'Working In Startups' By Mr. Piyush Surana, Director, Ola Cabs

On 23^rd March Vinod Gupta School of Management had the privilege of hosting Mr. Piyush Surana, Director-Operations, Ola under its guest lecture series VAARTA.

The discussion started with an introduction by Mr. Surana himself. An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, and having previously worked at Energy Controller and Fortis, he cited that his career’s learning curve took an exponential growth right after he started working for the startups of Uber and then Ola.

The session moved on to talking about careers in general where Mr. Surana gave his “$0.02 in today’s world”. That to plan your career may mean you are limiting your career and that we must seek out all opportunities we can find, were emphasised upon. To be at the right place at the right time is essential to make the most of these opportunities we seek. The most important takeaway, however, remained that one has to keep learning and find one’s passion.

Before we divulged into the reasons why we should work in startups Mr. Surana made us ponder over all the reason we should consider that might be deterrents to the same. Startups seldom have a structured learning path where things will constantly break and not all of your bets will work. To work in startups one has to embrace the chaos and get comfortable with change.

That said, careers in startups should be considered for an array of reasons. Startups help fast track your careers like no other entity. One gets to be involved in the decision-making process of things doing work that really matters in industries that are evolving. It helps quantify the risks one is willing to take and get optimal rewards out of it.

The session ended with a round of question an answer where Mr. Surana answered numerous pertinent questions regarding the life at a startup and all the variables attached.

Ola exemplifies the life at a startup and the places one might reach when you take the right decisions with a startup.