Blood, Sweat and Tears — Story of a Teen Entrepreneur & Some Parenting Thoughts!

Blood, Sweat and Tears — Story of a Teen Entrepreneur & Some Parenting Thoughts!

Ravi Karumanchi

9 min read

Welcome! Without further ado let’s jump in!

This article has two parts.

Part I — The Story

What do some of the clichés that I mentioned in an earlier article even mean at a deeper level and in practice? (Things I Learnt Raising A Wildly Successful Teenager)

To help address this, I will rely on the most effective way of communication known to mankind : Storytelling!

Part II

Parenting Thoughts

Let’s Begin!

Part I — The Story

Here were some learnings I mentioned in the article I referred to earlier:

Show up! 80% of success you gain is just by showing up! Get in the game.

Be tenacious. Grit is super important.

Luck & serendipity play a significant role in success. You can’t create it. But you can create the right environment, to entice it to drop by.

Unconventional path will lead you to Unconventional Success.

Fear is natural & just a sign telling you to address something. Tackle it head-on.

Forego youth-focused competitions and go tete-a-tete with adults any chance you get. You may fail abysmally. But you will learn.

Spend more time on stuff outside your comfort zone. Make discomfort your comfort zone.

Many interesting things happen because of chance meetings. Play in traffic. Push yourself out there. Interact with many. Participate and get involved.

They sound clichéd and like tweets somebody sent! How do we even relate to them? What do they even mean in practice?

Here is a personal intimate experience I want to share, though it is not pretty, to shine a light on them and understand the deeper meaning captured in those clichés and walk you through how the sausage is made!

My daughter, in 8th grade, with her classmate, came up with an idea. They took it to BASEF, a regional science fair for school kids. They won around eight monetary awards but didn’t move on to the coveted Intel Science Fair!

Her friend dropped out of the project and she didn’t want to do anything with it. I however saw a lot of potential in that idea. I thought she should continue working on it. Riya wanted to move on but I insisted. Though I was a tech guy and I could learn & help her with the project, I chose not to. I wanted her to do it.

Interestingly a lot of people who won the international science fairs didn’t take their ideas to the logical next step and create businesses around them!

I wanted her to form a team to work on the project. As luck would have it, I came across a three day Health Industry Hackathon for Graduate students where experienced health professionals pitched their idea in under a minute and potentially attract tech people and form a team to work on their idea. I wanted her to take a crack at it. She was 14! Understandably, she adamantly refused as it was way out of her comfort zone! After a lot of coaxing, we started practicing her one minute pitch.

Voices raised. Tempers flared. Sweat and Tears flowed.

You wouldn’t know how hard a one minute pitch is until you work on it! Especially one where you have to convince a team of strangers nearly twice your age to join you in under a minute!

The poor girl worked her ass off! She had a great pitch! Her years of practicing public speaking and experience attending pitch competitions as a spectator helped!

All this while working on her code and tech!

The day of the hackathon arrived. A beautiful sunny day! We went to the venue forty five minutes early.

Walking through the venue, all of a sudden fear overtook her and she was crying uncontrollably 😒 I tried to calm her. It only made matters worse. I was losing my patience and started raising my voice, which I shouldn't have in retrospect, and it of course went downhill from there. Her eyes were swelling. She was sweating. I was sweating. I then just shut my mouth and after a long pause I said let's go home. She didn’t reply.

She slowly recovered and we sat in an isolated lobby for fifteen minutes quietly. All of this was happening right under the floor where the hackathon was about to start.

Finally, she said she wanted to do it.

The hackathon started.

People started pitching. Professional people with lots of healthcare experience!

It was her turn. She did a phenomenal pitch! In my view anyway! People applauded, as they did for all other pitches!

I was elated!

Now the moment of truth. People were forming teams. The idea is the tech people, industry professionals, mentors choose to work on an idea they like.

Fifteen minutes elapsed. No one showed up. Then one person approached her and said he was willing to join her team. Ten more long minutes elapsed. A lady expressed her interest. Slowly it ballooned. Team grew to 8 including her! She had to close her recruiting as more people wanted to join but it wasn’t going to be manageable!

Remember, they could have chosen a different team with more prestige and higher potential of winning the hackathon. They still chose to join her! Incredible how people try to support others even if it puts them at a disadvantage! Eternally thankful for people like that!

The actual hacking started. She started fleshing out her idea in more detail and walked the team through the code she developed so far, the tech she used... Identifying who is going to be responsible for which piece of the project.. She was undergoing a real-time crash course on project/people management and leadership with no prior experience! That too managing a team of eight, a decade and more older than her!

I offered absolutely no help! My goal was to let her soak in that experience, overcome challenges and come out a better person and entrepreneur! Not to win the hackathon! That is an experience she wouldn’t get in school and super valuable!

The team worked their asses off! As usual with any tech project, tech failed, they had to scramble to find parts on a weekend, team member didn’t show up as they had other commitments, bugs, time issues… The hacking went on till 2 am. Starting again the next day at 7:30, ending the day at 1 am! On it went!

On the third day, everybody presented their projects! Her team didn't win any of the top 3 prizes! But they won a People's Choice Award!

The Director of MEDIC, a research lab at Mohawk, was super impressed with her and offered her an internship at the lab! At age 14! She was the youngest intern ever there!

Her entrepreneurial career graph only went higher from there! Of course with more blood, sweat and tears and some dips along the way!

Would she have achieved whatever “Success” she achieved:

If she didn’t show up?

Without grit and tenacity?

Without creating the right environment, would luck and serendipity have smiled on her?

If she fully succumbed to fear and didn’t decide to tackle it head-on?

If she followed the conventional path?

If she just settled for competitions with people her age?

If she didn’t venture out of her comfort zone?

If she didn’t play in traffic and push herself out there?

Behind every “success” story, untold, there is grit, failure, potential for humiliation and literally a lot of blood, sweat and tears! And of course tons of people who helped along the way!

And brief moments in time where a different choice would have led to a dramatically different outcome!

Circumstances matter but choices matter more!

Shortcut to Success: Blood, Sweat and Tears! Rinse and Repeat!

80% of anyone’s success belongs to others. 100% of failure belongs to you.

Part II-Parenting Thoughts

That was a story worthy of its own Netflix special! Isn’t it? :)

Full of inspiration, (melo)drama, some suspense, protagonist overcoming immense hardships at a tender age, triumphing spectacularly and culminating in a dramatic surprise followed by camera flashes, standing ovation and media mentions!! :)

Hope you enjoyed it! Great!

Now allow me to take you to the dark, difficult and not often discussed side : Thorny Questions Regarding Parenting.

Yes I truly believed my daughter had and still has lots of untapped potential and her “success”, so far, validates that partially. I truly believe all kids do too!

For her to achieve that, I had to push her through her/society’s imaginary limits of what’s possible and what’s not. Push her way out of her comfort zone. Put her in extremely stressful and difficult situations. She resented me for that and I feel she still does! Led her through a gamut of extreme emotions: sadness, doom, despair, anger, frustration and joy. I had to overcome immense resistance. From her and from well meaning friends and family.

I believe, from my experience, parenting raises some profound questions.

When it comes to pushing, How far is too far?

Should we put them through this ordeal?

Can you endure the pain of watching your daughter/son in pain? If yes, how much is too much? For you/them?

Do you love them enough to receive resentment in return?

How early is too early?

Can you withstand the severe criticism and ridicule thrown at you along the way (before her apparent “success”)?

How much do you know her? Do you really listen to her?

Do you spend enough time explaining the Why or just dictate?

How honest and realistic can you be with her when it comes to her abilities and output?

Can you stand by, watch when they inevitably fall, acknowledge it but don’t rush in to help unless it is an emergency?

Can you let them help themselves and not offer help every step of the way, even if you instinctively want to? Can you resist that urge?

Do you seek others input/opinions (teachers..) as well before coming to any conclusions about her abilities?

How critical can you be?

How much critique is too much critique?

How much praise is too much praise?

Are you choosing to praise the end result or the effort? (Tip: Praise the effort. Results may vary. Effort matters more than results)

Do you teach them to be detached from success/failure but do the best they can and more? (It is not easy, of course!)

How strongly do you feel that they should end up truly strong and independent?

Are you prepared to work yourself out of a job? (They become strong, super independent and don’t need you anymore, which, in my view anyway, is the whole point of this exercise!).

Are you willing to help her set aside her ego?

Are you willing to set aside your ego?

Are you ready to start acknowledging your own shortcomings and inabilities. Holes others could possibly fill?

Are you ready to start acknowledging the fact that others, better than you, could help her more than you ever can?

Do you seek other mentors/coaches for her or do you start falsely believing you are the only mentor/coach she needs? (This is especially critical when you start seeing “success” with your approach.)

Are you ready to start believing that she will be 1000x better than you will ever be?

What is “success”? What is “failure”?

More importantly, what if there was no “success” in sight at all after all this?

Can you endure seeing them “fail” abysmally?

Would you still truly consider it a “success”?

How would you help her cope with “failure”? A lot of people can deal with “success” but can they deal with inevitable “failure”? Are you preparing her for that? Even when she is relatively “successful”?

Or would you/she blame yourself, herself, circumstances, others, unfair world…?

What message do you really want her to takeaway from “failure”?

There are many more but I will end there!

I arrived at my own answers. You may have too or you may have to!

What I understand is that questions are the same for all of us.

We and our kids have to arrive at our own, possibly dramatically different answers and at our own pace!

If you are curious what happened since: She later on took the idea much further and eventually raised $50000!

She completed her Undergrad and MS (AI) at Stanford. She is currently working on a Startup with two other Co-founders. Raised capital from some of the top names in the industry. No certainty whatsoever of Success but what’s absolutely certain is more Blood, Sweat and Tears – Rinse and Repeat!

I wish you guys and your world changing kids the very best!

Ravi Karumanchi

Hyderabad, November 2026.