The Startup Journey

Everyone around the serial entrepreneur was telling him that they couldn’t see anything unique about the startup’s offering. Everyone was pointing out the various similar offerings already available in the market. They were pointing out technical, marketing, and business model problems but the serial entrepreneur was not listening. After all, hadn’t he sold his first company very profitably when all seemed lost? Of course, that his first company was acquired rather fortuitously, something that occurred through a chance meeting with a potential partner- not something that was consciously engineered. One of the important traits of an entrepreneur is humility. But a humility that’s coupled with confidence. Humility allows the entrepreneur to learn from others while confidence permits him to go around meeting players in the network, weed out “noise” to distil the essence of the learnings, and make appropriate course-corrections but without compromising on the fundamental vision of the com...

The young founder-CEO was excited about the email he had just received. The email was from an -apparently wealthy - NRI from Canada who wanted to invest in the CEO’s company. According to the email, the NRI had “found” the company thanks to the internet and had in fact done background work on the company and was now ready to invest Rs 50L for 10% of the company. The CEO wanted to immediately respond with a “Yes!” as he was in need of cash. He had to meet his employee payroll expenses in 10 days. He had no idea who this benefactor was and searches on the internet yielded no results. The NRI’s email also said that he was going to be in town that week just for a day and wanted to close the deal. He had also emailed a copy of an agreement. The CEO’s joy knew no bounds. He went for the meeting ready to return with a cheque for Rs 50L and grow his company to the next level. During the meeting, something didn’t seem right. Whenever any issue relating to his background, his experience, and the...