What I learnt at smallcase
As I leave this fantastic startup, I thought I’d make a note of some of the things I’ve learned over the past 2 years ( Aug 2019 — Sept 2021 ), mostly for myself, but for you all, too.
September 8, 2021, was my last working day at smallcase. smallcase is helping individual retail investors build low-cost, long-term, and diversified portfolios. Aside from improving personal finances, smallcase also helps connect to India’s fastest-growing investment product layer and offer modern products, seamless transactions and delightful experiences. This is a highly regulated space by SEBI, and as you can imagine building such products are incredibly challenging.
The company is full of amazing people with expertise ranging from Engineering, Design, customer support, marketing, people skills and of course, Financial literacy is way too high ( which was a pretty good thing ). I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to solve interesting problems with a group of extraordinary individuals in the smallcase. I’m going to miss them greatly.
Fear and Opportunities
Let’s start from the beginning. The first day here was enjoyable. I met a whole of professional people from various backgrounds in a single place. I got the tour around the office and got to know everyone’s role in the company, be it professionally and informally ( name etc. ). But, frankly speaking, I feared that I won’t fit in as I had zero knowledge about the Indian Financial ecosystem ( during that time ), and somehow, I landed in the dead smack centre.
As each team is small (which has grown now in certain aspects); here each day is about the decisions you make. Small, big, minuscule — it just doesn’t matter. Each of these decisions has an impact. It just isn’t about the effect on you; it is the impact on the people, the product, stakeholders, customers, and shareholders. That is what the beauty of a startup is. Such responsibilities also insight the fear in you. What if I failed. What if things don’t work. I guess that’s where the opportunity also lies. You fail fast and recover fast. It is important to start learning being around smarter folks & absorption by osmosis and overhearing.
Discovering my place
To improve, we need to admit that we don’t know everything there is to know about a particular subject. We all have to go through a learning curve to get better. In smallcase, I got the opportunity to constantly learn new skills because both Technology and Finance worlds (sometimes I blame SEBI, but it's for everyone’s good. ) are constantly changing — it means the industry is evolving quickly. It also leads to a constant learning curve, and sometimes, it will steep. Here, I was constantly learning at an accelerated pace. Personally, this is one of the things that attracted me the most at smallcase. I love learning new things, and there’s no shortage here.
In smallcase, I mostly worked on the frontend ( at times on the backend for internal tools ) in Publisher Team. But I got a chance to learn and work on various different technologies ranging from SPA, CSR, SSR, SSG, CDN, Error tracking, server monitoring, to name a few. Not only on the technical side, but I also got a chance to relearn the art of communication, be it spoken or written. This made me realise one thing that you need to allow yourself to be a beginner and constantly learn, read, practice and explore.
Freedom to Explore
Publisher Team is mostly dedicated to improving and scaling SEBI-registered individuals or organisation research and advisory practice to delivers a hassle-free & completely digital investing experience to their clients. Every single team at smallcase is like a bit of a startup, and it’s free to charge ahead and reach their mission by themselves. Usually, the release cycle for each team is of 3 weeks. In one release cycle, specs and designs are created for new feature flows or product improvement. The autonomy aims to have faster decisions and also helps to minimise dependencies and hand-offs. Following release cycles are more or less about executing and shipping to production.
Before joining smallcase, I was a more UI-focused engineer ( which I’m still ) who lived within the world of CSS and didn’t have a ton of exposure to complex routing or performance-based optimisations or product creation. Although, while working in Publisher Team, I usually got paired with people from other disciplines. It expanded my thinking beyond just code and gave me more understanding of the why and how behind a product-creation process and not just the final piece of the puzzle. As a result, my work led me to be a little involved in everything from beginning to end.
Work Hard; Party Hard
It is vital for anyone to find work meaningful to remain creative and productive to an extent. Having fun is also extremely important. At the end of the day, the quality of the works matters to all. Every success should be celebrated and every failure is an opportunity to learn and correct; you need to at times accept the outcome of the actions and appreciate luck. In the end both are successful. Someone has rightly said there is a meme in everything ( Reminds me of #off-topic, and #smallmeme channel — only smallcase peeps will understand this).
When I was in the office — each day was different. Be it switching to a new spot for lunch every day or daily commute in bustling traffic of Bangalore or some people trying to crack extreme PJs or smell of new sweets in the pantry which always cheers the mood and pleasantries being shared in the pantry or the hustle around the game room in late evenings.
All this was fun; For me, it didn’t last long. “The COVID-19 pandemic was a black swan moment for a new way of working. A change that would otherwise have taken more than a decade.” March 2020, the new WFH policy kicked in for everyone safety and it totally changed me. You can dress as you like, you can take as many breaks as you want, you can go for a walk without telling anyone, you can have a nap without telling anyone, you can start earlier, you can finish later, you can manage your time, you can work on your pace and much more. This has become the new normal of working.
During WFH, everyone at smallcase was focusing on mental and physical health. Taking care of one’s mental health is critically important. It's a reminder to us all about the importance of prioritizing emotional well-being and find meaningful ways to unwind and refuel.
Hitting the scale from 10,000 Feet
As you move into a new period of growth, a lot of processes and policies begin to implement. However, such changes can cause confusion, complexities and conflicts. But this also provided an opportunity for the team to channel challenges in the right direction and to expand business impact. The first step to alleviating any situation — in software or otherwise — is to clearly and accurately define the problem. Once the problem is defined. You need to come up with an objective; these are memorable qualitative descriptions of what one wants to achieve.
In smallcase, I had various objectives; in the beginning, most of these objectives were mostly given to me by EM or PM; once the team started to believe in me I was also able to create my own problem statements to solve ( along with usual works ). I worked on various Client-side Improvements projects — closely working with the Infrastructure team regarding the improved caching mechanism, CDN optimization, and also a Preview environment generator for frontend devs. Below are some of the detailed work that I, along with the Publisher Team, at smallcase solved at scale to an extent which I’m extremely proud of.
Kudos
My journey with smallcase has only ended as an employee, but I will continue to use the product hopefully for a very long time. It is something that I now understand and believe in it. It gives me an incredible feel of satisfaction to see people around me talk about smallcase and to know that I was a part of it. It will be unfair of me to point out every person who has made an impact — /kudos smallcase. I am grateful to everyone here, old and new. It’s left a mark on me. I’m glad that I was part of 1% of smallcase.
If smallcase sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work, I happen to know that they could really use awesome engineers right now. Apply here or you can write to them at people@smallcase.com
