Rakhesh was made redundant at 28, six months into a London energy startup job, and spent months being rejected despite seven years of experience — ending up doing pot wash at Muriel's Kitchen. His advice: "you have to keep reinventing yourself through the process, because the version of you that's being rejected is probably not the right fit for what you're trying to do."
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Rakhesh had moved to London at the end of 2015 to join an energy startup, and six months later was made redundant — "startups are good at many things, this startup was very good at spending money." The timing was brutal: the EU referendum was scheduled for June 2016, so employers said "let's just wait and see what happens with the outcome of Brexit," and the job opportunities he was banking on never materialised. He went back to the pub work he'd done at university — bar shifts for breweries he knew, and pot wash at Muriel's Kitchen in central London. "No job was beneath me. I just had to work."
The way out came through his network: an old colleague from that same startup got him into EDF Energy — one of the largest energy companies in the world — at the beginning of 2017, and he tutored on the side for months afterwards. But the deeper shift was in how he saw himself. The redundancy "was the first time in my life that I've had to think: what is it about me that makes me employable — not what is it about my skills." That reframe became how he pitches himself to every investor, employer, and client since: "people buy you, they don't buy your skills. Your skills are a commodity."
His advice for anyone in that transition: keep trying, but be honest and reflective enough to ask "why was I not successful, what can I control about this situation that's gonna make the next opportunity better?"