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My Life Story (in 1 Minute)

I grew up in the beautiful island nation of Sri Lanka. Since young, I have loved electronics and building stuff. My favourite invention that I did back in the '90s was an electronic door lock that I built from scratch including the number pad and the locking mechanism. Smart locks were unheard of back then. I picked up some basic coding skills when I was 16 and I never looked back.

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I studied Computer Science and Engineering at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka's #1 university for Engineering where the acceptance rate is less than 2%. After graduating in 2009, while being the top of my class, I joined 99x Technology where I spent 2.5 years building all types of enterprise software for software companies in Scandinavia. After that, I moved to Singapore in 2011 to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

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I collaborated with Microsoft Research for my PhD research, and ended up getting a job offer to join a Microsoft team at Seattle when I graduated from NUS. However, I (some would argue stupidly) turned it down to start a startup company, named Ackcio, in Singapore.

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My Startup Story

For the last 8 years (and counting), I have been the Co-founder and CEO at Ackcio. At Ackcio, we are building wireless industrial monitoring solutions to help industries like construction, mining, rail, and infrastructure avoid life threatening accidents and collapses. I will write a separate post about how Ackcio came to be on another day.

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Starting and growing Ackcio has been a rollercoaster ride. Some days are jubilant. Some days are like sh*t. Some days are jubilant and like sh*t at the same time, which would be hard for anyone to fathom. But if you are an entrepreneur, you would know what I am talking about.

 

From just an idea and a prototype, I succeeded (together with my team of course!) in making Ackcio a global company with operations in 6 continents. I raised over $10M in funding for the company, did business with clients from Peru to New Zealand and in over 50 countries in between. 

 

Coming from a tech background with no formal business training, Ackcio allowed me to get a double-degree in business from the School of Hard Knocks. I had to either self-learn or ask for advice from investors, advisors, and other founders about a lot of things. 

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About this Blog

Over the last 8 years, I have learnt so many things about starting and growing a startup. I made a lot of mistakes in the process, and some of them costed me and my startup a lot. In hindsight, there are many things I would have done differently. That's the main reason behind why I started this blog. I want to share some of my learnings with you so that you don't have to make the same mistakes I did.

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The Internet is packed with startup advice. However, there isn't much content out there that touches on very operational level details of a startup. Building a prototype is easy. Scaling a company is 10x harder. That's where the devil lies. Those are the topics I write about. Some of these topics can be sensitive and uncomfortable, but by knowing that you would have to deal with such things, you will become better-informed entrepreneurs. 

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Most of the things I write about are things I learned from my own startup journey. However, I will also include things that I learned from other entrepreneurs to give you more value for the time you spend here. I know there are billions of other websites that you can be on right now, so I appreciate you for being here.

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I hope you like my content. Please feel free to drop me a line using the contact form and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you.

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Welcome to Startup Mistakes!