founders

“So I, my own belief is that it is less about the founders and more about the kind of market That these startups are operating in.”

“Founders sometimes see it as a little bit of intrusion that investors trying to kind of control or getting into too much.”

“I also think investors don't want To operate the business. As long as they get the confidence that you're operating the business, and add the principles that they have committed in turn to their, you know, partners, et cetera that becomes a smoother relationsh…”

“The guys who need you the most are the ones who are lagging behind for whatever reason, right? Either they're selling a tough sell or they're not able to raise money. So how's, you're not actually even the mean or the average of all of these. You're actually s…”

“Accept the fact that you could be wrong. You will be wrong all the time, and that's fine. It's okay. But if you get rigid and forced in your way and know my way or the highway or everyone else in the world is an idiot, Ah, my customers are stupid. They don't u…”

“As much energy as the founder spend on bringing in capital, they have to spend as much energy in exiting capital. That's number one. It is not something that can be left to other people.”

“So I think it is very important that when you Decide to partner with someone and I'm sure whether as a founder or co-founder or anything else, you need to have some degree of history with the person because it's a difficult relationship. I mean, any partnershi…”

“Many times people blame investors, but a lot of times I feel founders don't take the process very seriously. Whether you know, and I don't know exactly why, because I assume they want to get the capital in fast, but you know, you have to understand that there …”

“And what we've seen is that if you're doing business, you're executing businesses which are all still tech-enabled, but require, ah, a lot of last mile execution, may not be physical infrastructure, but you're still trying to acquire a supply side or demand si…”

“I like to equate this with Brahma and Vishnu, which is, one is the visionary and the thinker, and other is the person who makes it, converts vision into execution. When this fusion happens in founders, then you tend to see very good outcomes, because no one pe…”

“If you see the Nasdaq downturn, It was actually quite prolonged. It was for more than two years. And in those kind of downturns, even the best of founders may flounder simply because, you know, it's very hard to sustain a business over two, three years of a do…”

“The biggest challenge being a founder is to be able to live without the typical validations that you get being employed”

“I, I'm sure every founder goes to bed at night imagining the way that their company can thrive, but also wakes up in the middle of the night imagining ways that their companies can die. And that's just natural, but sometimes that also gets in the way of work a…”

“And I think more conventionally, the right approach is to just try to get as much help around a founder as possible. And usually the first step is to bring in Management team members or people on the team that augment and bring capabilities or experiences or r…”

“Venture and angel investing is all about constantly unlearning these patterns that exist between different founders, because every successful founder has a lot of anti-signals that you would have seen so far.”

“The founder strength will become the biggest weakness of the company because the founder has no time, right? The founder can't be a vertical owner at all. The founder has to be somebody who owns the whole company, right?”

“The zero to one, the founder's role is the product. They shouldn't, you should not hire a product manager in zero to one. You are the founder is the owner of the product, right? One to hundred, the founder's role is business system scaling, right? Your whole s…”

“And investors try to keep that, keep founders and early teams in poverty for longer. They feel like that person will put in Jeejaan for their cost. It's a bad idea because your burnout risk is high.”

“No company can be successful if you are the only firefighter, if you are the only problem solver, if you are the smartest in the room, right?”

“In fact, honestly, what I've seen is all the high speed ones, which have been about with they don't go places.”

“At least at the stage of one to 10 where we are, I think founders should be closer to where the customers are.”

“If you don't raise the capital for scale, you'll never think scale. So then you're always thinking how am I going to optimize that little money I have and keep growing and it becomes very difficult out there.”

“If they have a sense of design and empathy, Then they'll figure it out. And design would mean that they'll reduce friction with the end user, but also they'll think about design of the organization and design of the sales force and design of marketing and all …”

“Many, many time founders, They start to get pushed by the company because they're not evolving fast enough, and yet there are others who actually pull the company because they're evolving faster than the company.”

“You cannot teach this behavior. This is something which is some founders are born with, right?”

“If you become a founder long enough, you become more pessimistic at later stages, especially the ups and downs that you've gone through as a founder.”

“Raising capital is a founder's responsibility and also arranging exit is a founder's responsibility too, because people who are putting money into our companies they also raise money from other LPs. And they also have back to back arrangements with those LPs. …”

“I think media induces a lot of competition and envy. I think envy is a very bad feeling for anybody to have, not just founders. And so, you know, it's a feeling which doesn't benefit anyone. You know, at the end of the day, you are envy of someone, but you can…”

“If I can't hang out with the founder who I've invested in, I will not invest. Because if the founder is not willing to share, he is not open, he is not coachable, he is not adaptable, he is not somebody who's sort of, like, thinks of me as, hey, I respect your…”

“Most founders, when they dilute too much, they become irrelevant and get kicked out of their companies in 10 years, which happened to some of the names that we mentioned, and then they don't get the remaining 40 X because you know, the real juice is when you b…”

“When it comes to a trade off between a founder and a professional CEO, I mean, if you look at the track record of, you know, the hundreds of companies, you know, in US, in China, in India, I think the choice is very, very clear. When you look at the track reco…”

“VC firm is made up of individuals, right? And if those individuals haven't tasted failures or haven't tasted dirt or tasted zero in their life in the past their reaction to failure would be very negative, and rather than, you know, backing the founder at the t…”

“Most top tier firms are very ruthless when it comes to their own economics. They will not Follow on or lead a subsequent round unless they really truly believe independently. That is a good decision for the company. And so a so it means just because you got th…”

“I think you definitely, one of the biggest mistakes some VCs do is always be really nice to the founders and not tell them what the market realities are or what they're seeing out there. You know, you can't be, you know, be a great VC by being, by playing a po…”

“Generally, we are not the highest price payers... Often what happens is our peer group is paying much more. And then we will tell the founder, we are not in at that price and believe it or not, the price actually comes down. It doesn't come to our price or it …”

“When your CXOs are actually, they know that they're going to be chopped in two or three quarters, they start taking very short-sighted steps actually, which is harmful in long run. Maybe short run, it might show some results, but founders have that luxury.”

“I think very few founders are like super friendly to their teams. Most of the time we are pushing the team to the brink. You know, constantly, right?”

“The number one thing for founders, right? No matter what your brand is, how much value you have, whatever you do, the valuation matters, what price you're giving them money at, how much ownership you're taking. That is the first priority for them. Everything e…”

“We see, I think I feel half of it is a sales job. You're selling yourself to the founder when you're selling yourself to LPs that's a large part of your job.”

“So what not to build is really to not to build the Things that you feel very passionate about, unless you're very, very super sure that that passion is shared by a wider community.”

“Many investors, specifically entrepreneur investors are essentially looking for people like themselves, and they're looking for their own qualities in those people in some way.”

“I have seen a lot of founders who, when they are raising and they're talking to so many people, they play yes man to VCs. So they might have a different opinion, but they're like, okay, this person is 80% agreeing to what I'm saying. 20%, there's a conflict. C…”

“When founders are not financially secure, and let's say they put in five, six years in the company. They became, they become so fearful as this is a hundred percent of what they own. Yeah. This is a hundred percent of what they own. They cannot let it go becau…”

“Sometimes, very good founders, when they are operating in bad spaces, that bias comes in, that why is this founder operating in this space? And that is why the judgment on the founder becomes mixed.”

“Eventually the founder is in the command of the ship. Right? And if there are more than one commanders, you will likely end up Having an accident, so you need to step away, but that's part of, like, my transitioning also to make sure that I'm not stepping into…”

“Then the right process as a VC firm, Is if you like the founder, then you have to track the pivots as well.”

“So, I think those are the biggest low moments for any founder, when you think you're building, building something meaningful, and you're not getting a response they're looking for.”

“Even if a founder has raised multiple early rounds, Sid, ah, the founder, the exec team, and the larger team should never be paid the market salary.”

“One thing which every founder should capitalize on is that anything, any company that has stayed on for a long time, their technology is old. They are an old tech stack. And, ah, they, ah, you know, all the workers, especially the newer workers who are coming …”

“When you ask Anybody who's good, would you have me make it easier for you? Or would you have me give you more work to do so that it's uncomfortable? The highest performers, 100% of the time say, I would have you give me more work. I would have you load me up. …”

“Founders should be maniacal about some arbitrary thing in the product. And never, ever let go of it, because it gives them the perspective on the system that they'll lose the day they give it up.”

“Great founders don't build markets. They find markets that exist and then they quickly raid those markets.”

“If you have never taken something from zero to one and you've only ever actually worked in large companies, Then you are at a disadvantage in trying to navigate the early years of your own company. It's just way harder to know what good looks like.”

“Obviously, a successful founder has to pivot. If they don't pivot, you know, then you're dead in water anyways, right? Now, what you pivot on matters a lot, right? So the first archetype, when you're tied on a problem, they will usually pivot through industrie…”

“It is not necessary, and it is not sufficient, but it is one of the most valuable skills that a founder can have, because founders ultimately have to tell the story of their company. It is possible to build companies without being a great storyteller. If you h…”

“We try to prep them a little bit, but you know, we all kind of talk about this is like, we don't want to coach the founders too much. We want to see them how they are, see how raw they are, see how they present, how they handle themselves.”

“It's a weird like dichotomy, right? Because at some level you want them to go search for the truth and not be happy ears. At the same time, you need to be outrageously optimistic to build a business, you know, because it's going to suck along the way. And for …”

“I want them to be able to convince people who in a rational world would not be joining your company to be able to join your company. Right. Because you're going to pay them less. You're going to make them work more. There's more risk with this company, but the…”

“The constraint actually is not capital, as I've realized over time, there's a lot of money in this world. The constraint is talent. Right. There's a lot of people who want to start companies. So that's not the constraint. There's very few people that are reall…”

“The biggest opportunity for founders is to become an educator. Become the person who all the customers look to as the expert.”

“Don't worry that somebody is going to leave and go to your competitor and take that information. By the time information is useful to that competitor, you will have done something else.”

“Radical transparency actually isn't a risk. It's actually an unburdening of your stress.”

“The difference between a company with a half a billion outcome and a ten billion outcome is just purely the hunger, ambition, and fearlessness of the founder.”

“Definitely worth spending extended time in the Bay. I don't think like short three, four days, two week trips help because you need to let serendipity happen. You need to come spend some extended time, go to a bunch of events. Many of those events will be low …”

“At the end of the day, what really drives that conviction is that direct one-to-one interaction with the founders, and if we see that founder truly growing in every meeting, and, you know, every time you meet them, they have a new set of answers, and you feel …”