71 Learning Post my Company Got Acquired

Its been more then 6 months after our company got acquired. The day we got acquired, the next day I started putting them down what all I have learned over last 5 years on this start-up journey.

Sharing this now with larger audience. Please feel free to share your thoughts, feeling, observations and corrections.

1. Buddha is right , “ Life is about suffering , you cannot ignore it”. I belief “Try to choose your sufferings which you enjoy going through”.

2. Be radically honest with yourself and ignore self-bias. Whatever you want to do(your start-up idea), your mind will find stories and facts to prove to you that you are on right path and it will be a huge success. That’s where the trap is.

3. Be radically open-minded so that you can keep your ego at bay to take better decisions for yourself and your team.

4. Spend huge time in finding right kind of people to build your business & invest time in building relationship with them.

5. Go with the flow and learn to live life, even if things are not working in your start-up. Most days of your company building, you will face rejections, things will not move at the speed you want, and its OK. Find the balance between living your life and living with failure if your start-up journey.

6. Your co-founders are your biggest asset in building the company, choose them carefully. And invest in building that relationship.

7. The journey of building the company will going to be very difficult; don’t let good co-founders leave you. But take decision fast to part ways from those who cannot help building the company. (Remain as much human as possible during this). If you have to motivate your co-founder on doing action every day/every week, sit and talk before you go ahead.

8. Learn to be a
A.Good negotiator
B. How to be assertive
C. How to sell

9. Take good care of your health , exercise.

10. Invest alot in becoming self-aware. How to do it
- There is no definite recipe or framework for this
- Try getting different kind of experiences in life
- Identify the feelings, beliefs, behaviors and values that are driving your actions and validate them are they adding value.

11. Build a mindset that you want your employees to make lots of money. If they will make money, eventually you will also.

12. Building blocks of business is revenue and profit, not getting featured in media.

13. Don’t let your thought processes impacted by news coming from media houses. They are not bothered about your success or failure, they don’t have any idea what works and what doesn’t, they just put exciting bold headlines to get eye balls.

14. Invest in identifying the vision and purpose of your company along with your co-founder. And then align your product/service offering with your vision.

15. Make sure your co-founders and core team is fully aligned with the vision and purpose of the new company.

16. Making money is not a bad thing, but identify how much money you need to lead a good quality life till you die.

17. Stop chasing VC’s. If you can build a version 1.0 of your product, get initial revenue and the market you are playing at is huge, VC will chase you down.

18. Learn to be spiritual, but don’t let anyone define it for you, what spirituality means.

19. Find a mentor. If you are too shy to reach out to those who have been their and done that, read books.

20. Invest in enhancing your capability on daily basis. Read books, talk to industry experts of your domains & CEOs . Ignore Social media influencers who haven’t been there and done it.

21. Don’t get mad about your ambitions that your family is left behind and they starts feeling OK if you are not around. Balance up the things , always.

22. If you are an experienced leader in a corporate world and thinking of starting up on your own, don’t get your experience or biases run the show of your startup. How things worked in big company will never work in startup.

23. Always reward top performing employees with more money, rewards and equity.

24. Getting work done from employees and making them productive without forcing them to work beyond 10 to 12 hours is an art and science. Invest alot in finding frameworks, tools and managers that make your people work better and faster as team.

25. Ignore first time angle investor. Though they will get equity in company, they will keep thinking that they have given you a debt.

26. Get right VCs who are also interested in helping you build a great company. Generally VC interest and intent doesn’t align with your interest , if you want to build a profitable business.

27. Get equity distribution right at start of the company between co-founders. Keep 10% to 15% equality for ESOPs. Define ESOP terms which favour employees and help them make money in future.

28. Don’t go on a journey with a co-founder who is not committed full-time for the startup. It’s fine for a while, if one of the co-founder is working somewhere, while you are full time on startup journey.

29. Start the startup journey with people who you already know and have a good relationship(atleast 5 years). Otherwise invest time in building relationship first then building the company.

30. Don’t ever assume you know everything. You will pivot your offering many times.

31. It’s an advantage to have a founder- market fit. Read about it here

32. Choose your influencers carefully.

33. Read books, economist, business column regularly. It helps in understanding what is changing in the world and at your regional level.

34. Define roles and area of work clearly between the co-founders . Who is accountable to get results in which area.

35. Don’t enter a commodity market unless your product is not 10x better or 10x cheaper.

36. Learn to hire right people. This is so important but ignored many times. Identify which critical skills are required to build your business, and out of those skills, which skills are missing in your and your co-founder(s) and then hire those people(if you can afford); OR while those people are working somewhere else, given them small % of equity, which will be rewarded to them after say 1 to 2 years and include then in your team to fill those skill gaps. You cannot do everything on your own.

37. As founder, define the principles that what’s accepted and what’s not at workplace. And share the same with your employees. Keep revisiting it in 6 months or an year. These principles might turn into your company values.

38. As co-founders, learn how to articulate and communicate better. Most of the time you assume what you think and want to communicate is easily understood by your employees and customers. But most of the time, they dont get it what’s in your head. Read “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

39. Find a person to whom you speak your mind out and you get radically honest answers to your questions.

40. Learn to respond than react. We hear this a-lot, but practice seldom. The difference between reacting and responding is the gap of those few seconds when you let your feelings pass.

41. Learn to understand the unsaid from people. When people talk, there are underlying words , identify them.

42. Invest in establishing very good HR practices around payroll, hiring and performance once you have reached say 15+ people in your company.

43. Make sure you pay your employees on time, everytime.

44. Invest more time in fixing your business/revenue model that leads to faster and better distribution of your product/service.

45. Keep an eye on your costs. Don’t let them skyrocket. Cost will include your people cost, infra cost of your product, marketing cost which probably is not giving any ROI etc

46. Do proper market & customer research,talk to people in your target industry before you jump to build your product /service. When I say people, I mean end user and buyer/decision maker. Target to speak with atleast 10 such people. Don’t talk about your solution or product, validate the problem you are solving for them.

47. Find a right balance between “building the right product” and “how and where to sell faster”. Too much focus of all founders on “building product “ will lead to less eyeballs for your offering. And too much focus on “sales” of all founders leads to lower quality product.

48. Share monthly/quarterly updates with your teams on where we are going as company. One of the co-founders should take this responsibility of updating the team.

49. Keep your investors updated about your progress always.

50. Invest in getting the right organization structures once you cross team size of 50 and beyond.

51. Develop a thick skin. Your will get rejections every day. People will de-mean you every day. If you will take everything on you, it will impact you alot mentally and physically.

52. Develop the ability to take calculated but bold risks.

53. Never ever push decision onto your team as co-founder. Let data speak or if you don’t have data, discuss what needs to be done with being radically open-minded . Put down various options, with advantages and disadvantages of each option.

54. You will make lot of mistakes , your co-founders and employees will also make lot of mistakes. But develop a culture as founders and employees where people are able to accept the mistakes in open and you move forward as team.

55. Don’t lie about your capabilities to your co-founders. Sooner or later they will come to know about it and you will lose your face value. If you don’t know , it’s absolutely fine to accept your don’t know.

56. Celebrate small wins.

57. With so rejections on daily basis, most of the time you will feel that your startup is going to die tomorrow , learn to develop rock solid positive mindset. Keep a pulse on your co-founders and employees , when they are going in negative zone, and pull them from their as soon as you identify it.

58. Be ready to give at-least 36 months to your startup .

59. The problem you are trying to solve should be a painkiller then vitamin. This means it should be closer to customer actual need. The maslow hierarchy of developing a painkiller solution/product
• Helping customers improve topline
• Helping customer improve bottom line
• Helping customer improves their process and productivity

60. Distribution ,sales, revenue and profit are strongest moats then any another things.

61. Learn to put the purpose of your company existence which is for larger good then about just making money for co-founders. Its now impertive in today’s world.

62. Before you take on the start-up journey, work in a startup to understand the importance of speed, execution and how to survive. And work in a corporate to understand how a big company works and why process are important part of building a sustainable organization.

63. Believe in yourself more then what you do. At a same time, don’t lie to yourself.

64. Don’t just blindly follow and do what your competition is doing for the first 1 to 3 years . All of them are trying to figure out what to build, whom to sell , how to sell and how to do all these things with tremendous urgency.

65. Choose your battleground carefully. Ignore grounds where big players are already fighting hard to get market share.Spend time in identifying actual market gap and how you will play around that gap without getting noticed for long.

66. As a co-founder , It’s good if you have survival money for at-least 36 months to pay your bills

67. You will sooner or later identify that everyone (your co-founders and employees) have their own agenda. And their agenda is much more important that yours. Sooner all the agenda get aligned, better it is. And it’s ok if making money is the agenda, but if that’s the only agenda, then team might split very early or you end up creating toxic culture.

68. Building business or company is not cool as shown by media. It’s a very long journey with so many downs and few ups. But when you achieve few of those ups, you feel very fulfilling.

69. Align your company vision and product vision. And keep revisiting it every month/quarter. It will change for sure in the journey, but if your company vision and product vision don’t get aligned and adjusted with your learning, you might fail down the line.

70. Sales is the holy grail of building business. Learn it as fast as possible when you start. And sales is all about
A. Building trust with your customer
B. Giving value to your customer
C. Help the customer realize that value faster.

71. There are 3 levels of self-actualization of a person
1. When you LIVE Life for other — When you do things which other people want(other include society, your parents, expectations from peers and friends)
2. When you LIVE Life for self — When you do things which you want
3. When you LIVE Life for others — When you do things keeping in mind how it will help others. You are ready to plant those trees where others will take rest & enjoy those fruits.Entrepreneurship most of the time help you to accelerate you reaching at level by 10X speed.