Are entrepreneurs romantics at heart? As the world celebrates Entrepreneurs Day today, BusinessLine asked a clutch of founders who turned their start-ups into unicorns and what we found was that beneath the innovative ideas and high valuations, entrepreneur’s lives are always filled with high-pressure situations.

Building a company is not a 100-metre sprint. It is a marathon that the founders have to show up for day after day. So, how have the lives of these founders changed after their start-ups became unicorns; what are the things that keep them going; and how do they ensure a people-centric approach in their business practices?

“There is a certain romanticism around being an entrepreneur. But being an entrepreneur is very difficult. For an entrepreneur to build something of value, he or she has to commit 200 per cent,” said Amit Gupta, confounder of InMobi and Yulu.

He added that if an entrepreneur is committed to the company’s purpose, then there is never a boring or dull moment in the entrepreneurial journey.

“And, I can relate to this point even right now with my journey with Yulu and in my past journey with InMobi. There was never a dull day,” said Gupta.

‘Driven by passion’

Divya Gokulnath, teacher and co-founder, BYJU’S, added: “I firmly believe that a business is driven by the passion to bring a change in the society instead of just making millions.”

Talking of making millions, when a company grows from being an early stage start-up to a unicorn — their hustle also takes a turn. With the addition of institutional investors and increased media attention, there’s an apparent change in how people perceive the founders and the business. But other than that, according to Shashank kumar, cofounder of Razorpay, there is hardly any change in the hustle.

“Once the start-up has achieved product market fit, most of the job is to kind of figure out how to scale, how to grow, and I think that journey never ends. We’ve been expanding rapidly. We have been growing significantly year over year, but the hustle continues. That’s also one of the things that we enjoy as well, and so, if that stops, that will be a cause for concern,” he added.

And then there are companies like Zerodha, which do not believe in the build fast and fail fast philosophy of the start-up world. Zerodha has never raised institutional funding and this gives the company a certain liberty to do things the right way and at its own pace.

“We built really slowly over the past 11 years and what is known as the Zerodha success today, really happened over the past 3-4 years. So, for almost a decade, we were building fast but executing slowly and carefully. One of the reasons why we have been able to build Zerodha the way that we have is that we don’t have any percentage targets and growth targets,” said Kailash Nadh, cofounder of Zerodha Tech and the company’s chief technology officer.

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