The Startup Journey

From a great post by Pravin Jadhav of social media startup Wishberg . Don’t divulge what is not shipped yet. This is a tough one to explain. To put it simply (or wisely) – ‘You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.’ Here the context is different. Everyone is looking for ideas, you don’t give it to them. We met with one angel investor, had a detailed discussion about our product – how we intend to market / acquire consumers. Few days later, one of his invested startup came up with remarkably similar approach. On another instance, one investor met us twice in a span on 10 days, insisted we share our detailed road map ASAP. A week later his firm announced a investment in an over lapping category; he was leading the deal. Do whats impossible, not what is easy. If you have a brilliant idea and you think its easy to execute, there probably are another 100 startups doing it already. You are operating in a crowded space. Your health is important. ...Long working ...

Entrepreneur, Writer and Podcaster Jonathan Fields has a great post on maximizing productivity by focusing on the key activities during the productive time periods during the day and cutting out "email, social media, phone calls and other yadda yadda" during those times. Using peak creation cycles for email stifles innovation, performance and progress. I was inadvertently doing maintenance and production work during the window where I should’ve been in hardcore creation mode. By the time I’d roll into late morning/early afternoon, my organic hyper-creation window was cycling down and I nothing left to do the work that makes me come alive and that people most value. Malaise would set it. I found it harder and harder to come up with ideas, new posts and solutions when structured my day this way. So, I responded by making a simple shift. I still do check my email after I get done meditating or exercising (shhhh, don’t tell). But, it’s a quick scan and, unless there’s a tru...

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.” - Anonymous Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” – Confucius, Thinker and Philosopher You must fall in love with what you do, because being an entrepreneur is a lot of hard work, and overcoming a lot of adversity. From that love will come the dedication that will get you out of bed at 4 a.m. because of a great idea you just had and get you to work till 11 p.m. and not feel tired.” – Ken Field, Real Estate Magnate Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers.

From a post by AnnMaria of The Julia Group. ..sometimes, as Paul Hawken has said, the biggest problem with small businesses is that they have too much money. That may sound crazy, but I have always tried to keep overhead to the bare minimum. Almost everyone who works for us is a contractor, which means we pay them when we have work and when we don’t have work for them to do, we don’t pay them. I’m not too worried about being first to market – I see how well that worked out for VisiCalc and Netscape. I’ve way too much experience to think that you can do a project twice as fast with six programmers as with three. After 27 years, I still have an office in my house. When I meet people, I usually go to lunch... Interesting and certainly worth thinking about... Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products...

From a Mixergy podcast interview with Dr.Rajiv Kumar of US-based corporate wellness service ShapeUp. (Emphasis mine) What’s the one takeaway that you have? One thing that you say, hey you know, I am better because I have this one understanding after having built this business. Rajiv: Yeah, I think it would probably sound very obvious and maybe somewhat cliché, but at the end of the day, every single thing that a business does, successes and failures, are all about people, and can’t underestimate that. I think we know it, but we forget it sometimes. But it is the people that makes everything happen or makes thing not happen. There’s a huge opportunity cost to having a wrong person in a position, and you don’t realize that opportunity cost until that person leaves, and because either there’s a void and you realize that this person was actually dragging the company down, or someone who comes in that’s much better and you realize how much more quickly you’re accelerating. And when you hav...

From a post on OnStartups titled "Remembering 9/11: Leadership Lessons From Akamai Founder". (Danny Lewin, co-founder of Akamai Technologies, "a commando in the Israeli Special Forces counter-terror group, then a genius mathematics graduate student at MIT, and then a visionary billionaire entrepreneur", "was tragically killed on American Airlines Flight #11") To Restore Trust When it Weakens: Hold People Accountable and Get Rid of Non-Performers. Great leaders hold people accountable successfully by honoring an unspoken contract between them. The team members make commitments to each other and to the leader. Then the leader measures each of them fairly and by the same standards - by how well they did what they said they would do. The leader pays each member by how well they performed their part of the deal. But when one member fails to execute, other teammates see it immediately. They lose confidence both in the non-performer and in the leader for failing...

Bring home the bacon 1. To earn a living, especially for a family. 2. To achieve desired results; have success. In one of his latest posts titled 7 dark secrets of Entrepreneurs - Revealed , Alok Kejriwal (as usual) provides a lot of material for reflection at the same time making it an easy read. 2. Entrepreneurs are lonely. Honestly, entrepreneurs are their own best friends. Yes, family comes close and there is almost a reverse dependency on family (I feel I depend on my wife and 2 daughters more than they depend on me), but there is really no one else. Maybe I speak for myself, but the gigantic tasks of the day leave no room for hanging out with friends or acquaintances. In most cases, it’s going out with the office crowd. Entrepreneurs speak to themselves in their sleep. They sell proposals to themselves in the shower and negotiate term sheets in their mind while they are eating sev puri. There is little time for other friendships. Here are a couple that particularly struck a chord...

Cross Posted from the Venture Intelligence Entrevista blog : Latha Rajan & K. Pandia Rajan of Ma Foi ( B i o s ) In conversation with K. Satyanarayan , Co-founder of regional language publishing firm New Horizon Media. (Recorded on August 15, 2012 in Chennai.) Highlights: Takeaways for Other Entrepreneurs: (Click on the links for the video segments) Don't add artificial constraints when it comes to entrepreneurship KPR: Separating home and work, politics & business - we tend to have many boundaries where none need to exist. These are Western notions and mind blocks that we can revisit. Being a Husband-Wife Entrepreneur Combination was never a major hassle for us. In fact, as Latha says often, we would have probably fallen apart but for Ma Foi! Latha Rajan: In the early days, he used to travel 25 days a month and I used to travel 10 days a month. But since I was there within the system, I could understand (the pressures and issues). Both of us knew what we were workin...

From Art Reisman's post titled "Nine Tips for Technology Start Ups". (Hat tip: Terry Gold ) 5) Product companies must avoid the consulting trap. If you produce a software product and (or any product for that matter), you will always be inundated for specialty, one-off, requests from customers. These requests are well intentioned, but you can’t let your time and direction of a single customer drive your feature set. The exception to this rule is obviously if you are getting similar requests from multiple customers. If you start building special features for single customers, ultimately you will barely break even, and may go broke trying to please them. At some point (now), you have to say this is our product, and this is our price, and these are the features, and if a customer needs specialty features, you will need to politely decline. If your competition takes up your account on promises of customization, you can be sure they are spreading their resources thin. 6) Vali...

Rediff.com has an interesting profile of the Chennai-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) software product firm and its founder Suresh Sambandam (who grew up in the small Tamilnadu town of Cuddalore). Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers.

Rohan Bhansali, Founder of digital marketing firm Gozoop, shares interesting HR practices at his company in an interview/profile at TheRodinhoods.com: Culture wise: These are the things we do. All may not be unique but they make our culture unique. 1. Every Saturday the team comes together (no matter how busy they are) and we do crazy things – Idli eating competitions, back to school drawing competitions, ragging new recruits, dancing to 90’s Bollywood tunes, Dumb charades, etc. Last week we played passing the parcel. 2. Gozooper of the Week – Every Thursday, an email is sent to the entire team mentioning one odd (or weird) fact of a team member. The team then has to guess who the person is. Great way to get to know each other. 3. Every year we write a hand written letter to the parents of our most dedicated and earnest team mates highlighting their achievements. There is no prouder moment for parents than hearing about their child’s success. 4. We have weekly Foosball mash ups where ...

The inimitable Alok 'Rodinhood' Kejriwal has an interesting account of an invitation from an international publication to nominate his company for an "hot startup" award. - The call was pleasant and kinda, "How is the weather" type of talk (read - "Entrepreneurs are this and that", etc) - I participated and humored the caller. - In the end I was told, "We like to see the entrepreneurs. We want them to come to Hong Kong and present in front of a jury. On that day in September, something will happen at 4pm, then something at 5pm and winners will be announced at 8pm. So please come." I said NO. This is the point I made: - Entrepreneurs don't have time to pitch for awards and mentions. They have time to do business. - As an award, you have done lots of research on all the companies concerned. This is the age of the INTERNET! Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on priv...

From an article by Rajeev Peshawaria in The Mint. I define culture as what your people do when no one is looking. ...The first step is to articulate the desired culture in terms of the specific behaviour expected from all employees. Use full sentences that tell people exactly what to do and what not to do. “Excellence”, “passion” and “collaboration” are large, abstract words which mean different things to different people—a clearer way of articulating the cultural principle or value of excellence is to say, “Find better ways of doing things.” Similarly, instead of just saying “collaboration”, a better bet might be to say, “Proactively help others to succeed”. Most companies have prescribed corporate values, but they usually stay on the hallway posters they’re relegated to—because nothing is done to socialize or reinforce them. The next step, therefore, is to socialize the desired culture. Repeatedly communicate it at every possible opportunity. This sounds easy but there are two commo...

A July 2002 Business Week article had this to say about Amazon: “after seven years and more than US $1 billion in losses, Amazon is still a work in progress.” The company posted $5m in profits, it’s first ever, in the last quarter of 2001 on sales of $1.12 billion. Amazon is the poster boy of e-commerce around the world, the incredible survivor of the 2001 dotcom meltdown - when naysayers said that Amazon with over $2 billion in debt (largely used to fund warehouses) would become insolvent - and naturally enough inspires Indian entrepreneurs as well. There are a great many lessons to be learnt from amazing Amazon. Founded in 1994 as Cadabra, Amazon.com went online in 1995 raising about $300K from friends and family. In June 1996, KPCB invested $8m and it went public in May 1997. It had sales of $15.7m in 1996, did $16m in the quarter ending March 1997 before the IPO, raised $54m in the IPO at a market capitalization of $438m on the first day. The company had gone international, had a w...

Rick Perreault of Unbounce has a nice guest post at OnStartups on the topic. Tip #1 Use video to tell your story In hindsight, probably the most effective thing I did was include a link on our profile and in all my email correspondence to a video of me giving our pitch I had the opportunity to pitch at the last GROW Conference here in Vancouver and lucky for us, they recorded it. I included it on our Angel List profile and almost everyone that contacted me commented that they watched it and especially liked the Q&A. Here is the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WcpFqKA7So You don’t need to spend any money doing this either. Record yourself giving your pitch and providing answers to all the typical questions that you get from outsiders and post it on YouTube. Your passion, conviction and knowledge of the problem you are solving will come across in ways that a deck can never achieve and by presenting your own Q&A, you’ll skip all the typical questions and have a...

Extract from an article by serial entrepreneur K. Ganesh in The Economic Times. Startup infant mortality rate is over 95%. You don't want to be among the casualties. And for that, you need all the aces or high-value cards. So be it the right co-founders, adequate capital, unfair access to supply chain or disproportionate advantage over others make sure you have the secret sauce. This will ensure you are part of the 5% that make it alive. ...Almost all entrepreneurs out there are passionate, hardworking and intelligent. At best, you can incrementally and marginally improve operational efficiency. But then you will make other mistakes. So, it's better go for new, uncontested spaces or disruptive business models . You would then have a better chance of success. 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 pro...

Manish Sabharwal of Teamlease provides this great contrast in an article for Economic Times. We are frugal with capital because we know that entrepreneurship is the art of staying alive long enough to get lucky. But we also understand that entrepreneurship is a leap into the unknown so if you are going to jump from the 10th floor you might as well jump from the 50th floor! What is happening in India today is not once in a decade or once in a millennium but once in the lifetime of a country. This offers unique entrepreneurial opportunities. 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.

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 ...

The Hindu has a profile of the woman entrepreneur, G. Sree Vidhya, behind Ravindra Services Pvt. Ltd, the company which operates Dgroup Security Force and facilities management firm Dialtone Hotline Services. Dgroup Security Force was founded by her mentor, friend and business associate Ravindra Padmanabhan in 1992 and she had a hand in the decision. Until then, the duo was running facility management services under the name Dialtone Hotline Services, which continued to exist alongside the new business. Dr. Padmanabhan passed away in 2001 in a road accident and Sree Vidhya bought out the company in 2003 and named it Ravindra Services Pvt. Ltd (RSPL), after the founder. Dgroup Security Force and Dialtone Hotline Services function as the brands of the RSPL Group. The group also provides temporary staffing services. RSPL Group has over 3,000 workers on its rolls and boasts many corporate clients. ...“Avoid false promises” is another must in her book. When Dgroup Security Force was in its...