The Startup Journey

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...

From a guest post on OnStartups by Paul DeJoe, founder at Ecquire. ...You start to respect the Duck. Paddle like hell under the water and be smooth and calm on top where everyone can see you. You learn the hard way that if you lose your cool you lose. ...You begin to see how valuable creativity is and that you must think differently not only to win, but to see the biggest opportunities. You recognize you get your best ideas when you're not staring at a screen. You see immediate returns on healthy distractions. ...Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire. When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, it's a feeling that can't be explained. The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you. It's why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important. This learning will affect your lif...

“My wife walked out of the house last week. I’ve known her for 7 years and we’ve been married for 5years and now I feel our relationship is purely transactional. I’m consumed by my startup and think about it every waking minute. Am obsessed with it and want to make it a roaring success. My wife works in the financial services industry and she too works long hours. We moved to Bengaluru from Mumbai so that our quality of life would be better. She travels on work and so do I. I get back home late and she’s either in bed or on her laptop. There’s no time for anything else. I don’t or can’t talk to her about the pressures I’m under. Don’t think she’ll understand. I keep responding to emails and SMS messages  when I’m home. I don’t want to lose out on any business opportunity. She wants children and I am not sure I’m ready to be a dad till my startup is done. Am depressed and lonely. But I cannot give up on my startup dream. What should I do?” So said the 31 year old CEO of a s...

“Five years before we took in venture capital in our family owned company, we’d decided that ownership and management had to be kept separate. The chairman of the company was the well known retired Chairman of a very well known publicly listed company. We had independent Board members and the CEO, a family member, was evaluated by the Board regularly and his compensation decided by an independent sub-committee of the Board. There were no other family members employed in the company which was run by competent professionals. This ensured that sticky situations involving reporting relationships, performance appraisals and the like were avoided. Other family members ran their own companies which had to bid for and secure business from this company as any other company would. All things being equal, we gave preference to our family company. But the operative term is “all things being equal” These were the words of the scion of a well known family owned company in India. But then how many co...

The CEO had been in conversation with several potential senior hires for his startup. At least 3 recruitment firms were on the job for him. Somehow the “right” candidate hadn’t yet crossed his radar. He was getting, quite naturally, frustrated. If a candidate had the right experience, he didn’t have the right attitude. If another had the right attitude, then the competency was deemed inadequate. If both attitude and competency seemed right, compensation became a stumbling block! Most companies, and especially, startups have an immensely challenging time finding the right talent. India has a large number of people, but a small number of appropriately qualified people. “Qualified” not by way of being able to brandish a degree, but in terms of having the right mix of experience, competencies, skills and attitude. Given that the India growth story is just unfolding across multiple sectors of the economy, it is natural that a critical mass of trained and experienced manpower has yet to emer...

The founder was agitated. He had just read in the papers that some VCs had funded a company that appeared to compete head-on with his company. Some of his partners had also recently told him that other companies had contacted them with a better value proposition than what he had offered. And they were therefore re-thinking their position. A couple of his employees had also left to join a competing firm. It seemed that the whole market was, all of a sudden, conspiring against him! After all, he was the first company in the market (and the only company, as far as he knew). What was going on? What was going on is all too common in the world of startups. Founders usually believe that their companies are unique. In fact, so unique that they believe there’s no competition of any kind whatsoever. Which is why VCs get to see pitches where the entrepreneur has positioned only his company in the top right quadrant of the familiar 2by2 market positioning landscape! Two of the most important thing...

Social anthropologists have determined that the impact of a dominant culture on a constrained (either self-imposed or externally imposed or a combination) culture is such that over time the dominant culture so subsumes the other culture leaving it as a poor carbon copy version of itself. Indian culture too has been constrained and inhibited for several generations for reasons of history and bad policy. In the India of the 21st century, there’s rapidly growing self-esteem and great opportunity ahead- critical ingredients for original thinking and innovation. One of the most critical attributes of an entrepreneur’s personality is self-esteem. The desire to achieve, the ambition, confidence, and drive all flow from this core personality trait. People with a manic desire to prove to themselves and to the world that they “can do it” are the ones who can weather storms, deal with crises and plug away at making their aspirations come alive. All great entrepreneurs are people with high self-e...

Early last year, I met a startup team that was building the next great mobile application. They had built a system that could offer mobile social networking to end consumers. The team had great technologists including a few successful entrepreneurs among them. They were convinced that their system would be the next great thing for consumers; they were supremely confident (bordering on overconfidence) about the uniqueness of their offering. This company was trying to build a company focused on the end-consumer as their customer. This meant that they had to build a brand, build a system that would be ridiculously easy for consumers to use, have a mechanism that would keep attracting people back to them, and figure out a way to make money. Of course, companies like Google and MySpace were their role models. The team had enormous expertise in building and running systems for businesses, selling and marketing to businesses and supporting business customers. They however had no experience in...