If you are a small team, starting out to solve a problem, having a mission is hardly a concern. What must concern you at that stage is getting to the product market fit and customer validation. But even after building a successful product and scaling the business to a sizeable extent, many startups hardly articulate a compelling mission for themselves. With early signs of success, founders...
Noida/India, March 2015: Typical startup scene. Cash running out, existing product not scaling fast enough to excite Series A investors and the worse part, need to let go some awesome employees who believed in our vision & promises. For a few nights I couldn’t sleep properly in the hope of getting that “one” idea which could give us a new direction and the enthusiasm to keep going. During all...
The globalization of new ventures, be they from advanced or emerging economies, may sound like an oxymoron: how can a young firm with limited resources go global? Research by various academics, including my own for over a decade in India, UK, US and latterly China, shows that in many cases the answer is: by leveraging network relationships. Entering international markets typically entails...
The emergence of an IP and technology-based leader from India will have a bigger long-term impact than a few Indians heading major global corporations Isn’t it strange that we were obsessed with happenings at Google while the really momentous news of the coming of age of a serious desi challenger got lost in the noise? Sundar Pichai and Google News of Sundar Pichai’s ascension to the Google...
As founders, many of us had to learn skills that don’t come naturally. Some responsibilities are better handled by your co-founders and other team members. You may be an amazing engineer, but a weak product manager. You may be a great product manager, but terrible at sales. And then there’s the universal challenge that every founder has to deal with – hiring. Founders have an internal compass of...
Nothing can be done solo. Everything can be done with the right team. I meet dozens of people in Bangalore, who when they realise I am an entrepreneur ask me my two cents on starting up. Some of them have started up, some are about to and many want to sometime soon. If there is one thing common between many of them – it is the lack of a great team. Or any team at all. I see people with great...
I had started InBoundio in Jan 2013. After doing lot of freelancing, services and building casual hobby products, this was my first serious attempt in building a web product and business. This also made me took a dive into core technology as earlier I only had surface knowledge of technology. It did well and got reasonable success. We did plenty of iterations with product feature and pricing and...
Last week a very interesting free e-book called “Software Paradox” was trending on Hacker News. The premise of the book is, that the value of software as a product is diminishing, but the value of software as an enableris rising. Pure play software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle are fading in comparison to rising stars such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and newer ones like Uber...
The first few customers (or users) usually set the tone for your startup. They are the ones with either acute pain or the burning problem, and the earliest of early adopters. Usually, I have found that most entrepreneurs get their early customers because of the relationship they have with them OR they solve a really pressing problem for their customers. When I talk to most entrepreneurs, one of...
What is common to Cisco, Oracle, Google, Apple and WhatsApp? Besides being some of the most iconic technology companies in history, all these marquee firms share one more thing in common – an investor named Sequoia Capital. Sequoia Capital is arguably the most prestigious VC firm on the planet and its chairman, Michael (Mike)Moritz is undeniably a legend in the tech investment arena. In a...
