The Startup Journey

Extracts from a blog post by AnnMaria of The Julia Group (emphasis mine). 1. Show up when you are supposed to show up. ...The point is that if I say I will be in Fort Totten, North Dakota at 10 a.m. on April 10th, if you come into the office at that time, you should find me there. Reliable competence is worth more than unreliable brilliance. I can make promises to a customer based on reliable competence and know that those promises will be kept. ... 4. Don’t just do the bare minimum! Most jobs offer a great opportunity for people to LEARN and unlike college, they actually pay you to do it. What a deal! At The Julia Group, you can learn how to do everything from complex statistical calculations to use the video editing software. Specifics may vary from one job to the next, but the more you learn, the more valuable you are to us and the better it is for your future. Don’t just do only what you are specifically asked and then sit on your hands. Suggest something! Ask questions!...

Came across this old post by US-based venture capitalist Mark Suster on the topic via a recent guest post by Amit Sharma in NextBigWhat. Uses comparative examples to help understand Gross Margin / Net Revenues, Price/Revenue Growth, Cash Flow vs P&L Profitability, etc. 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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Mukund Mohan of Microsoft Ventures has a wow blog post on why illustrated with a couple of examples of startups from the firm's accelerator: For every two of these entrepreneurs, there are 100′s I know whose story did not end up with funding. It ended with a company that closed, or a marriage that fell apart and a kid that had to go to a tier 2 college, because they had spent a lot of their life’s savings in their startup. To them as well, I say “you tried, and did not succeed, but you did not fail”. Those who “failed” are the ones who did not try at all. The ones who failed are the ones in a safe job, 9-5 assignments who keep telling me “they want to start a company some day”. I think we should have entrepreneurs that succeeded and those that did not succeed. I liken it to giving the gold for the successful ones and silver to the unsuccessful ones. The ones watching on the sidelines and commenting are the ones that “failed”. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Ve...

Entrepreneurs like Sanjiv Bikhchandani of Naukri, Murugavel Janakiraman of Matrimony, the Bansals of Flipkart;  VSS Mani  of Justdial, etc. deserve massive admiration. What they have achieved is more like conquering Everest. Good to know that once they have climbed the peak, thee environment also helps protect "their" turf. From a blog post by Dev Khare of Lightspeed Ventures (emphasis mine): Many of India's successful startups have navigated a maze of challenges, creating leading brands and sustaining for long periods of time.   Correspondingly, it is much harder in India, relative to the US/Europe, for competition to unseat leading brands . ... Startups need large markets (Rs 2500cr+ or $500 million+) to get large and succeed.  This is hard to find in India, perhaps due to early consumer demand, unorganized markets, regional differences or foreign substitutes.  For example, digital advertising is a roughly $400 million annual business here, ...

Was wowed by this powerful quote I'd heard yesterday: " You are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. " (It's attributed to Jim Rohn .) It seemed to be much more powerful than the famous Silicon Valley mantra of " A Players hire A Players; B Players hire C Players ." Since for most working professionals (and especially so for entrepreneurs) almost all the 5 people (that we spend the most time with) are likely to be co-workers, why would we ever hire a "B Player" again? 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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhausti...

Was wowed by Deshpande's simple yet powerful speech and interaction at the TiE Chennai organized event on February 5 . Amazing how someone who's been living in Boston for 30 years is so much in touch with the grassroots issues in even small town India - and more importantly able to come up with practical solutions to them. My top takeaways from the many that he provided: India's Creme-De-la-creme is Taking Charge 2% of Indians are Globally Competitive. And the cream of this segment is now applying its intellectual and financial resources to tackle some of key problems of the bottom of the pyramid. The advantage that we enjoy, as compared to say China, is that citizens here enjoy the freedom to take action (and, as required, also partner with the state) to deliver these basic services. The Govt should have an M&A arm to acquire NGOs! Just like how big corporations (especially in developed countries) keep a keen watch on the innovation experiments being made by...

From Mukund Mohan's post There are 3 primary parameters I have seen used when people hire folks to determine their salary. 1. Experience – usually measured in # of years working on relevant and related technologies. A rule of thumb I have seen is 1.2 to 1.5 times the number of years of experience + starting salary of a fresh graduate at 2L ($3K) per year to 6L ($10K) per year. For example, if you are looking to hire a developer with 5 years of experience, then you will pay 5 years times 1.2 plus 2L per year if you are a startup that’s not funded. 2. Type of technology – The more arcane the technology the more you can expect to pay for it. For example, you can expect to pay much less for a person who knows PHP and more for someone who knows Android app dev or Ruby on Rails. Some common technologies and your base times multiple is below. I am assuming php developer is the base at Rs. 1. All others are multiple of what you’d pay the php developer. I dont mean this to think of php...

From the post by Eric Ortiz, founder of Moblish (emphasis mine): The only way to build a company with staying power is by doing – by rolling up your sleeves and getting to work . Every day is a series of micro wins and micro losses. Some days you are up. Some days you are down. Some days you pull an all-nighter. Some days you pull back-to-back all-nighters. Some days you are sick. Some days you are tired. Some days you are discouraged. But you keep showing up. Seven days a week, 365 days a year. There are no breaks for startup entrepreneurs. Parents know the feeling. When you want to sleep in and your toddler wakes up at 5 a.m., sleep time is over. Your kids are counting on you to feed, clothe, shelter and buy them stuff. As an entrepreneur, the startup is your other child. And you keep showing up. The same temperament is required when finding a UX designer takes weeks, not days as you thought it would. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the...

  The diagram seems to implicitly point out that that the best way to Getting the Best of All Worlds (the #Win zone) is through Entrepreneurship. How else can one "Live a Dream" and get paid massively for it? If things don't work well in that zone, the Entrepreneur can most probably move to the "Rich but Bored" zone! :-) 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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Cross posted from the Entrevista Blog Interview with Ganapathy Subramaniam, Founding-CEO of Bangalore-based semiconductor tech company Cosmic Circuits. (Cosmic was acquired in early 2013 by Silicon Valley-based, Nasdaq-listed electronic design giant Cadence.) The interviewer is fellow entrepreneur Chandu Nair. The Podcast can be downloaded from here . (Use Right Click > Save As to save the file to your desktop) Highlights Reading the Wind How Ganapathy, as part of visiting customers in October 2012, realized that Cosmic Circuits could no longer remain an independent company. (Its customers and partners wanted a strong Number 2 player in the segment to provide a balance to the Number 1 player, Synopsis.)  Making the company Due Diligence ready How Cosmic's decisions to rope in a Big 4 audit firm (just five years into its existence) and go in for an ISO certification, stood it in good stead when it came to due diligence at the time of its acquisition. ...

Cross Posted from the Entrevista Blog In this audio interview ("podcast"), Palem Srikanth shares his amazing entrepreneurial journey - from a Stanford educated logistics executive with Hewlett Packard to returning to India and starting a Dosa restaurant chain to the tough lessons from making cross-border acquisitions to the recent sale of the logistics software business (to US Private Equity firm Francisco Partners-backed Kewill) for about Rs.275 crores.   The Podcast can be downloaded from here . (Use Right Click > Save As to save the file to your desktop) Highlights : Importance of Financial Strength in the Enterprise Software space How persistence and investing in technology (to ensure Four Soft's products  were cutting edge)  provided the maximum return - much more than the expensive acquisitions the company made  Managing the confidentiality of the transaction involving a listed company - so that there is no misuse of insider in...

    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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

The only tip I'm ambivalent about is "doing easiest things first" (that would be email!). Some experts suggest just the opposite. See http://vientrevista.blogspot.in/2013/09/email-vs-productivity.html 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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

John Morgan has a nice post on why "keeping close tabs" on the competition is often a waste of precious time: Competition produces copycats. You start copying them, they start copying you and next thing you know the marketplace is bored! Additionally you’re comparing yourself against something unknown. You don’t know what their life is like. It may suck. I once ran a full page ad in a magazine that cost me a few thousand dollars. The ad didn’t convert at all and was a complete failure. But it did look pretty, and because of that in the next issue not one but TWO of my competitors knocked off my ad. They copied it because I did it. They had no idea the ad didn’t work. Don’t play their game. You lose your initiative and innovation when you’re copying others. … You can break out of this trap by focusing on yourself and your own initiative. Be so busy you don’t have time to know what the competition is up to. You don’t want to succeed for the sake of beating...

From the Business Today article : Credila started operations in March 2008, two months after DSP Merrill Lynch invested in the company. From March 2008 until HDFC bought out DSP Merrill, Credila had disbursed only Rs 20 crore. Since then it has sanctioned more than Rs 2,000 crore and disbursed nearly half that amount. The big surprise was in 2012 when Credila received more than 90,000 online applications for a cumulative loan amount of over Rs 8,000 crore. "It was more than we could handle," says Anil Bohora, Chief Operating Officer at Credila. The company looks at applicants' credit worthiness, the repaying capacity of parents, collateral, and the institute they are applying to while scrutinising loan applications. ...In some ways, Credila mirrors HDFC's own journey. HDFC was founded by Deepak Parekh's uncle, H.T. Parekh, in 1977. It had the first-mover advantage as there was no other mortgage lender in the private sector at the time. But this wa...

From an ad by financial services firm Shriram City Union (in Businessworld issue dated 9 September 2013) Hello, Boss Here's to those who never needed to have someone down the corridor telling them what to do. Here's to those who never delegated upwards. Here's to those who only served one boss: Their Passion. Here's to those who never found themselves a job, because in a job they would have never found themselves. Click Here to download and view the original advertisement (scanned pdf ).  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. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter....

Bruce Kasanoff has a great post and slide show on LinkedIn If you are an entrepreneur - or intrapreneur - your first question needs to be: am I the right person to bring this idea to life?  If you are a marketing professional who doesn't understand code, you are not the one to "leapfrog Google" and launch the next generation search engine.  If you always take a three-week vacation in August, and two weeks at Christmas, you are not the one to "take down Oracle." (They are fierce warriors compared to you.)  If you are a genius at coding, but you can't work with an interface designer or pick a font to save your life, you are unlikely to create a top ten consumer app.   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,...

Cross posted from the Entrevista blog at http://www.entrevista.in Interview with Ratish Nair, Founding-CEO of Interactive Avenues (IA), the Mumbai-headquartered, Sequoia Capital India-backed digital marketing agency which was acquired in March 2013 by US- and Europe-based ad agency Interpublic. Interview focuses on the company's founding (5 co-founders who earlier worked at another digital agency Mediaturf); Angel Funding (from Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com); VC Funding and relationship with Sequoia Capital; and, of course, the Exit (how IA ran the process, the role of the VC, the role of the intermediary, internal dynamics, etc.). The interviewer is fellow entrepreneur Chandu Nair . (Chandu earlier founded, successfully raised venture capital for and exited from Scope eKnowledge, one of the earliest KPO firms in India.) The Audio (podcast) version can be downloaded from here   Other Highlights Synergistic Co-founding team How, having worked together in the past (a...

From an article by Avery Augustine in The Daily Muse: 1. They Have the Numbers to Back Them Up ...I’ve found it helpful to have some sort of tracking measure in place to stay aware of employees’ performance, like a spreadsheet to keep track of project closures and client feedback. This will allow you to see patterns emerge (e.g., “Jennifer always manages to exceed her sales goal during the last week of the month”), so you’ll be able to immediately pinpoint the employees who should be on track for promotions. 2. They Don’t Clock Out at 5 PM ...Pay attention to the employees who are willing to jump in wherever (and whenever) they’re needed. This doesn’t mean they always need to stay late—but it’s nice to know that in a pinch (and when given more responsibility), they won’t leave you or their clients in the lurch. 3. They Voice Solutions Instead of Complaints ...In doing this, your employee is proving that he or she is ready to step up and take responsibility for what goes on with ...