When I joined Zoomcar in 2015, finance was a mess. We had a skeletal and unstructured team. Our financial numbers were (very) incorrect. We had very little tracking and control over our spending. We didn’t have a consolidated view of our cars. My team and I got to work. One by one, we figured out the issues and fixed them, some ourselves, some with the help of other teams across the country. We stepped up hiring, which itself took away a lot of time. We did this while we were going through a debt capital raise, an equity funding round, our first Big 4 financial audit and continuing to grow the business (more cars, more cities, more financial complexity). We didn’t have time to stop and breathe. For the first six months, we left office after midnight most days and worked most weekends.
Working in startups is hard, risky and, on average, makes you less money than a role at a larger established company. So why do it?
For one, so I can sit with my team over dinner and say: “Haha, you remember how tiny and crappy things were when we started? Look at them now. Look at what we built!”