The Startup Journey

From the Economic Times article : Vivek Ranadive, the founder-chairman of TIBCO Software, recently sacked his America sales chief despite the Palo Alto, California-based infrastructure-software provider surpassing market expectations. He had to because he grades his employees in a very contrarian way. "If you do everything you are asked to do and you do it very well, you get a C," he says. "In order to be a superstar (to get an A or Aplus)," he says, "you have to do things that nobody asked you to do." Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private equity, venture capital and M&A deals in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs reach out effectively to the investing community.

During a recent review meeting, I asked the startup CEO the status of certain action items agreed to in the previous meeting. He smiled sheepishly and said that he would need more time as his days were packed and that he would need another 10 days to complete the pending items. This was after 2 weeks had elapsed! Upon digging deeper and on further questioning, it transpired that it wouldn’t have taken more than 4 hours to accomplish the tasks. Yet the CEO was asking for more time and he was indeed very busy! “Call me tomorrow afternoon”, said another startup CEO. I was trying to set up a phone call with this person to discuss a possible partnership with a startup I’m involved with. Upon calling the next day in the “afternoon”, I was told that the CEO was in another meeting and that he would call back. I asked for a time when I could expect a call – that wasn’t forthcoming. I also couldn’t get a convenient time for me to call back at. I received a call late in the evening that day from ...