[Issue 3] Fail fast, fail more and let it go: Ujwal Thapa
When Ujwal Thapa started a one-man company, called Digital Max Solution (DMS), after returning from the USA, he thought he was the last person to start the company as he had neither studied business, accounting or management nor had worked anywhere continuously for more than 3 months. Slowly and gradually, he built a 35+ person company. More than 30 of his former employees went on to become entrepreneurs themselves and start their companies in Nepal. Ujwal, mostly known for his founding role of Bibeksheel Nepali Dal, the torchbearer of alternative politics in Nepal, a firm believer in becoming "Karma Yogi", is an entrepreneur, activist, blogger and a traveller.
For this issue, DN Newsletter Team caught up with Ujwal Thapa to talk about his entrepreneurial journey and other facets. Excerpts:
Q. You’ve been an entrepreneur, writer and activist among other things. How would you introduce yourself?
I think I am a “seeker”. Like any other human being, I am trying to find what life is, trying to find myself and doing a lot of experimentation to do just that. That’s the reason why I came back to Nepal. Your life must have a purpose. Why am I here?
This is the reason why I have delved into so many diverse fields. Whether it’s travel, IT, politics, social work and so on.
Q. You shared an interesting anecdote in one of your blogs about illustrating answers with cartoons in your O levels English exam. Would you mind sharing it with us?
We take a lot of risks in our lives and this was something similar. We had to study English Literature in our O levels and I wasn’t ready for the exam and was suffering a lot of mental anguish because of my acne. I had a penchant for scribbling cartoons. It was a way for me to distract myself from my agony. So I start drawing or rather illustrating my writings with drawings in my answers. But it wasn’t just drawing absent-mindedly. I illustrated my points through my art. I guess the examiner thought that I had expressed myself creatively and adequately and I got a flattering score.
A few years later a junior tried the same thing as me but he wasn’t as lucky as I was :)
Q. You went abroad to become an Astrophysicist, but returned to Nepal as a web artisan? How did that transition occur?
This where the gap in education in Nepal and Western culture shines. We have this priority order Science then Commerce then Arts. Because our choices were so tunnelled I had to study Maths, Chemistry and Physics. But I was always interested in Astronomy and exploring what’s out there in the skies.
So I went to Bennington with a scholarship and the first thing they handed to me was a Mac Laptop. The closest before this I had come to a computer was a typewriter my parents had bought so that I could learn typing before I went to college. Receiving this computer was an eye-opener to a new horizon.
From almost exclusively boys high school, I ended up at an almost all women’s college. From a life of never-ending graded exams to no graded exams ever(instead one had to defend practical projects reviewed by peers). Going there and being able to explore felt like being a kid in a candy store with infinite money for me. I took Astronomy, Genetics, European History (a study about the French Revolution) and Japanese Languages. The same goes for my second semester where I took up subjects like Child Psychology.
Exploring these courses shaped me up to be a more wholesome human. Suddenly I was in a culture where I could experiment with absolutely anything. Having been an artistic person forever, I started making art through my computer. Because my college allowed me to make my major, I chose Multimedia as mine.
Q. After your studies, you interned at Lycos among other high profile companies. What were your experiences like there?
Lycos at that time was the google of that day. Internships like these opened the way for the work environment in the biggest economy in the world. Schools and colleges are a safe environment for education but need to be augmented by a transition to real-life which might be shocking for youths entering the “real world”. That transition is internships. Internships give you a sense of what you want to do in your life. It will teach you about collaboration, office politics, management and all the other things. It taught me a lot about the practical aspects of life.
Internships helped me learn so much about myself, what kind of environment I could thrive in.
Q. How did you start your first company, Digital Max Solution (in 2002) here in Nepal?
I always wanted to work on my terms and for myself. That’s why I started Digital Max Solution. The first office that I started was in my room. At that time I had no money and came back from the States with 2 luggage, one had an Apple Mac G4, while the other had a big 21-inch computer CRT monitor, which helped me start. My mom was the seed investor of my company who pitched in with 50k NRs.
In 2 years, we grew to a 35 person office and taking inspiration from Silicon Valley, we set up an employee-friendly office space with a basketball court, snacks and drinks, a dining facility and even rooms for a sleepover.
The workplace is where you live most of your life, so we invested a lot to make it enjoyable.
Q. What were the challenges that your company found yourself in? In retrospect do you have any regrets?
My company at that time was focused on Nepal’s tourism industry. Unfortunately, it coincided with the height of the civil war which meant the downfall of that industry itself. We also had up to 16 hours a day of heavy load-shedding (without electricity) to deal with back then.
After our company grew it became harder to manage people. We also constantly clashed with Nepal’s societal norms, with most people wanting to go abroad.
Because we were the pioneers, we couldn’t be part of a culture or an industry. We were the industry. It was suddenly our responsibility to define the culture and inspire more people to join this field.
I would not necessarily label this as regret or a mistake, but one improvement I could have done is do a better job collaborating with people who left me to start their projects. I didn’t have an investor’s mindset back then and I feel like I could have helped more companies grow if I was educated better financially.
Q. You consider yourself a recovering game addict having been hooked to World of Warcraft. What’s your story behind that?
I enjoyed playing games back then which I still do. For me, gaming wasn’t just gaming, but a chance to meet people from all around the world. But it turns out I took it to the extreme, playing it almost 16 hours a day regularly until the moment when I was hospitalized for 8 days. That was the wall I had to hit to finally recover.
Q. You were on the path to becoming a Buddhist monk once. Could you share about that personal journey?
When I was in Nepal, I didn’t care about Buddhism or any spiritual processes. But in the US, I had the opportunity to explore further. It wasn’t just Buddhism. I did a lot of reading about philosophy and religion and spirituality in particular. That exploration has guided me a lot in my life.
A thing Buddhism preaches but we usually ignore is the concept of balance. Buddha showed us the way towards मध्यम मार्ग (Middle way). Which is striking a balance in our life. Be it financial, mental, physical or emotional. We human beings either under-do or overdo things. And the scary part is we don’t realize exactly what striking a balance is until the clock runs out.
So I am always on the quest to strike a balance between finding myself while bringing in humanity with my work.
Q. You have released a CV/Resume of Failures. What was the motivation behind that? And what kinds of feedback have you received?
A lot of people have found my resume of failures interesting. It has turned heads as normally we tend to hide our failures and only polish our perceived successes. But the message I wanted to send was, despite all of my failures, if I can stand here still, have been successful by some measuring stick. We tend to lose hope with our first setback, but these are what connect the dots to the path of success.
I feel like more people should have a CV/Resume of failure, so people see how flawed everyone is and how everyone is just struggling to strike their balance in life.
Q. You call yourself an Apple fanboy and back in ‘97, you chose buying a new Mac against buying Apple stocks. Could you tell us about that?
The biggest takeaway of that story is the utmost importance of financial literacy in our lives and how far behind we are. Back in 1997, Apple was going through a rough patch and being a fan of Apple products, I wanted to help out however I could and a good way would be to invest in the company’s stock. But because I didn’t know the simple processes of how to invest I decided instead to splash out on a new machine. Had I invested that money into stocks, I would have been many hundreds of thousands of dollars USD richer This is why I say financial literacy should start when you are 10/11 years of age itself. Every parent and educator should make teaching financial literacy of children their priority.
Q. Nepal’s government has been pushing Digital Nepal recently. With the growing field of e-commerce, payment systems, and evolving infrastructures where do you see Nepal’s IT industry going? What are the roadblocks that budding entrepreneurs should navigate through?
First of all, there aren’t any policymakers in Nepal who are educated in Information technology and hence understand the rapidly evolving technology in the 21st century. You tend to amplify the system from which you grew. The distance between these entrepreneurs and lawmakers is huge. So far the policies that come about are all safe ones that are incentivized by fear of technology. Instead, there should be some creativity about using IT to our advantage with policies based on hope and risk-taking.
The conversations shouldn’t be about “we’ll lose money if X idea fails”, but instead centred around how we can make these ideas take off.
Q. You have built a lot of successful communities here in Nepal like WordPress, Entrepreneurs for Nepal E4N? What’s the secret sauce for building such engaging communities?
The first thing has to be persistence and including others to take leadership. Do not listen to noise but be consistent with your efforts. With E4N We went from having 7 people in our first meeting to hundreds of thousands strong now. But it took 2 years for people to finally notice us. We have had similar progress with WordPress Nepal. It was all part of giving back to the community from the technology that helped shape our careers and provided us for.
Leadership handover is also an important value I have learnt along the way. At some point, your life is going to have different priorities and you won’t be able to devote yourself to it. You also need someone to whom you can hand over the keys. After we handed over WordPress Nepal, the group is still going strong thanks to the people that came after us and the subsequent ones after that.
Q. If you had to start over, what are some of the changes you might do in your journey?
I don’t think I would change anything as life is a series of experiments, the sum of which has brought me so far. But there certainly are improvements I would make. There is financial literacy, learning soft skills, i.e to work with people be it, partners or employees or adversaries. Whatever we do, we should try to collaborate with the community. You will hit a wall if you try to do it all on your own.
Focusing on and striking the right spiritual balance is also extremely important in dealing with our social lives.
Q. You’ve tried a lot of things in your life and you’ve admitted to having done almost everything that you have wanted. What else in your life do you feel is left to experiment? And what can we expect from you in the future?
You always have different awakenings based on your age and have to grab them as they go “कती कुरा समय भन्दा अघी पनि आउँदैन, र समय भन्दा पछी पनि आउँदैन “. You’ll be more family-oriented or social-oriented in your 30s or 40s while you are more experimental and adventurous and risk-taker in your 20s.
So I don’t have a bucket list of to-dos lying around. I am sure there are tons of things left to do for me and everything will come in its own time. I try to follow up on my writings and ideas that I have accumulated on my blog. And make them a reality. Life is a virtuous cycle of acting as per your thought and shaping your thoughts from your actions.
As for now I am taking a step back from everything and have been contemplating my life, relationships, exposure to different cultures and traditions, journey as well as spending more time with family and friends, something I haven’t had the chance to do in the last decade because of involvement in various social causes.
Q. Any messages to our readers?
Looking back it seems like my life’s motto has been to “Just do it!”. So I’d say to live by the same mantra. If you don’t experiment and innovate you are always going to be stuck. Also, make sure you make your passion your career.
Fail fast, fail more and Let it go. Do not stay attached either to your failures or your successes. Life is after all just a series of experiments.
Follow Ujwal on Twitter: @ujwalthapa, Blog: Why Nepal
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