Toronto Entrepreneur

Starting your own company can be easy, hard, boring, fun, exciting or scary. It all depends on what you make of it. If you do start your own venture, it probably means you’re up for the challenge and you’d like to create something of your own, which you strongly believe in. That’s the best reason to start your own startup.

The first few months of a startup both get you excited and lost at times. You’re excited because you’re starting something truly of your own. You’re lost because you don’t yet know what exactly it is. In my case, no idea at all. It is really true when people say “the devil is in the details”. The more you delve into the details the more lost you get. Don’t worry though, because you will figure it out.

Perseverance is your engine and innovation is its fuel. You must accept that you will deal with several new problems every single day. Whether it is a conflict with one of your partners, a technical bug, not having money to pay the bills or your girlfriend telling you you’re not around enough. Don’t let these things discourage you. Come up with innovative ways to fix them because you can. If you have partnership misunderstandings, try to support your partner and show them you’re there for them. If you don’t have enough money to pay some of your bills, sell something you don’t need that much on craigslist or ebay. Take your girlfriend out to a nice musical or play (I recommend Dirty Dancing). Yes girls like these things and you would even get surprised that you might even like it because let me tell you the quality of that show is phenomenal.

At first you might not have a clear idea on what you wnat to do. It took us almost 3 months to find that one idea. You’ll end up scrapping 200-300 ideas maybe. Don’t worry because if you think about it hard enough, you’ll find the problem.

You might need money while you’re coming up with that great idea. So get a part time job somewhere and set regular hours in every week with your partners to get together and discuss business. It’s always great to have a team that is both critical and optimistic at the same time. Critics find the flaws of the optimist’s thoughts and the optimists help the critics find motivation in those thoughts although they have flaws. Don’t think things are not moving forward if ideas get criticised.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Today I started my blog as a way to communicate my experience as a Torontonian entrepreneur. My goal is to share what I go through so other entrepreneurs know it is easy to follow their dreams.

A couple months before graduation, I had to decide whether I’d like a comfy, well paid job with benefits or to start my startup, which I had been dwelling over for a year by then.

In order to make the decision process easier for myself (in reality it made things harder for me) I decided to look for jobs, while I had 3 courses and two part-time jobs (I had just picked up a part time position at UofT at OISE alongside IBM). So putting the right resume together took around a week and a half.

I really tried to pass my resume to as many professionals as I could and tried to incorporate their suggestions.The outcome was great and the resume looked great I think. I started sending out resumes (to pretty much anywhere I could think of). A couple days later I was in trouble.

I was getting 5-10 calls every day from all these head hunters for jobs all over Canada and US. A lot of these jobs didn’t have much with what I was looking for so I ignored them. So I ended up getting 5 interviews all together in 3-4 weeks (the market was doing really well back then). 4 job offers came out of these 5 interviews (I told you the market was doing well). Now with these offers on the table, it was a lot harder to make a decision.

I ended up consulting with anyone I could think of. My profs, my manager at IBM, my boss at UofT, my friends, parents…etc. Bottom line everyone gave me one answer. Do what you really want to do. That didn’t seem like much help back then but now I realize it was the right answer.

Anyway, one morning I woke up at 8 am and realized I wasn’t really happy being in my comfort zone. I’ve always been the kind of guy who needs things to go up and down in his life (as long as I can predict those ups and downs). So that was the first step in starting my startup. It’s been a year since then and I’ve loved every day so far.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard