We turned students away this year. On purpose.
Dear friend,
We are entering our fourth year of Let's Enterprise.
Last year, we admitted 17 students.
Seventeen.
The market is huge. Parents are looking for a real alternative. Employers are looking for young people who can do real work. Every business instinct says scale. Open the doors wider, take more students, ease up the selection criteria.
This year we decided to do the opposite.
We are going to reject more applications than we ever have. Not because the students can't pay. Not because we don't want to grow. Because LE isn't an easy option. We work students hard. Real apprenticeships. Real founders. Real stakes. If a student is looking for a soft landing, or doesn't want to engage fully, we'd be doing them no favour by saying yes.
I took it to the team. A few rounds of conversation. I expected at least one voice to push back on the revenue side.
Nobody did.
Everyone rallied around it.
That is the moment I want to write to you about today.
Not the decision itself. What it told me about us.
For three years we've been moving. Building. Trying. Failing. Trying again. We didn't start LE knowing what it was. We started knowing only that something needed to be built.
Then somewhere along the way, a sentence emerged that I'd been circling for months without quite landing it.
Work is the curriculum.
We don't run a curriculum and add work on top. The work itself is the curriculum. The apprenticeship, the founder you sit with, the problem you have to solve by Tuesday. That is the syllabus.
You couldn't have given me that sentence on day one. It would have meant nothing. We had to build the thing for three years to see what the thing actually was.
And the moment we saw it, we got brave enough to say no to everything that wasn't it.
Including students.
I've been working closely with a founder for three years now. A few weeks ago, a large international company wanted him to manufacture for them. Significant revenue. Overnight.
He said no.
It was the hardest no he's said in 15 years of building. We had spent a year getting clear together that he was building his own global brand, not running someone else's operations. OEM is operations-led DNA. Brand is product-led DNA. You cannot run both from the same chair.
He didn't have that clarity at the start. He earned it through the work.
I've been thinking about Sridhar Vembu lately - The founder of Zoho. I admire him for a global Indian software product company. Even when I was 14 years old and a coding enthusiast I felt this strongly - why aren't there more Indian software product companies - not just software services.
In 1996 he started a company called AdventNet. Network management software for telecom. He built it for nearly a decade, through the dot-com boom, through the bust, through every offer to take VC money or be acquired. Inside AdventNet, almost as a side experiment, his team started building tiny productivity apps for small businesses. Mail. CRM. An office suite. They bundled them under a name no one had heard of. Zoho.
Years later, in 2009, he rebranded the entire company as Zoho.
Fifteen years from starting, to seeing what he was actually building.
Today Zoho runs from rural Tamil Nadu, bootstrapped, more than a billion in revenue, still no VCs.
Vembu didn't begin with clarity. He earned it. By moving first.
I've come to call this Action to Identity. It builds on the idea I've been actively talking about for years now - Body of Work.
Most people get the order backwards. They sit. They think. They wait for clarity to arrive before they act.
But clarity doesn't arrive that way.
You earn clarity by acting. By trying things in public. By building before you know what you're building. By staying in the work long enough to see what's there.
Movement before identity. Always.
Movement is the easier work.
The harder work comes later. The day you finally see what you've actually built, and you have to start saying no to all the other good things you could have been.
The OEM deal. The easy admissions by taking whoever applies. The VC term sheet. The fourth service line. The brand number 41.
The hardest moment isn't the start.
It's the day you have to be brave enough to be only what you actually are.
When our team rallied around rejecting applications this year, what they were really saying was this.
We know what LE is now. And we love it enough to protect it from what it isn't.
That isn't a small thing. That's three years of work talking.
So look at your own last three years.
What's been quietly forming inside the work that you haven't named yet?
, Adi
Building India's 1st Working BBA
@playful_ceo
Write back. I read every reply.
PS. I built a carousel on Linkedin this week breaking down the Action to Identity framework, with stories from Wipro, Nokia, LG, LE and Match Group. Attaching the link to it in case you want to see it. __https://qrto.to/3c941aa7__
This week's recipe: Bhel Puri Because nothing captures "movement before identity" quite like ten ingredients you couldn't have planned, tossed into a steel bowl, mixed with your hands, until something shows up that is unmistakably its own thing.
- A generous handful of puffed rice (murmura)
- A spoon of fine sev
- One small onion, finely chopped
- One small tomato, chopped
- One boiled potato, diced small
- A handful of fresh coriander
- A teaspoon each of green chutney and tamarind chutney (don't measure, taste as you go)
- A squeeze of lime
- Chaat masala to finish
- Crushed papdi on top
- Add one 'personal' ingredient of your choice.. something lying around in your kitchen! (Tell me what it was in case it actually turned out nice)
Mix everything with a spoon, then your hands. Eat immediately, before the murmura goes soft.
Here is a Bengali touch you can add: add a teaspoon of raw mustard oil in the murmura before adding the wet ingredients. This gives it a jhaal-mudi feel and the mustard oil will send some sparks to your nostrils.
The first bite is the answer.
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