Archive for the ‘team’ Category
Is your company fundable? What do VCs look for?
I meet a lot of young bright people in India that have an idea and want to be part of the startup lifestyle. A lot of them come to me for advisory roles or to be a sounding board. The number of teams I meet that I get excited about are just so few and far in between. I am sure VCs who see a lot more startups than I do probably feel the same way and hence the high rejection rate of startups that don’t make the cut for funding – about 99% in India. This got me started to think about what are the things that I personally believe that are the secret ingredients of an exciting startup that VCs want to fund. Before I address these topics let us make sure we understand the term Venture Capital.
Building a Kick Ass Team – Part I
Surround yourself with people smarter than you and see the impossible become possible. Startup founders who have built the biggest baddest companies have lived by this philosophy and proven time and again that it is possible for small groups of people to impact the world. Take the case of Google, Facebook or Twitter and all of them have one thing in common, there are small groups of great people impacting the entire planet in a very profound manner.
In the Indian context, we are just starting to realize that the next generation of leaders will not be the grey haired tenured industry veterans or people that went to cram schools with a roster of degrees and brands like IIT and IIM. The next generation of leaders in India will be young people with a dream that could assemble other young people and go change the world. The US went through this revolution and the Valley is a place where there are so many examples of young people just taking on the world and making the impossible possible. In the valley, people are not measured by their fancy degrees or their age. People are measured by what they can contribute. I love an article written by Paul Graham titled “After Credentials” – if you don’t follow Paul Graham, now would be a nice time to do so (piece of advice – don’t get carried away by his LISP can change the world rant). The article refers to a culture like ours where kids are pressured by parents to go to cram schools to prepare for entrance exams to the esteemed institutions of IIT and IIM, or the so called elite services (Civil services IAS etc) that make up the bureaucracy in India is a culture of credentials. The culture of judging people by their credentials and not by their performance is just broken. We cannot recreate silicon valley in India if we continue down this broken path of hiring people with credentials instead of people that perform into teams. I have several life lessons to share here that have made me a big believer in this theory as well.
