The Hidden Curriculum of Entrepreneurship
- by: Jatin Chaudhary
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I have been catching up with founder friends for eChai’s Slice of Startup Life series. These are the little moments and side notes that don’t always get written down, but they stay with us.
The other day, I was catching up with Anuj Dalal, founder of Zestard, and he said something that stayed with me:
“According to me, the business is not just sales and operations; it’s beyond that. When a founder is coming from a job background, they are either from the sales team or the operations team. But when we start a business, we need to talk about HR, finance, account, legal, admin, liaisoning… and you usually pick that up only through co-curricular or other activities.”
It reminded me how startups stretch you into rooms you didn’t imagine yourself in. You walk in with one strength, maybe sales, maybe ops, and suddenly you’re dealing with contracts, bank officers, team disputes, compliance deadlines. Nobody really prepares you for that part.
Anuj connected it back to the side things he kept doing, robotics contests and cultural events in college, free city seminars at Ahmedabad Management Association on finance, trade, IP rights. At the time, they were just things he was curious about. Years later, they turned out to be the experiences that gave him the range to step into all the “beyond sales and ops” parts of running Zestard.
I keep thinking about that. Maybe it’s not just the main track that makes us founders. Maybe it’s also the side roads we take, the random events we show up at, the projects that don’t look like “career moves,” the moments of curiosity that add up quietly in the background.
Maybe that’s what we should pay more attention to. Not only the formal training or the job experience, but the parts of our lives that quietly prepare us for responsibilities we can’t yet see.
