Always in Beta: Startup Learnings from the Experience of Working at Shadowfax
During the summer of 2018, I worked for the CEO’s office in the Corporate Development team at Shadowfax. Based in Bengaluru, I was involved in several projects of strategic importance to the company.
The summer experience proved to be much more than what I was looking for.
The stint allowed me to not only immerse myself and understand the subtle nuances of business from the grounds up, but also deep-dive into the Indian logistics industry ecoystem.
Shadowfax has a fast-paced environment that nurtures a hard-core entrepreneurial streak. In 3 short but eventful years, Shadowfax has completed two acquisitions, expanded to 100+ cities in India, and signed up marquee clients in the F&B, E-Commerce, Pharma and Grocery space. This is a big feat to be proud of in an otherwise conventionally run logistics industry.
Many people who interact with Shadowfax, the customers as well as investors, will very quickly acknowledge the strong reason behind the company’s explosive growth in the hyperlocal logistics industry — the team.
The people at Shadowfax never failed to amaze me with their infectious team spirit and crazy ownership of every project, however small or big. Founders, Abhishek Bansal and Vaibhav Khandelwal have succeeded immensely in charging every employee with the same adrenalin rush, determination and craziness that they shared since the start.
In my projects, I interacted across departments from Operations and Finance to Strategy, Planning & Analytics. We collaborated in a common spirit to challenge the status quo and find better alternatives.
Shadowfax provided me with a steep learning curve in the form of diverse projects ranging from strategy and operations to mining international business expansion opportunities.
An exciting project I worked on during my stint required me to understand trends in the logistics industry, and corresponding business models that have emerged. This was useful to me as a personal research project, but also helped the company identify potential opportunities to expand internationally.
Another project needed me to investigate the drop in performance for reverse pickups, for a specific e-commerce client. The percentage of pickups, turn-around-times and entire reverse cycle of the client was hit. This was puzzling since the performance with other e-commerce clients remained excellent. I was brought in to complete the root cause analysis of this issue and make suitable amends in our operations to eliminate the problem.
I crunched vast-amounts of rider and reverse shipments data (and became an excel ninja overnight 😉). I also went on the ground and interacted with our Hub and Zonal Managers to understand every single nuance of the process chain. My learnings allowed me to articulate the root causes well, which were subsequently eliminated across the logistics facilities all over India.
During these projects, I found that the team was constantly driven to improve and be at the forefront of the technology revolution in logistics. As you might have noticed, these were massively different kind of projects that I got to work on. There are several practical reasons, I think, why everyone should consider working for a startup.
The challenges are diverse and the environment is unpredictable, particularly at a late-stage startup like Shadowfax. The start-up culture itself has the ability to teach you multiple chops and make you comfortable with handling chaos while leading cross-functional projects.
Many a times, your project may not see the light of the day. At other times, your idea may require several iterations before launch or it might practically be the first time some company is trying to do something of the sorts. This builds resilience, a learning-by-doing mindset and forces you to keep an open mind when designing solutions.
One has to be extremely comfortable with failing, asking uncomfortable questions and starting from scratch again and again because this is how the company’s success becomes inimitable- also popularly known as staying forever in the beta stage, where you never stop questioning and thus, improving.
I am grateful to everyone in the Shadowfax team for their unwavering support and patience while tackling my bizarre questions as I took it upon myself to unravel the secrets of the logistics industry during my summer stint.
Earlier this month, Shaurya joined the Class of 2019 of the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, a liberal arts-leadership program aimed at grooming future Indian leaders that will lead through the twenty-first century. He previously received an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with Eta Kappa Nu Honors, from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
Shadowfax is looking out for brilliant interns. If you are one of them, drop in an email to Siddarth and let him know how you’d like to contribute.
