startup

“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.”

“And I, it was a lesson that I really learned that you need to really detach yourself from what you're building because only when you detach, you can really see it from a different dimension and probably help it grow a lot bigger and assess the things that you'…”

“I think the great thing about doing a startup is, Not that you'll become rich, mostly you won't, but you will learn a lot about yourself, because you'll be forced to, because you'll be forced out of your comfort zone all the time, you'll be forced to do things…”

“I believe that engaging with them on one, once in a quarter is definitely not a good idea. I typically engage with them once every two weeks if not every week.”

“While the VCs are obviously interested in coming at an earlier stage, the number of startups is not grossly limited. So angel investors can still, even today find a lot of startups which are at a very early stage and are optimum or ideal for angel invest to co…”

“Don't ignore the potential of B to B to change people's lives. I know a lot of startups are looking to do amazing things and, ah, you know, really Give people access to products and services that have never existed before. You know, it could be counseling, it …”

“The greatest weakness of startups is that if you're not talking to the main guy, then You're not getting the same level of service, you're not getting the same level of attention, or they won't necessarily understand your business challenge”

“A lot of companies and products which are 20, 30, 50% better. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's bettering the state of the art, but that's better for an incumbent. That's better for somebody who already has distribution, already has cash flow, already …”

“Typically companies that come to us are one to two year old, they are angel invested so they have some traction”

“So if you have an idea that I want to do this, right, as a startup, sit on it for a hundred days. Let it sort of simmer in your head. And if you feel so passionately about it, even after a hundred days, there is something in it, then go and follow it.”

“The other thing is that I think I'm also made mistakes where I've invested into people who are kind of Corporate executives. And you know, just thought that corporate executives could build startups. I think those are the things. It goes back to the same rigid…”

“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…”

“So I think my expectation is that the you know, the time, To a series B is, is shrinking you know, from what it used to be because the execution is superior because people are making fewer mistakes, and doing more right things you know, in shorter time frames.”

“One of the things that will happen is I see also a wave of Consolidations and mergers, M&A, right? More the M side than the A side. Consolidation doesn't necessarily mean distress. I mean, good companies banding together, right?”

“My advice to people is that this is a time to back people. So let, let retrenchment or finding people will be The absolute last option because this is not a market where anybody is going to be able to go out and find a job. So figure out other ways and other m…”

“The impact of macro factors on very small enterprises and very small new innovative enterprises is reasonably small to start with. Right. We were, so while the economic situation was probably not not very amenable, macro factors like internet penetration in In…”

“I've actually I've not found a lot of examples where truly the company was doing well and deserved to raise capital and couldn't raise capital, right? Like, it largely could be traced to, like, either the cost structures or sort of getting ahead of where they …”

“Normally also if you see corporates, they take time to give receivables to startups. It's anywhere from 90 days to one 21 51 80 days, and they end up waiting for those receivables.”

“A better approach is to identify a very small problem, a very narrow problem that has a broad application, and then you can build a very big company. That is the ideal way for an entrepreneur to do a startup, and so what I recommend to people is even at the ri…”

“There are two kind of a points at which they change. The first point happens when the company starts generating steady state revenue... Second point where the board meetings change very dramatically is when the company has built out a full team. Because then y…”

“That's probably the worst thing. And, you know, VCs do is try to design the company for the next round of financing. Versus long term, you know, tenure success. Yes, I mean, you're really the next round. But you know, smart people, smart investors figure out w…”

“For most companies four, five, six years in, they're still just trying to figure it out, and they haven't even gotten out of their own J curve, if you will.”

“I don't think it's a large enterprise company that comes in after that. It's usually another startup.”

“Fundraising in the last few years is taking only longer. It's not taking shorter, right? Unless there are some of the larger unicorn kind of companies different, but for some of the other, most of the largest startup companies, it's requires enough capital in …”

“So the go to market and teams are an area in us where many startups actually flounder. And the problem becomes acute because at that time, you know, you may not have raised too much of capital and us is that way in our market where you need capital. So many ti…”

“I have a lot of friends that call me that want to invest in startups because they feel like your money is going to multiply and become a hundred X in like the next five years. And you know, it's really not like that.”

“We over glamorize startups too much. Not every startup has to change the world. Some startups could purely be built for a profit basis, which will in fact, you know, help the financial crisis of a lot of households. It will give financial liberty to a lot of h…”

“Enterprises have really long sales cycles. So as a young startup, imagine, you know, putting in nine months of effort in a sales process where you don't know whether you will get something or not. And because it's a much larger company, your entire leadership …”

“We have cut checks from a hundred K up to two million dollars.”

“When you see success closely, you realize that how much self-doubt exists between founders, how much board members actually doubt success of these own companies, how much employees are sometimes unhappy.”

“The great part about doing one creative activity well, whether that's a startup or a, Novel is that it takes all of what you have as a human being, I guess, and you pour it into that creative activity, and after that, in a way, the well runs dry.”

“We are probably seeing we are towards the top of an up cycle. Will there be some volatility? Absolutely. At the same time, the momentum will absolutely continue.”

“Enterprises have increasingly more appetite they recognize that they will not have all the solutions in-house, or your traditional enterprise tech providers may not have the solution, so they're quite willing to experiment and also partner with startups.”

“From a very happy and light workplace, which is creating magic, it started transitioning into a unhappy, miserable, little, but dark workplaces where there was a lot of focus on growth and valuation without really caring about what was happening to the humans …”

“I've seen so many companies that were kind of ahead of their time. And five years later, or 10 years later, you know not those companies, but other companies that were doing exactly the same thing, just because bandwidth became more available you know, just bl…”

“In this sprint of investing, I'm not able to really invest a lot of I mean, a lot of times I'm not able to invest in startups with just an idea stage. I mean, I would love to do that in startups, which is very early, but right now I have to look at a startup w…”

“And I kind of figured out the 50, 50 formula, that 50% debt, 50% equity. And from that 50% equity, half should go into startups and half should go into you know the traditional businesses into stock market.”

“I don't think any startup today can start a enterprise first business and really find product market fit in the first year or two years.”

“This is something that was not there 10 years ago, you know, getting to five, ten million dollars of revenue was itself a big achievement, but now we're seeing that happening, you know, in 12 to 18 months in some cases.”

“I think there are a lot, there are lots of yarn about, knowledge about how to start. I don't think there is enough knowledge about material about how to quit.”

“Somehow, you calculate in your mind, what is the worst case? Like, it will fail. The job is not going anywhere. Like, okay, I will be late for one or two years. But the job is always there.”

“There is no part time. There is no sort of ad hoc kind of solutions. That doesn't work. We have seen it, right? None of the startups would ever scale with that mindset.”

“This is the fact. No one can become two, four, five years.”

“And ultimately, I think in startups, if you keep trying, one of them would crack. So and I'm reasonably, reasonably confident saying that I would have achieved financial independence. Maybe the age would have differed. But that's because startups are a great w…”

“For second time entrepreneurs it is difficult in a different way, wherein I think they, because more often than not, they are financially free. So they paint a very idealistic picture of what they want to build. Almost like MBA, this is a large market opportun…”

“Because you feel like, okay, I can't do, like, I have to do a really great job with everything, you know, but in startups, you know, the velocity matters. Because if you have velocity, you can iterate faster, right? This is also like one of the, you know, the …”

“But I think now the trend is reversing will, where you'll start seeing companies going public when they maybe hit a thousand crores revenue or 15, 1500 crores revenue, et cetera.”

“If you have 50% investment from a company, then that company becomes your exit. Unless that company is an investment company.”

“Flipkart-Walmart deal didn't, what it did was, I think it suddenly Open the gates to startups. Yeah. I think suddenly a lot of people said, wow, this is like big money.”

“Earlier, it was usually just the large MNCs that were driving this change. Now it's like every Indian company also, SMEs, startups, all of them are coming to us and talking to us, then how do we get more women in and how do we get more women to stay and rise?”

“Today, anywhere between say, you know, 20, 23 to right now, and maybe for the foreseeable future as well. Any company, any startup that is being valued at more than a hundred million dollars. I mean, forget about, you know, our unicorns. They are all being val…”

“No startup can literally think of having a great office in the initial period. And that's how Mumbai lost out.”

“We have three, I would say quite big hubs nowadays, which is UK. I mean, UK was for a long time, the capital finance and also the location of most of the bigger VC funds still like, I would say there are less startups now, which found and go to the UK to found…”

“One of the things that I've observed in some of our best companies is the thing that the founders think is going to be the competitive advantage at the start actually turns out to be the competitive advantage only for a short period of time, but that allows th…”

“I would say maybe 10 or 15% at most because startups, if you look at the history of startups one out of 10 succeed. So your chances of success are much less than if you go into the stock market and look at companies that already have a proven record of success…”

“There's not really a role for a leader in a startup that's, you know, you got to get your hands dirty. You got to roll up your sleeves. You have to have vision. You have to be directive. You know, and so I think, you know, being a CEO leader at an, you know, a…”

“From what he did for startups and from how passionately he spoke about startups, I could see that he believed that the future of India, a large part of the future of India would come through startups that young people like you are setting up within this countr…”

“Close to a hundred to a 120 startups in the last two years have emerged after opening up, and they're all now becoming suppliers to Israel.”

“Uncertainty is actually a moat for startups. And I would differentiate uncertainty from risk. Risk is something that you can model on an Excel file. Risk is what you can say. I have a five percent chance of failure and so on. And if you're able to quantify ris…”

“As per me, sweet spot is if you're able to find, let's say one or two direct competitors with some customers, That validates the problem exists, but also validates that it's just very nascent where the, if the whole market grows, your company will grow with it…”

“Diversity value systems are great for democracy if you're running a country, but if you're running a startup like a democracy, you'll never end up making any decision with a fast enough speed that a startup requires.”

“Diversity of experiences is very valuable. So if everyone comes with a different history of what they know, then obviously as a team, you know, a lot more than what you would know individually, but a diversity of value system very early on in startup is, is no…”

“Startups are perfect for commercializing what knowledge exists, and that, that's what it should do. But fundamental research, of course, companies like SpaceX exist. But I don't think startups should pursue that.”

“I agree to this thing Sam Altman's view that build something which is really, really hard. You'll be able to hire great talent which likes working on hard problems. Just because problem is hard when you're actually going selling to customers, there won't be a …”

“Switzerland has a stock exchange, but it's not really well suited for startups, right? And if you don't have enough revenues, don't have enough valuation, then no way to even have a chance.”

“As in this corridor, what will happen is people will not need to raise a hundred million to scale up. I think you can get to things quicker and probably change that cycle that was going on in general.”

“I thought that large companies can do a lot And so startups, the startup will fail, that startup will fail, and that was a stupid mistake that I did for many companies. I think large companies move at their own pace, and that's why entrepreneurial energy is im…”

“Incumbents have the advantage of a lot of data, right? But they also have the baggage that often the data is not very clean. So as you build your models, as you build your foundation models, et cetera, are you relying on good data or not, right? Whereas a star…”

“I would say it's a timing. You know, I know traditionally we have grown up hearing time is money. I think That may be true, but I think timing is money. So if you time your startups, if you time your stories, I think.”

“Usually I stay away from startups, like the core zero trust foundation, and identity management, and like the data loss prevention and all those things. I stick with the core established companies, but anything a layer on top of it that is going to help us wit…”

“So then we realized, you know what, rather than going back and forth for two, four weeks, and at the end of the cycle, they accepted 95% of our needs anyway, right? So I said, why are we doing this convoluted way? Why don't we just give them our document like …”

“If I come across a startup which is not backed by VCs, I typically, for me, it's a red flag. Typically, it's a red flag for me.”

“When you are a general manager at a large company of a division, you're not a financial center. Somebody else is doing the financial plan. In the startup, you know, the founder CEO has to be a financial center.”

“Most companies, again, set aside the outliers. Most companies that find wild success find it pretty soon, find it pretty early. They find it because they were in a good market. They find it because the founder had an earned secret that they could use to build …”

“Startups usually do not hire people with like MBAs and who would come from management consulting for their, in their mind you guys, you know, all about process and data and analysis, but as a startup, you do none of that, right? A startup is all about taking a…”

“I do believe that if you're getting someone new into the business, micromanage for the first three, six months because context is the thing in a startup, right? Because your documentation is not great. Your processes are not great, et cetera.”

“In startups, especially if a, if an individual is not delivering in the first six months, there's no chance they'll deliver. You might have hired someone thinking of the next five years, but if that individual is not like able to cross the line in the first, I…”

“The advantage is towards startups who get this right. Because I can't imagine an existing behemoth going back and saying, okay, now I already have your trust in you know, reliability and everything. I can take care of that, but I'm going to reinvent and now be…”

“If you're incremental of what is already there and you have an FD model and, you know, bad cost structure, you literally have the worst of all worlds basically.”

“Yes, while this has done a lot to the execution part, it does not really seem to have speeded up the innovation and the invention part, because theoretically, imagine you speed up everything, then who cares? There are 10 times the number of venture-funded star…”

“When you find someone who actually is addicted to pain, they tend to perform really well at startups and they tend to make great leaders. They tend to grow very quickly. And our thesis has always been find these people and make them celebrities in the company.”

“People that are good natural writers do well because in a chaotic environment, you need to be able to distill your thoughts, present them in written form, And then really disseminate that across the org as quickly as possible.”