I'd like to tell you there was a plan. There wasn't.
There was a corporate job I didn't like doing, a salary that hit every month, and one day a feeling I couldn't argue with: I need to earn more than this, and it isn't going to come from here. So I quit. No business plan. No future planning. Nothing lined up.
That's how differ* started. The idea came after.
How did differ* start?
With a resignation, not an idea. Most founder stories go idea first, leap second. Mine went the other way. I jumped, and then had to work out what I'd jumped toward.
The job was the default. I didn't choose it so much as land in it and stay, because the salary came on time and that's what the salary is for. Most people I know are in some version of that. It isn't a tragedy. It's just a Tuesday that keeps happening.
Leaving it wasn't brave, by the way. It was a feeling. I only called it a decision later.
Wasn't there a time before that?
There was Canada.
I moved there with the dream of building a life. That was the whole plan, and I believed it.
It didn't go the way the dream goes. I slipped into depression and ended up in a dark place. I'm not going to decorate that part. It was what it was.
And then, at some point, I picked myself up and chose to come back.
Was I a coward? Maybe.
Was I scared to come back? Yes.
Did I make the right choice? We'll see how life pans out.
I've left those answers exactly as they are. I don't have better ones.
What I can say now is that coming home was a choice. It didn't feel like one at the time. It felt like losing. But nobody made it for me, and everything after it went somewhere else because of it. That's what a fork looks like from the inside. It almost never looks like courage while it's happening.
Why is it called differ*?
Because of one very human thing I kept noticing. The big things tend to happen when someone, on their own, chooses to differ.
Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard to keep building Facebook. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in 1978 out of her garage, after she struggled to get a brewery job in India because she was a woman. Dhirubhai Ambani was working as a clerk in Aden, came back to Bombay in 1958, and started trading spices under the name Reliance Commercial Corporation.
If each of them had taken the safe path, we wouldn't know those names.
Now the footnote, because there's always one. For every one of those, there are thousands of people who quit, or dropped out, or came home, and nobody wrote about them. They differed too. Their story just doesn't get told, because it didn't end in a company you've heard of.
That's the part I care about. differ* isn't about winning the fork. It's about noticing you took one.
Where do people actually differ?
Mostly in places nobody's watching.
- Took the long way home.
- Went anyway.
- Left at eleven. No note.
- Ordered the strange one on the menu.
- Stood on the balcony for the whole party. Best part of the night, honestly.
- Phone right there at 3am. Didn't.
- Said yes to the thing everyone said was a bad idea.
None of those are stories. Said out loud, they sound like nothing. They're only enormous from the inside, and usually nobody else in the room saw them happen.
Everyone differs at least once in the big way: a job, a city, a person. Everyone does it constantly in the small way and never counts it. differ* is for the small way.
What does AYBC stand for?
The company behind differ* is AYBC. It stands for Aren't You Behind Clout.
We came up with the name back in college, when a few of us wanted to start an agency of our own. The name stayed with me.
Say the letters in English and you get A-Y-B-C. Say them in Hindi and you get ay B.C., which, if you grew up here, needs no explaining. It's probably the most flexible phrase we have. Surprise, anger, love, disbelief, a friend walking in forty minutes late. Same words. Change the tone and it means something else.
One name, five meanings, depending on how you say it. For a brand about the same person choosing differently on different nights, that turned out to be accurate.
So what is differ*?
The other option. The one that wasn't in the room.
It starts with one category and it won't stay there. Batch 001 is the first thing it makes.
Did I make the right call, walking out with no plan? Same answer as before. We'll see how life pans out.
If you want to be around to find out, get your founder code.
Tirth
Founder, differ*
Sources
- Britannica, Mark Zuckerberg.
- Science History Institute, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.
- Britannica Money, Dhirubhai Ambani.
If you're somewhere dark right now, talk to someone. In India, Tele-MANAS is free and open 24x7 on 14416.
