Siddarthareddy Chitiki

How not to start a startup";            - Siddarthareddy chitiki I’m quitting my startup journey, and it’ll make you rethink whether now is your time to start a startup. Chutzpah is the confidence to do the impossible, daring to want what others can’t dream of, or going after “impossible goals” — Gil Kerbs This is my fifth, and final, in a series of posts called The Chutzpah Series, in which I will share the methods and learnings of the journey of starting a startup, all with the aim to help more entrepreneurs and learn from others. (There’s a CTA at the end, also for not-startuppers) To give you a little background:  I spent the past nine months trying to build a startup , but I was totally unprepared. I had my Master’s Degree at a top tier business school and had experience in finance, strategy, new business development, and advising startups. From other entrepreneurs, the piece of advice that kept recurring wa...

The Paths We Take:    - Siddarthareddy chitiki “ The Path ” by Gwenole Camus on Flickr. Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you had been born someplace else? Or to other parents? So many things seem like a great deal of  chance , once you actually look into them. If I hadn’t have been born in New Jersey, I wouldn’t have  moved  to Orlando, Florida, and I wouldn’t have gone to Disney World every weekend, which would have eventually mean I would not have ever moved to Tokyo. It’s all a seemingly  random order of events  in a chain reaction that leads people down their own paths in live. Not all people are lucky enough to have good paths however, And for that I am thankful that my path was a good one so far.

Watching Soap Operas with the Repo Men; Credit:  Unsplash When they kidnapped me the third time I remembered the coins in their mouths. The shape of a quarter pressed out against their cheeks. I like the way her hair smells, one of them said. Another smacked the man hard and said, we’re here to do a job not sample the merchandise. Back then we all used Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo, you know, the one that promised no more tears  and we laughed because we were nothing if not mournful. Our home was a bank and sadness filled the vaults — but that’s not important now. What you need to know is that four men stood over my bed and apologized for what they were about to do. These were the kind of men who walked through your front door without masks because they already had a set of your keys. Consider us repo men, they said the first time, and you’re what we like to call  collateral . One of them, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Tom Selleck in h...

A Family Murder in the Colombian Jungle; How the surrender of the FARC helped bring closure to a mystery Santa Marta | Stefanen Ator/Public Domain/Flickr Here is what I know for sure: Nearly 10 years ago, my aunt Adita was kidnapped from her home one morning in Santa Marta, a beach town on Colombia ’s Caribbean coast. Hours after her disappearance, she was found dead on the side of a dusty road in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. The violent murder of Adita Perez is one shrouded in mystery. Her kidnappers were mysteriously killed before questioning and no one was ever charged with her death. Some say she was killed on the side of the road and then set aflame (a gruesome version of the story I had grown up with). Others say Adita was killed in her home, rolled up in a carpet and dumped in the mountains. The theories surrounding  why  she was murdered are even more nuanced. I hadn’t been to  Bogota  — my birthplace — in over a decade but after ...