How tennis lessons helped this entrepreneur re-strategise and reinvent

Hush CEO says entrepreneurs should be like tennis players.If one style or strategy is not working, change it to come back and win the tournament

Ashutosh Dabral's Twitter bio proudly proclaims two things. Firstly, he is the CEO and co-founder of Hush, and secondly, he plays tennis daily. Well, almost. Such is his love for the game that he dedicates an hour for it everyday and even compares the game to being an entrepreneur itself.

"In tennis, we have seen seasoned players changing their style years into the game and coming back to win tournaments. I think, that applies a lot to start-ups and entrepreneurs too," said Dabral, an alumnus of IIM-Calcutta who has spent over 16 years in global technology firms like Yahoo, AOL, Dell and Target. 

He sees tennis as something integral to his mental health and personal time, and makes it a point to schedule games with friends as well as to help strategise better. It was this effort to change strategies that helped Dabral and Umesh Joshi switch the game when their previous entrepreneurial venture Plastr (it started as VoyageUp) didn't take off.

At a time where the race for the best job is almost as cut-throat as the race for the employers to grab and retain top talent, Dabral and Joshi founded Hush in 2017. The idea was to create a safe space for employees of different organisations to have balanced discussions about their work culture and raise pressing questions about their career.

Most of the top technology companies and MNCs in the country have been complaining of a acute crunch to the extent that many are poaching off each other. This makes it doubly important for companies to not just ensure that they have a strong retention mechanism but also have a sense of what their employees actually feel about the organisation.

"Both of us came from a corporate background in product management for online and tech industry, but we realised that even if we build a platform to help people connect to other likeminded travellers or enthusiasts (as was the case with VoyageUp), there was a need for something that would help in retaining users as well," said Dabral whose company competes with the likes of Glassdoor.

The workplace discussion platform also allows employees to rate their CEOs and CXOs. One of the main needs Dabral and Joshi witnessed was the fact that while professionals from premier institutes have easy access to a strong alumni network to connect them to the best offers, it is not something that all professionals have. "We realised that a professional network can be a much stronger and more sustainable bond than the one that is built around common hobbies alone." 

Currently, Hush caters to over 40,000 employees from various firms and has over 300 top companies represented on the app. An average user spends around 10 minutes every day on the platform.

The employees can becomes a part of their company's community or post globally and can ask questions, start polls, rate their leadership team or hold discussions with fellow colleagues anonymously. The platform is also roping in trained mental health practitioners to counsel employees. 

"We will be looking at another round of funding in a few months after our last round in December 2018, however, the focus is on introducing a number of programmes to improve employee training and upskilling at present," said Dabral.