In August 2020, I got an email that stopped me mid-scroll.
VirVentures, one of our core businesses under the Ergode umbrella, had been ranked No. 1788 on the Inc. 5000 list. America’s fastest-growing private companies. 240% revenue growth over three years. Right there, in black and white, next to names I recognised from press releases and business magazines.
I read it three times. Then I called my wife.
Here is the thing you have to understand about that moment. In 2020, the world was in the middle of a pandemic. Everyone was scrambling. Supply chains were breaking. Businesses that had seemed rock solid were shutting their doors. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we had quietly built something that an independent publication had decided was one of the fastest-growing companies in the entire country. I genuinely did not see it coming.
Not because we weren’t working hard. We were working harder than we ever had. But when you’re deep inside a business, when your days are consumed by the operational detail of keeping things running, you stop seeing the shape of the thing from the outside. You see the problems, the gaps, the things that still need fixing. You rarely see the whole picture. The Inc. 5000 was the outside world holding up a mirror and saying, actually, look what you’ve built.
I started this whole thing in 2007 with a textbook arbitrage. $40 on eBay, $1,600 on Amazon. No plan, no investors, no grand vision. Just a price gap that seemed too obvious to ignore and a decision that took forty-five seconds. By 2020, we had over a million products, vendors across the world, and a team that had grown far beyond anything I had imagined when I was selling books out of a home office in Texas.
And yet. The moment that external recognition arrived, the first time someone outside the building decided to pay attention and write it down, I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel. Not just pride. Something closer to relief.
Because building something in relative obscurity for over a decade is a strange experience. You believe in what you’re doing. You have to, or you wouldn’t keep going. But there are long stretches, years sometimes, where the outside world gives you very little signal about whether any of it matters. You’re just doing the work, making the decisions, solving the problems, hoping the direction is right. The validation, when it comes, lands differently than you think it will. It doesn’t make you feel successful exactly. It makes you feel seen.
We made the Inc. 5000 four times in a row after that. Then came other recognitions, other press mentions, podcasts, speaking invitations. The Maharashtra Visionary Summit. Top CEO awards. Things I couldn’t have imagined sitting in that home office in 2007 trying to figure out how to ship a book.
But none of them hit quite like the first one.
There’s a lesson in this that took me a while to properly articulate. Recognition is not the goal. If you build a business waiting for external validation, you will make bad decisions. You’ll optimise for the things that look good rather than the things that work. But recognition, when it arrives as a byproduct of doing the actual work, is one of the more useful things that can happen to a team. It reminds people that what they’re building matters beyond the four walls they’re building it in.
The morning after that Inc. 5000 email, I printed it out and put it on the wall in our office. Not as decoration. As evidence. Evidence that the work was real, that the growth was real, that the people who had poured years into this business had built something worth noticing.
I still have that printout somewhere.
Some things you keep.
Regards,
Rupesh
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