Choose a boss who makes you grow, not the one who keeps you comfortable.

I keep seeing this among folks who have just started their careers.

Within a few weeks of joining, they are already comparing bosses, exchanging notes, labelling cultures as "toxic". An anxiety creeps in. They start judging.

My honest view: if you ever have to choose between a nice boss and a tough boss, choose the tough one. Every single time.

I was fortunate. Early on, I worked with genuinely tough bosses, and that training held me in good stead when I later started building Dexter.

Take Saurabh Mukherjea as an example. I am incredibly grateful to him. When I first interviewed, I was rejected because my communication was poor.

Saurabh took a bet and hired me anyway.

I thought I was doing brilliantly. Reading like crazy, 12-plus hours a day, waiting for the appreciation to arrive.

Instead, he took me to lunch and told me, plainly, that I was not good at the job.

It was heartbreaking. My first reaction was revolt. Unfair, I thought.

But when I reflected, he was right.

I was measuring myself by effort. He was measuring me by output and outcome.

I loved reading annual reports cover to cover, collecting data slowly, and my final output for the firm kept getting delayed. That lunch taught me to reach the output first, then indulge my curiosity later.

I became the internal champion for Reuters and Thomson Analytics. The effort, output, outcome framework has stayed with me ever since.

Here is the hard truth: for an entrepreneur, only outcomes count. Efforts rarely do.

The second lesson was discipline.

2006, peak Mumbai monsoon. My train home was delayed, my Nokia died, I reached at 10.30 instead of 9. I missed a training session run by a leader called Alex.

Saurabh would hear none of my reasons. He straightened me out completely.

I felt terrible. But for almost every day after, I reached office by 9.

Years later, on my first day at Olympus Capital, my boss Sumit personally drove to my hotel to pick me up at 8am. I was still in bed. He waited. I have never forgotten that embarrassment, or that lesson.

A tough boss pushes you out of your comfort zone. A nice boss lets you stay in it.

What you learn in your first five years becomes the foundation of everything after.

So choose the boss who makes you grow, not the one who keeps you comfortable.