Aditya Bali on Entrepreneurship

Last week we were thrilled to host Aditya Bali, the co-founder of BufferBox, for a talk on his experiences as an entrepreneur. What began as a project for his undergraduate mechatronics course became a Y Combinator-backed startup before being acquired by Google in 2012 for $25 million.

Aditya shared his thoughts on launching a company with students at Bitmaker Labs, here are a few of the highlights.

Don’t let school get in the way. Leverage it.

Don’t let whatever framework you’re stuck in dictate how you make decisions. Whether it’s school or a full-time job, figure out ways to hack around it. Aditya and his co-founders took a fourth year design project and used it as an opportunity construct the prototype for BufferBox.

Talk to people. Get validation. Plan your business.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, you shouldn’t be afraid of sharing them with the world. Founders should gather feedback early on and let others poke holes in their business model. BufferBox used business case competitions as a way to develop and iterate upon their original business plan, and used the winnings to fund their early prototypes.

Know what you don’t know. Ask for help!

Don’t be afraid to reach out to experts within your industry for advice. The team at BufferBox used LinkedIn to strike up conversations with experienced executives in the shipping industry. That led to a tour of the FedEx sort facility in Toronto and gave them unique insights into the challenges they’d have to overcome in building and scaling their business.

You don’t have much. Use what you have.

Accepting the fact that you have limited resources and operating within those constraints forces you to become, in the words of Paul Graham, “relentlessly resourceful.” As poor undergraduate students, the BufferBox team couldn’t afford office space. Instead of raising money, they turned a small apartment into their corporate office, hardware lab, and living quarters.

Launch, launch, launch. Build a Minimum Viable Product.

If you have a product that can offer the smallest utility to the end user, ship it. Don’t wait until you’re completely happy with what you’ve built. Aditya cited Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

In the case of BufferBox, the team started out by offering concierge package delivery to students at the University of Waterloo. They’d have products shipped to a room on campus and charge students $3 for delivery. It was proof that demand existed for such a service and further reinforced their belief that people would pay to use a convenient and secure parcel pick-up station.

From Fixing iPhones to Writing Code

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“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” – Steve Jobs

This thought – from the founder of the company whose retail store I was working at – changed my life. In the four months since leaving Apple Retail, I’ve gone from fixing phones to developing experiences from the ground up.

Bitmaker Labs, a Toronto-based company, teaches its students fundamental languages and tools used for building websites. The course focuses in on the Ruby On Rails framework, used to create both simple and complex web applications based on widely accepted software engineering patterns such as ‘Convention Over Configuration’, and ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself.’

Early on in the course, all this seemed difficult to grasp and I was nervous about the immense workload I knew would be coming my way. Though I knew this was a great opportunity to work towards a career-making skill, I felt the pressure when we began diving into the Ruby programming language. In the second week of the course, I had a little meltdown while I was working through a problem with a class friend. I convinced myself I wouldn’t be able to understand the language and that I had made a big mistake coming to Bitmaker. I felt like I wasn’t good enough.

However, as I became closer with my classmates, I learned that they all felt the same way. This sense of mutual understanding and community helped me discover that the insecurity we were all feeling was part of the learning process. The only way to feel better about my abilities was to push forward and work harder. The course can only give back as much as you put into it.

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In order to feel better about my skills, I spent numerous evenings and weekends with the TAs untangling the ball of wire I had built up in my head. All of us in the cohort had highs and lows – from feeling like a coding superhero to totally incompetent, sometimes even in the same day – but the sense of success soon trounced any sense of failure after a few weeks in this environment that values learning from mistakes.

In what felt like no time at all, the course was ending and I was preparing for hiring week. When I wasn’t getting ready for interviews, I was applying the skills I acquired to build my own applications. Due to the sense of shared experience in the Bitmaker community, the atmosphere was more excited than anxious. I was able to follow my imagination more than I ever had the chance to in other endeavours.

Before Bitmaker, I struggled to consistently enjoy the work I was doing. Now I look forward to working on new projects where I can make important contributions every day. Looking in the mirror every morning, I don’t say ‘No’ very often any more.

Canadian Success Story: BufferBox

BufferBox is a network of parcel pick-up stations that are conveniently located, allowing customers to grab parcels securely and on their schedule. The company is led by three extremely bright University of Waterloo grads: Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah.

The BufferBox team was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 class and pitched at their 15th Demo Day. The presentation landed them a spot on TechCrunch’s list of 10 best startups. Just a few months later Google acquired the company for $25 million.

On the date of acquisition, Google Waterloo engineering director Steve Woods remarked, “We’re not going to go into great detail about our future plans, but we think there’s a real exciting space beyond this amazing start with boxes, and the idea of touching consumers as part of their end-to-end experience is something we’re going to explore together. I don’t think we would say even definitively what it’s going to be, but we’re going to do some great things together.”

The team at BufferBox has an exciting future ahead of them. Join us this Thursday from 6:00-7:30pm at the Bitmaker Labs classroom for an exclusive chat with Aditya Bali, Co-Founder of BufferBox. Aditya will be sharing insights into his experience as an entrepreneur and answering any questions you have.

http://adityabali-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Our Values

Over the past month we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting as a team. It’s been an incredible ride so far and it’s awesome seeing our graduates land jobs at amazing companies and launch businesses of their own.

At some point it’s important for a business to define the values they live by (and hire by). We’ve come up with our own list of six core values that define who we are as Bitmakers:

1. Give a shit.

2. Focus on the student experience.

3. Be relentlessly resourceful.

4. Be uncomfortably honest and transparent.

5. Act like an owner.

6. Make a dent in the universe.

I know that if we stay true to these principles we’ll be able to achieve our goal of creating an education platform for the future and making a positive impact on many people’s lives. We’re thrilled by the success of our students and excited for what’s to come.

I want to take the chance to thank students, teachers, mentors, hiring partners, family and friends for your continued support. We love you all.