A founder’s life is lonely. It is always day zero. It circles around uncertainty. Someday the trusted best-performing employee will resign or the other your customer. From cook, negotiator, coder, mentor. Everything comes on a single plate. I know there are million-odd videos on youtube and a million other podcast guiding how to start a …
Category Archives: startups
founders
Silicon Valley, tech crunch, and abundance of money have glorified founding a company. In the early ’90s, people built a company because they had the option to pursue their dreams. It was more about innovation. Most of them worked for many years out of their garage. The capital was limited. Fast forward to 2020, media …
co-pilot
What will happen to the plane if the co-pilot is not sticking to him checklist? It will result in an accident. A plane requires both pilots to stick to their task. What will happen if the crew will not serve their passengers with love and care? There will be an uproar. What will happen if …
times
After a few months, I am out, meeting friends in person and some shared incidents about layoffs. COVID has changed market dynamics and operations. Many jobs will be lost forever. The capital was cheap; growth was supreme. Now it is about survival and profitability. So many non-essential roles are getting cleaned up. Some firing incidents …
switch
I got to know the last day that one of our early adopters is moving on. We got sad because he was there with us from day zero. Our second cheque came from his organization. He was there with us when no one believed in us. The market I am in, there is a constant …
interview
I had an interview scheduled with a successful founder last day. I have revived aroundstartups podcast and mostly talking to founders. What was supposed to be a pre-interview conversation went on for an hour. We later realized it was an interview, not a coffee conversation. It was more like two listening and learning from someone …
Growth
One matric which I consider for growth is how people in my team are growing and how they are maturing and getting ready to fill in our shoe. We had a good discussion with one of our early hires, the feedback we received as a founder was an eye-opener. I see growth as my team …
The Impressionists
I was watching the documentary and got to learn about: The Impressionists. A half a dozen of misfits going against odds and creating a new style of painting. Most of them were poor and; not part of the existing elite and, selling their artwork via Salon was not an option. The Impressionists came up with …
communication
With a group of great people when you are on the journey of building something, communication can make or break the ship. The other aspect is the expectation mismatch. If the product team is not explaining correctly to dev leads about customer’s pain and the sales team are not indicated on realistic feature releases. It …
culture
As the company grows, we get lost in many activities that take away focus from culture. We hire in a flock with people of various backgrounds and expectations. We forgo our principle because we need a 10X engineer or high flying sales folk. The side effect of this is people who were with you from …