No, but why am I here telling you all this? Why was I chosen to talk about this topic? There are many businessmen. There are bootstrapped businesses as well. Maybe my life lessons, maybe the journey, the duration during which I've been able to achieve this.

So people often ask me, what, what is Fyers? Is it a bootstrapped stock market startup? Just another fintech trading platform, Somebody who manages money of others? Yes, all of these things. But more importantly to me, because I was raised differently, it's more than that.

To me, it's a quest, which is why we actually called our company and our group fires. It is an acronym that stands for focus your energy to reform yourself. This is what entrepreneurship is ultimately about. It's about refining yourself, continuously responding, reacting to the changing landscape of competition and to the ground realities of the economy and the circumstances in which we operate in.

It is the true spirit of entrepreneurship. This is something that we try to embody with every new milestone, with every plan for the next year. And as people, we like to be better versions of ourselves. That, to me, is what Fyres is all about.

Lastly, as a bootstrap entrepreneur, you are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your choices. That is such an important thing. So choose to be in the game, choose to take risks carefully and choose to bet on yourself. Because if you do it right, you won't be sitting out there in the audience. Someday you would be here on this stage telling everybody about your story.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INNOVATION, BUSINESS, STARTUPS, BOOTSTRAPPING, INSPIRATION, TEDX TALKS