It was my last day as a Cequity employee, the company I had created in partnership with Swamy & Shekar of the Hansa group. Leaving something is always challenging. When you have created something from scratch, you can’t leave the baby behind & walk away. And yet I chose to do it quietly, conscious about my commitment to investors & clients. So I faded away from Cequity & committed to staying true to my values on a new journey.
Company creation is about building from your values as the sheet anchor. And the fact is that values differ for people. How you do things differ & what even little things mean to you can be very different for someone else. As you build your company every day, you create the brick-by-brick edifice. And your values are guiding you at each step. The deep satisfaction you get when there is alignment with your values is something that I constantly lived for. And the texture, character & laying of each brick is why you become an entrepreneur. And mostly, you don’t do this alone. I worked with my partner Swamy in creating this brick-by-brick structure. We were very different people & we could successfully make Cequity because of these differences. Yet we differed in important fundamental ways & those we kept aside to allow the company to succeed. How much of themselves should founders sacrifice for the company’s overall good? It’s a million-dollar question with no easy answers.
I ran the tightrope for over a decade, in fact, for about 11 years. It was not easy for me & it may have been hard for Swamy too. I was clear that the bigger picture mattered & that the company took precedence. And yet, the work of building a company is by its very nature-a one brick at a time enterprise. And each time I laid that brick, I injected my unique temperament into our building structure. I brought my instinct, my aggression, my belief in people & my value of creating a certain kind of culture. And having done it for over a decade, I felt something was broken. I had reached the edge of my comfort zone. I wasn’t doing what I believed in & instead, I was making decisions that one is expected to take after one acquires financial resources(we had just added a private equity company as an investor).
So what does the edge of my comfort zone look like? Firstly it seems scary, terrifying. It is a place where I lacked confidence, a place where I was questioning everything. I was way too different from my partner & every brick that we laid for Cequity had that contradiction in its gene pool. One part of me said that I should navigate the conflict & find a way to make it work. Another part said, enough, we had lived through too much compromise. Look at creating new or different paths. I felt this way at various points in my career. But this was the scariest point; I was about to decide to leave a company that I had helped build brick by brick & no one was asking me to go. I was in a liminal space.
A Liminal space refers to a person’s place during a transitional period. It’s a gap and can be physical (like an entrance), emotional (like a breakup), or symbolic (like a decision). More about this later!
I had felt this in other areas of my life. I am an outdoor person at heart & trekking teaches you about your comfort zones. I remember a trek many years ago to Milam glacier in the Himalayas & the path was pockmarked with many landslides that had occurred in the previous months. Each time our trail would meander into a landslide area, the path would disappear. We had to cross carefully, constantly checking our path & finding a way to balance ourselves. With steep drops on the other side, these landslides tested my comfort zone. I knew this would be a challenge with my fear of heights. I was terrified when I crossed the first one & then we got many landslide zones as we walked along. The discomfort continued to be there, but I could control the fear & not panic by the end of it. Nature teaches you a lot about these transition points or edge zones. The poet Alison Hawthorne Deming wrote: “In ecology, the term edge effect refers to a place where habitat changes — where a marsh turns into a pond or a forest turns into a field. These places tend to be rich in life forms and survival strategies.”
I had always believed in taking important calls using first principles. First, principles thinking examines every assumption about any problem, then creates new solutions from scratch. Here I was, unhappy about what I was making. Also, I was aware that the unhappiness would seep into the quality of what I started & also impact my health. Initially, I felt uneasy, as if I was running away. But this feeling did not last. I was confident that I was making my decision to exit Cequity for the right reasons. My first principle approach told me that a liminal moment had arrived. The term comes from the Latin limen, which means a threshold. Liminal moments are times of transition, precisely when one realizes that the past is over & a new road has still not appeared clearly before you. The liminal space is an invitation to surrender – to allow something more significant to emerge, something you may not have planned for or cannot control. Liminality is a concept in most cultures; many worship liminal deities: gods or goddesses who preside over thresholds, guardians of gates, and crossers of boundaries. Hecate, the goddess of crossroads in Greek mythology; Janus, the dual-faced god of beginnings and endings in Roman mythology; Menshen, the divine protectors of doors in Chinese mythology.
How did this transition impact my leadership ability? Should I think of my leadership capacity as my hardware, or should I see it as my software? Both can have capacity increases, but my software can be added infinitely. Can I expand my leadership capacity over time? I have added to my ability when I reflect on my various transitions. And this particular transition gave me a multiplier effect! I discovered new roads that I never knew existed & a unique leadership style I could not imagine myself practicing.
When the first known Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, was asked what was the most challenging thing in the world, he answered, “To Know Thyself.” That observation, made more than 600 BC, is as accurate today as many years ago.
Now I work with leaders to help them take different paths. I work with leaders to help them tackle their transitions & reach new exciting directions for themselves. I have only one regret about my crossroad & liminal moment. I could have been more vulnerable with the Cequity team. And communicated more frankly about why I was exiting. In the final analysis, nothing rocks a well-built boat & my fears were unjustified.