I wasn’t planning to write about Anethix Labs again.
But after reading what has recently been written about the company and about the people who were part of it, I felt that there was one part of the story missing.
When I look back at how Anethix Labs started, one thing still feels funny to me:
Anethix Labs was never the original idea.
There was no plan saying, “Let’s start a software company called Anethix Labs.”
We didn’t even start with Anethings.
We started with two completely different projects, a lot of uncertainty, and four people trying to figure out what we could actually build.
One of those projects was Ane Rentals, a car-rental application.
The other was Troql, a project I was working on personally.
And, in a way, Troql played a much bigger role in the story of Anethix Labs than I understood at the time.
Before there was a company
I was already working on Troql before Anethix Labs existed.
The idea was to make it easier for developers to understand unfamiliar codebases and get onboarded into projects faster.
I built an early version, launched it, and posted about it on X.
I wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary.
But within around 48 hours, three people had actually used it one from Japan, one from San Francisco and one from Bangalore.
Three users.
That’s it.
Today, three users sounds almost insignificant.
Back then, it meant a lot to me.
It was the first time I had built something and had people I didn’t know, from different parts of the world, actually try it.
At the same time, the four of us were working on Ane Rentals.
Eventually, we started thinking about turning our projects into something more serious.
For that, we needed a legal entity.
So we went to Assam Startup.
And that’s where the direction of everything started changing.
“The car rental business isn’t that simple.”
We showed them Ane Rentals first.
The response was something we hadn’t really anticipated.
Building the application was one thing.
Actually operating a car-rental business in India was another.
There were regulatory requirements and legal complications that made the business much more difficult than we had assumed.
So we started talking about Troql.
I explained what it was, what problem it was trying to solve, and mentioned the early users.
The person we were speaking with was interested in the idea and told us to work on it more seriously and see whether we could develop it into a deep-tech project.
That was the first time I started thinking:
Maybe Troql could actually become something bigger.
We also asked about getting support to establish a company.
Instead of simply telling us to go register one ourselves, we were directed towards our university’s Venture Labs.
And that eventually led to the four of us sitting in front of the Venture Labs team.
The question that made us think
We presented Ane Rentals again.
Same problem.
The regulatory side made it difficult.
Then we showed Troql.
The questions came quickly.
Who is the customer?
Who would actually pay for this?
Why would an MNC use it if they could build something internally?
We didn’t have polished startup answers.
We were students.
We were still figuring things out.
But we could at least say one thing:
People were already using it.
I told them about the three users from Japan, San Francisco and Bangalore.
The team understood the concept, but they also made it clear that we needed to figure out the business model and target users much better.
We were given forms to fill out with the project details.
For the first time, the idea of actually forming a company started becoming real.
Then we had to choose
There was just one problem.
The Venture Labs could support the registration of only one company.
So the four of us had to decide.
Troql or Ane Rentals?
We discussed it.
Troql had potential, but taking it towards an enterprise product would require resources we simply didn’t have.
Ane Rentals looked like the easier route to generating revenue.
So we chose Ane Rentals.
And then, ironically, the same problem that had come up in the meetings became impossible to ignore.
The more we researched the regulations, the more we realised that we couldn’t realistically run the business the way we had imagined.
So the project we had spent so much time building had to change.
The pivot that eventually became Anethings
We didn’t want to throw away everything we had built.
So we started thinking:
What if the rental concept wasn’t limited to cars?
And that’s how Ane Rentals slowly became Anethings.
The idea changed from renting cars to allowing people to rent different kinds of things.
We started modifying the product.
Then we tried to move ahead with the company registration.
The name we wanted wasn’t available.
So once again, we had to stop and rethink.
This time, we weren’t just thinking about the app.
We were thinking about the company itself.
What if we created a software company that could build software for clients while also developing our own products?
That idea made more sense.
And eventually, we settled on the name:
Anethix Labs.
Anethings would be one product.
Troql would be another product we wanted to develop.
And Anethix Labs would be the company behind them.
That’s how it happened.
Not through one big decision.
Through a series of decisions that kept changing the direction.
What I understand differently now
At the time, I thought the difficult part was building the technology.
Now I think that was only one part of it.
Building something with other people is a completely different experience.
You can have the same idea, sit in the same meetings, work on the same product and still walk away with completely different memories of what happened.
That’s probably normal.
Everyone remembers the part they were closest to.
For me, the technical side was always the part I was closest to.
I was working on Troql before the company existed, and when we started working towards Anethix Labs, I was also involved in the technical development of the products.
So when I look back at those early days, I don’t just remember the company registration.
I remember the projects before the company.
The first version of Troql.
The first three users.
The Assam Startup meeting.
The Venture Labs meeting.
The questions we couldn’t answer properly.
The decision to choose Ane Rentals.
The night we changed the idea.
The birth of Anethings.
And eventually, the name Anethix Labs.
That’s what the beginning looked like from where I stood.
I don’t think a title tells the whole story
One thing this experience taught me is that titles are easy to remember, but contributions are harder to measure.
Someone can be a CEO.
Someone can be a CTO.
Someone can be a managing director.
Someone can be a developer.
Someone can be the person handling finance.
But a title doesn’t tell you what happened before the title existed.
And a title doesn’t automatically make someone a leader either.
I learned that leadership is much more visible in how someone behaves when things don’t go according to plan how they communicate, handle disagreements and take responsibility.
That’s something I will carry with me long after Anethix Labs.
I eventually walked away
My time with Anethix Labs eventually came to an end.
I made that decision knowing that the company would continue without me.
And it did.
People continued working.
The company changed.
The team changed.
The products changed.
That’s how startups work.
When you leave something, you don’t get to own everything that happens afterwards.
And I don’t want to.
The work done after my involvement is not mine to claim.
But I also don’t think leaving means that everything you did before leaving disappears.
I can acknowledge what others built after I left while still acknowledging what I contributed when I was there.
Both can be true.
Maybe that’s what Anethix Labs really taught me
When we started, I thought we were trying to build an app.
Then the app changed.
The business model changed.
The company name changed.
The product changed.
Our plans changed.
Eventually, even the people changed.
And somewhere along the way, I realised that startups aren’t really about following the original plan.
They’re about making decisions when the original plan stops making sense.
Sometimes you pivot.
Sometimes you start again.
Sometimes you keep going.
And sometimes you walk away.
I don’t know what Anethix Labs will eventually become.
But I know what it meant to me.
It was the first time I got to experience what it feels like to take something that exists mostly as an idea and try to turn it into something real.
And for me, that story didn’t begin when Anethix Labs Private Limited was incorporated.
It began much earlier.
With a project called Troql, three unexpected users, a car-rental app that didn’t work out, a lot of questions, and four students who didn’t really know where all of this was going.
Looking back, maybe that’s what made it worth experiencing.
- Yash Kumar Gupta Co-Founder, Anethix Labs
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