Founders often assume that getting access to top mentors, leaders, and founders in the startup world is almost impossible due to a high wall of gatekeepers and unread emails and calls. But what if the difficult part is not access at all? What if the actual problem is simply reaching out?
Param Shah, a student and an intern at venture capital firm Gruhas, realised this of late. He cold-emailed Karthik Reddy – a top-tier VC investor in the country, at 11 pm seeking an internship opportunity, fully expecting no response. Instead, in just eight minutes of his email, his inbox lit up with a direct response from Reddy.
The instant response shattered Shah’s long-held assumption that top names are usually too busy to reply or answer queries.
“The reply caught me off guard. I had assumed big-shot founders, investors – people at the top, were too busy to bother with a student’s email asking for a shot at an internship,” Shah shared his experience in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.
Over the next few weeks, he kept testing the waters and time and again, he had responses in his inbox.
This wasn’t an anomaly. At the Mumbai Tech Week a few days back, Shah saw the same thing play out in real life.
“Ritesh Agarwal (OYO’s founder) had just wrapped up his session. Instead of rushing out, he stayed back, answering questions like a mentor who knew exactly what it felt like to be in a young founder’s shoes,” he recalled.
This gave Shah a clear learning about the Indian startup ecosystem that it is built by people who never had a blueprint.
“Who had to figure things out from scratch. And because of that, they don’t just give advice. They show up and step in, because they know that a single conversation can change someone’s trajectory completely,” Shah said.
The bottom line here, as Shah added, is the need to show up, ask questions and put yourself out there as the problem for most people is not about access but understanding that the doors were always open.