How did one small decision change your life?

After about an year in grad school my father in India told me once that he wanted me to help him at his poultry farm and I said yes, not thinking much since I was doing Spintronics, it was just an emotional impulse.
 
I came to India and started working on my poultry farm and found that a really foul smelling sludge passed by in front of our farm every day. I stopped the guy to tell him to take another route and he told me that was really healthy fodder for animals and maybe we should feed some to our chicken. I digged in and found out that the sludge was actually more than 50% high quality protein by dry weight. I took a loan available to unemployed educated youth in India, a friend joined me, we built out a dryer (hello physics!) and started drying this sludge. It replaced soya meal in poultry and incidentally soya prices rose a lot that year because of deficient rains in Argentina, Brazil and USA. Our product became famous in Indian poultry circles, we set up a factory and became the biggest buyer of that very sludge in North India.

Then I sold off the majority of my stake to open a mobile software company on 1st March 2011. Two years later the company is 120 people strong, we raised two rounds of funding, acquired another company and just opened our second office in San Francisco on 1st March.

I guess that decision is still changing my life.

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Samar Singla on Quora:

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