Category Archives: Management

Learning, Management, Mentors

The one piece of advice I’d give myself from 15 years ago

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“Skills are overrated, Connections are invaluable”.

Fresh out of school and eager to ‘conquer the world” I wish I focused a lot less on picking up “Analysis”, “Critical thinking”, “Strategy”, “Time Management”, “Project Management” skills and instead focused on “building and growing connections with people”.

I get 2-3 people emailing me to be their mentor every day. Most of these folks are young, fresh out of school and are at a large company – most times a tech company like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.

Since I have very little time, I schedule 15 min when I can with them to help them learn what I did not learn, but wish I had 15 years ago.

Most young people focus on picking up “skills” or “intellectually stimulating global assignments” like a stint in China or India, etc. so they can be a well rounded individual. Then I try to push them towards entrepreneurship.

At this point, they usually (90% of them) tell me the dont think they have the skills to be an entrepreneur and point to their lack of sales, marketing, branding, positioning, coding, scaling, hiring, interviewing, motivating, etc. Any number of skills that they believe they dont have yet to be an entrepreneur.

Here’s the thing – skills are easy to develop for “most” people. If you are at a company like Microsoft or Google (or any other large company), you are reasonably skilled already. Else, they would have not hired you.

Focus your attention on building networks and connections with people instead at these places. There are folks who will be there building careers for the next 15-20 years there. They will get to important positions, just because they are there for so long. You will need their help at some point.

The other way I have found is to offer help on projects that executives have which they will never get to but are keen to execute. Offering your time and smarts towards that helps you build a relationship with top executives.

Build connections and networks not skills.

Hiring, Learning, Management

How to be a better manager – providing feedback to your direct reports and employees

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There are 3 types of behaviors when it comes to managers giving feedback to the people that work for them.

1. I’ll give you no feedback – little praise, no criticism until the year-end when I have to do reviews.

2. I’ll give you unvarnished feedback immediately when I hear something from others you work with or from my own interactions. As it happens, often and early.

3. I’ll watch the interactions, notice behaviors and patterns and give you feedback every so often – weekly, monthly, quarterly and avoid “the last thing I heard syndrome”.

It is obvious that #3 is the best way you can be a manager. Feedback is very important to employees. They want to know what they are doing well and what they need to improve. As a manager you are at one of the best positions to tell them that. After all most people spend more interaction time with their managers and peers than their spouse (which is unfortunate, but true).

The rule of thumb to follow to give feedback as a manager is to watch for “lines not dots“. I love that phrase from Mark Suster.

Ideally you have the chance to talk to, watch and get feedback about an employee over a good period of time (ideally a month, but I have seen folks do it over a week or even over a quarter) and then make sense of the patterns.

The first kind of manager is absolutely useless, but tragically more folks like those exist in the corporate and startup world that we’d like to admit. This kind of manager is obsessed with “results” alone to provide no developmental feedback to their employees. If numbers are good, they will let employees get away with murder (figuratively) but if they are bad, then everything is suspect.

The second kind is sightly better, but not by much. They give raw, unvarnished, ball-by-ball, running commentary on the employee’s actions – from others, from their own interactions and from random folks as well. The reason it is useless is because they dont help detect patterns – they only remember the “last” thing someone said and repeat that. So, if there was something about an employee not responding to one email, that one person said, on time, this type of manager would rake your coals over that, even if that’s not the usual pattern of that employee.

The third type of manager is the evolved one. They listen, keep notes and keep both anecdotes and feedback for the employee in a file or in email so when the monthly or quarterly review period comes, they can provide both data and concrete examples.

These types of managers will be the most appreciated in your startup. They “invest in the lines and not the dots”. They look for patterns and observe behavior over a period of time, instead of giving conflicting feedback over even a small period, and unwilling to understand the behavior of the employee.

It takes a lot of effort to be that type of manager. They are very valued because they invest in their employees.

The trick I use to keep track is send myself emails with the Subject line having the name of my direct report. I have filters setup for the name as well. Every so often (I do it monthly) I will go and review all the emails I sent to myself about that employee and look to summarize the feedback. Then I also keep not of the anecdotes so I can help them recall behavior and suggest some corrective action if it needs to happen or kudos if that’s in the order.

What is the hack you use to help provide feedback to your employees?

Entrepreneurship, Management, SaaS

A #contrarian view on how the customer validation phase should fine tune your #startup business model

The trend from users (businesses and consumers) wanting to buy services – software enabled services, instead of software is accelerating more than ever in my observation. Previously things that most folks would sell as software is now being packaged and sold as a service that solves a problem and is a solution than a packaged piece of software.

In the 90’s and 00’s the solution to a business problem was to develop, deliver and sell software, which was either sold as a license or an annuity. SaaS then came about to provide a change in both the pricing model and the deployment model.

The trend is more pronounced in the consumer portion of the business. Let me give you a few examples and then go into detail of one case study that I discussed with some entrepreneurs Utah.

Take the case of Uber. A decade or two ago, the prevailing model would have been for Uber founders to build the software and then try to sell it to taxi companies and help them service their customers more efficiently. They instead chose to be a “full stack” company and own the consumer experience and recruit drivers to their program.

Another example is Zillow. Instead of providing software to real estate brokerages or individual brokers, they turned the model on its head to go direct to consumers and be a lead generation engine for brokers.

Finally on the enterprise side, HackerRank is a product as an example that a decade ago, would have sold software to companies that helps them manage, deliver and attract software developers with challenges. They prefer to directly attract software developers to their platform and then engage with potential recruiters to help match the top puzzle solvers with companies that are looking to hire them.

Note that in all these cases, the companies are purely software companies, but their business model is predicated not on selling packaged software, but a set of services to end consumers.

I speak to entrepreneurs worldwide, who have heard the phrase “software is eating the world” and then immediately assume that the only way to deliver software and build their business is to sell either a subscription business to the hosted solution or to sell packaged software (yes, there are still folks that think this is the way to go). That is no longer the case and you will find in most instances, investors will prefer full stack companies to software business models in the next decade.

Only hosting your product and providing a SaaS solution does not make your business model different.

That begs the question, how does one go about creating and building a service business instead of a purely software business?

I think the most important phase of your startup journey to figure this out, is when you do your customer development and validation.

During the customer validation phase you will find many potential customers not willing to buy what you sell them (software). That’s usually because they don’t have the problem you articulated.

There are two types of problem articulation strategies. One set of folks articulate the problem they think customers have and another set share examples of the questions potential prospects have.

Let me give you an example of a company I met yesterday.

They are folks that run a theme park who had built software to better manage their park and generate better profits and returns. They were keen to sell software that helps manage a theme park to other owners of theme parks.

When they spoke to potential customers and said they had ERP software to help with theme park management, most potential customers did not care. Their customers did not have a problem that required software.  When we got talking, and drilling down to the real problem, it turns out that 20% of a theme parks budget annually was spent on renewing customers.

So, most park owners had a marketing and a renewal problem not a software problem. When they went to the customers with an end to end solution to help streamline renewals and still had software at the back-end to manage the renewals their message seemed more appealing to theme park owners. Suddenly the problem was not software for automating the theme park but a solution to help remove a key headache and a solution to one of their key problems – Renewals.

The startup still wanted to only be a software company so they were not too keen to take on all the hassles of renewal processes, so I suggested they outsource the other aspects of the renewal process to other companies.

Having control of the end to end renewal process, now gives the company the data and analytics to build another stream of revenue to help end customers get discounts on other services they would like and give the theme park owner a cut of that revenue.

That’s the future. Software enabled services will be the primary business model for the next decade or so. Instead of selling it as a software product (either SaaS or otherwise), I encourage entrepreneurs to look at business models in more depth during their customer validation phase.

Management

A comparison of business software review sites: Credii, ITCentral, G2Crowd, BestVendor and GetApp

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There are an estimated 5K to 10K SaaS and enterprise software companies that provide solutions for small, mid-sized and enterprise companies.

The large IT analyst companies such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC, EMR and Burton Group have made a $billion business out of evaluating and ranking these vendors on a magic quadrant or waves.

Over the last few years a host of companies have tried to disrupt the evaluation, comparison, review and ranking portion of the business.

The companies, G2Crowd, Credii, ITCentralStation, BestVendor and GetApp all pretty much offer a similar service with a few twists. The ability for business users to review, evaluate and filter the software solution for the based on their custom need.

Given the explosion of startups (thanks to the lower cost of starting a company), there are tons of choices for any buyer of software and many deployment models as well – mobile app, mobile web, SaaS, etc.

I had a chance to look at all these companies, and the intent was to review them from the point of view of a buyer of technology. I was initially looking for the best Early stage private company database, and stumbled upon one of these websites and went to research and see if there were others as well providing Yelp-type reviews for startups in a “crowd sourced” way.

There are 3 different approaches taken by these companies. While G2Crowd, ITCentral station and Best Vendor are more crowdsourced platforms, where any user can write a review and rate the vendors, Credii is more like a “Analyst on Demand” or ” Analyst as a Service” solution. GetApp is a pure marketplace and seems to want to follow the App store model with some reviews, but more a listings website.

There were 3 things I was looking for when searching for a database of startups – first a good comprehensive listing of vendors, followed by analysis of their features and pricing, and finally reviews and recommendations by users like me.

Of the 5 solutions (none of who are comprehensive) I found Getapp to have the most listings – for other solutions than the one I was looking for. G2Crowd was a close second. The rest were pretty poor in the comprehensive nature of their coverage of a domain or the products within a domain.

In terms of analysis of features and pricing, company information, I found g2Crowd the best, but Credii very comprehensive. The limited nature of editorial reviews in the other sites, make them hard to take seriously.

Finally in terms of user reviews, getApp was the best by far with the most reviews. followed by G2Crowd. ItCentralStation was poor but definitely better than the other two.

If you are an SMB vendor with an interest in reviewing products and learning more about products before you start to shop, I’d be hard pressed to say an of them will truly meet your needs. They might be a starting point, but if you are expecting an Amazon like listing, with great reviews, multiple feature comparisons, you will be sadly disappointed.

P.S. I have been also informed (see the comments) about Capterra. Worth a look as well.

Management, Tips

Surveys or open questions – What works better for initial product validation

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Over the last few weeks, the new batch (fourth) of 16 companies at the Microsoft accelerator has been getting started with customer development. Some companies are fairly advanced, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but most are early stage. Last week our CEO-in-residence from the Israel accelerator, Hanan Lavy, came by to lead them through our customer development framework. The first thing I gathered from many entrepreneurs after that session, was that they were surprised at how it helped them revisit some of the assumptions they had made when they had the first idea about their product.

There’s an old saying that good sales folks are used to quoting “Always be Qualifying” (as opposed to the more popular ABC – Always be closing”, which never quite works, but is popular). The “lean startup” generation has its own version of that at the early stages of the startup – Always be validating – your assumptions, your plan, your pricing, your offering, etc.

Customer validations, early on, start by asking questions of customers, mostly in face-to-face meetings and then “graduate degenerate” to emails and phone conversations when entrepreneurs are unable to scale. I dont think there’s only one way to validate though – a good product manager uses all techniques to get in front of her customers / users as often as possible.

There are pros and cons to each of the techniques to validate your idea and assumptions, so rather than focus on all of them and their efficacy, I thought I’d take some time to share what I learned from 5 of the startup founders who have been trying 2 techniques over the last week with both Indian and US customers to validate their problem statements, ideas and positioning.

Think of this as A/B testing the format of communication as opposed to the medium or the message.

The medium most of them chose was email, given that they had to provide a quick turnaround back to Hanan (they were given 2 days to speak / connect with at least 10 customers. They could have chosen face-to-face meetings or focus groups using Webex / Skype, in app questions or real-time in-app chat, but they all chose to email their potential and few existing customers.

Now that most chose email, the next question I asked them was how many of the sent customers open-ended questions versus an objective survey with 3/4 choices for answers.

Turns out 2 of them used an online survey tool with 5 questions and 3/4 choices per question and 3 of them chose to send and email with 4-5 open-ended questions. Response rates varied from 40% to 60% I was told (fairly high given that their potential customers had only 24 hours to response). The survey’s got more responses than open questions.

What I did learn was that for companies that were earlier (had started building product, but did not have a prototype) the survey format worked better since they were able to get specific answers to questions and make decisions on 3 features they had to drop so they could ship quicker and gain more feedback quickly.

The open questions format worked for those that had worked longer with their customers and prospects since they got good qualitative feedback and a suggestion or two, which they had not considered before.

I have a personal bias against survey questions, since the choices are predetermined. Survey’s tend to be much better when you want a quick pulse to make feature decisions, not direction decisions. Surveys also work when you have a large pool of responses. Open questions on the other hand work just as well with 5 people as 50 – but at 50 people you have a hard time collating the responses. Open questions also requires you have a better relationship with the folks responding since their commitment of time is more.

What I also learned was that while there are pro’s and cons to both mechanisms, the decision you are trying should guide your choice of format, not the speed of the responses.

There are many types of decisions one takes at the early stages of the startup. Product direction decisions are rarely going to be resolved with surveys or email. Those are the type that many people leave to gut, data and lots of soul searching.

On the other hand, validating assumptions is always better with open questions is what I have learned.

Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Management, Tips

Tip on being a good manager – Saying the same thing differently #startup #entrepreneur

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One of the things I have figured out that I am not good at is being a great manager. I am largely bad at managing people. People that work for me like “hanging out with me” as a friend or a colleague, or even working on projects with me. Most people like working with me, but working for me as a direct report is a pain. I go between the two extremes of being a micro-manager to completely hands-off.

This is an extension of my personality. I am a known control freak, I prefer to be direct and am less of a consensus builder. I really value high intellect and have little patience (that’s is the biggest drawback in India as a manager) for people that dont articulate well or speak up. I do listen, (I am told) but I rarely acknowledge that I have listened.

This works in specific situations (running a sales team) or being a product manager (when the engineers report to another person), but works very little elsewhere.

I realize that most entrepreneurs with a technical and product background face a fairly similar situation. Not have too much experience in being a “manager” hurts your in retaining good people. Here is a rule of thumb if you will that I was taught early in my career at Cisco and then at HP, that have shaped my management “style” Ed. It is a joke I call it management style, when there’s no real style at all.

You have to adapt your communication style to the different people in your team. This was the biggest problem for me. I dont like the effort it takes to change my communication style. I am very direct, brutally honest and dont mince words. That does not work for most people. You cant change as a person much (I think) so you have to work hard at communicating the same thing differently to different people in your team. Let me give you an example.

In 2009, after 4 months of working on our product and getting feedback from customers that the product was not quite there, we knew we had to pivot. Communicating that pivot to the team was a bigger challenge.

One of the folks in my team is very numbers driven and a “give me the facts, so I can form my own opinions” . For her, I had to give the basic facts of our user engagement and customer feedback before I could convince her to pivot.

The tech lead was a young developer (with about 3+ years of experience) and had worked on the product from the start. He was a lot more emotional about the product being “his baby”. Giving him the facts only made him defensive. So the approach I had to take with him was to get him on a trip to meet 13 customers in 5 days to listen to the feedback for himself. More expensive, but worth it.

There was yet another person on our team who tended to be the group’s excitement barometer. When she was in a good mood, everyone’s spirits lifted and when she was cross, most people wont answer even the most basic of questions. It was pretty surprising given that she had no one reporting to her, but she was the team mascot. With her we had to make her feel “involved” with the process and the decision.

For her I had to take a dramatically different approach. I knew if we communicated the pivot incorrectly, there would be a week of unproductive nonsense at the office. Done right, I knew we could get a superhuman effort from the team.

To involve her, we put her in charge gathering feedback from all our customers. She had to put together the survey, let customers know, collate the responses and then come up with her recommendations to communicate to the team. Worked like a charm. She suggested that we “pivot” but did not use that word.

As an entrepreneur, one of the big challenges you will face is hiring people. The next big challenge is to keep them motivated and focused.

Communicating differently to each of your direct reports is one way to do that effectively.

Entrepreneurship, Management

How to encourage more amazing people to join #startups – for #investors & #entrepreneurs

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In the last 2 weeks I have had to catch up on several shareholder’s agreements that startup founders have sent my way to review.

It is very disappointing to see that most of the Indian founders keep 10% or less towards Employee Stock Option Plans.

There’s no better way to say this. This is silly, very backward in its thinking and has no justification.

I dont buy the argument that employees dont value stock options. They dont understand them and hence they tend to ignore them.

As an investor and startup founder it is your duty to make sure employees understand the value of stock options.

All successful startups will agree that the startups with the best people usually wins. Not always the best product or best technology but the one with the best people.

The best people dont come cheap. They have multiple options – Working at a large company, working for themselves or striking it on their own to build their own startup.

If you want to encourage the best people to consider startups, you not only have to pay well, but also give them enough incentives and “upside” to ensure their success.

I am also very disappointed that investors are not asking this of startup founders. The long term viability of the ecosystem depends on the best folks making good money so they can become entrepreneurs or investors again.

The wealth needs to go around. 2-3 folks in any company making a lot of money while the rest slave away for paltry sums is a recipe for a host of B and C players being early startup employees. None of us want that.

I dont think this is very sustainable.

If you are a startup founder, one of the most important things you need to do is to ensure your employees make a lot of money as well if there is a big upside.

I want to be a big force of this change for the good.

Starting today (as part of Microsoft Ventures and my own personal investments) I pledge I will ensure that every startup (starting in India) has at least 15 if not 20% of the shares kept aside for early employees. I also want to make sure that the shares do get granted to employees. Finally I also will make sure that our portfolio will share the wealth with the employees as well. I understand that means we might have to take a haircut on valuations or even reduce our ownership. So be it.

If any of our co-investors do not agree to our model for equitable employee contribution, we will not do the deal.

Be the change.

Management, Research

The Market cap, revenue & profit correlations of top technology companies

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Fortune has a post on the “market cap” problem for Steve Ballmer. During the period from Jan 7th 2000 to Aug 23rd 2013 here is the change in market capitalization of the top technology companies.

1. Apple – 1836.30%

2. Amazon – 222.22%

3. Google – 703.44%

4. IBM – 70.7%

Those are the winners. Now for the ones that lost in market cap.

1. Cisco – (54.13%)

2. Intel – (46%)

3. ORCL (70.21%) and

Microsoft itself is (40.46%).

That only tells you half the story.

Lets look at revenues:

1. Apple – 1861.3% increase

2. Amazon – 12118% increase

3. Google – 55389% increase

4. IBM – 18.2% increase

5. Cisco – 143.3% increase

6. Intel – 58.1% increase

7. Oracle – 266.4% increase

8. Microsoft – 222.9% increase

Here is the table.

 Profit Growth % 2000 – 2013 2000 Revenue 20013 Revenue Revenue Growth % Stock price %
Apple  3046% 7.98 B 156.51 B 1861.3 1836.30%
Google  736000% 19 m 55.39 B 55389.0 703.44%
Amazon  2948% 573.89 m 61.09 B 12118.0 222.22%
IBM  46% 88.4 B 104.5 B 18.2 70.70%
Microsoft  (45%) 22.9 73.73 B 221.9 -40.46%
Intel  284% 33.73 B 53.34 B 58.1 -46%
Cisco  73% 18.93 B 46.06 B 143.3 -54.14%
Oracle  (4%) 10.13 B 37.12 B 266.4 -70.21%

What’s the story? The revenue increase for Apple has been excellently rewarded, Google and Amazon have also been well rewarded but they have done better and been rewarded less. No clue on why IBM stock has done well despite the lower growth in revenues compared to everyone else.

Learning, Management

The most admirable part of Amazon’s culture that #startups can benefit from

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I am a big fan of Amazon. I read Jeff Bezos first “letter to investors” back in 1998 (a year after they went IPO) and was super impressed by his focus on customers above all else. I paraphrase, but he said, we are a one trick pony – our trick is to keep customers happy.

The most amazing part of their culture is the way it permeates and allows each and every employee to be a part of the experience. I dont know how they do it.

There’s another part of the culture that amazes me. How can a company that’s 100,000 people able to get all its employees to sing off the same hymn book? I know companies that are 10+ people that struggle with this. At 100,000 employees (not including contractors), Amazon is humongous.

Let me give you an example. There are many people in the Bangalore office in India, who are part of Amazon’s foray into eCommerce who I know well. Most, if not over 90% of them are not related to AWS in any way at all. Well, they may be users of it for their applications, but not evangelists by role or title.

The previous weekend we had 2 events, which I happened to be at. One was at our accelerator and another at a location in a local college.

I know the key evangelists from AWS fairly well and expected to see them at these events in full force. Except I saw more than 2 people and none of them from the AWS team.

I walked up and talked to them before the events and was surprised to hear that they were “all hands on deck” to support startups on AWS. Many of the folks in the Bangalore (and other offices as well) volunteered to be at these events to help startup developers understand AWS and be evangelists for it. And this was not part of their MBO or their job description. They were doing it because they liked it.

Try getting that from any other large company. Most large companies operate in “silos”, with each team focused on their own turf.

Startups as well for most parts have people “responsible” for certain roles. Getting a developer to support customers can be a challenge but that’s what you should as a startup founder aim to build as a culture. Similarly getting your marketing folks to help with testing should be par for the course.

This is possible to do when the company is 10 folks or so and even possible at 50 people. Beyond that is very rare.

At 100,000 that’s near impossible.

If Amazon’s done that, then it is something to learn from, admire and find a way to emulate that.

Entrepreneurship, Management

How to be ruthless as an entrepreneur and compassionate as a leader

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Early in the morning yesterday I had a chance to catch up with a friend and entrepreneur who had started a company 2 years ago. I have known him and his cofounder for a year now and got an opportunity to learn about their business and employees very well. They are both very strong technical folks, and had raised a small seed round of funding from a few angels and a institutional investor.

Both the cofounders are among the nicest people I know. Patient, good humored and simple, they were both genuinely great bosses who attracted a cadre of folks who were loyal, intelligent and blue-collar in their attitude and expectations.

Yesterday was a more sober meeting though, since the business was not in the best of health. He was fighting the good fight, but it was very tough going. In the last 3 months, a very reputed institutional investor had pulled out of a verbal commitment to a term sheet, which caused the company to rethink their plans. Their bank balance was at about 10+ L (1,000,000)  INR, salaries and gross burn (monthly expenses) were at 7 L INR (700,000) and net burn (after revenues) was at 2 L INR (200,000). Revenues were growing, starting at 5 L INR (500,000), but not as fast as they’d like.

The business was losing money month-on-month and they had about 5 months to survive.

The part that bothered me the most was that he knew the numbers well, but did not take any action, because he ran the company from his heart. He had known about the situation for 3 months now and still had not taken any corrective measures.

That to me is one of the biggest mistakes most non-business (technical or developer) entrepreneurs make.

They are not ruthless about their business, and tend to make all decisions from the heart and gut alone, not from the head.

It was clear to me that he had to create a longer runway for his business.

There are only 2 ways to survive. Make more revenue (increase sales) and lower expenses (reduce cost).

Most technical entrepreneurs estimate sales to pick up faster than it actually does. I understand their optimism, but its probably (not scientific, but my gut says so) the #1 cause of companies having to close down prematurely.

Most technical entrepreneurs also dont lower their expense fast enough. For a software company, 70+% of their expense, in the early to mid-stages, is payroll. I understand their reluctance to do so, given how tough it is to hire good talent for startups, but that would be my #2 cause of companies having to close down prematurely.

It was clear to me that he had to reduce his headcount, by 50% at least, to quickly get his business into the ICU and rapidly look for new sales opportunities to increase revenues. While the revenues were largely not in his control (given how finicky customers are), the expenses are within his control.

He had some very valid reasons (as I mentioned he is a very nice person) to not reduce headcount. A few folks in his team had just gotten married and a few had families to provide for.

I have been in this situation two times just in the past 3 years. At both times, revenues from a customer suddenly were in jeopardy and I had to take corrective action very quickly. The day we got to know about it, we had to let go of 4 folks in a very close knit team of 7 and the second time let go of 3 people in a smaller team of 6 people.

I had to be ruthless about the business since I wanted the company to survive. Without those cuts, the business would have folded and the folks would have been out of a job in 3-6 months anyway. I thought it would be more appropriate to be proactive.

I also had to be compassionate as a leader so I took great pains to call at least 50+ friends to find a position that paid better and was more stable for most of my colleagues.  Everyone of them got a role that paid higher and was closer to their home. One of my colleagues was going to get married, so we made a few adjustments to his salary as well so he could get a better pay hike at his next job.

The 7 colleagues are still good friends, and although there might have been some ill-will towards my actions in the early days, I am confident that now they understand that I had to do what was required so the business could survive.

When the writing is on the wall as a business person, have a strong action bias. 

There may be tons of reasons, which are all very valid and humane, for you not to take any painful measures. Your first commitment should be towards your people – so do what it takes to help them land on their feet someplace else, but take the necessary actions to ensure that your business will live to fight another day.

You owe it to your dream, your passion and your family to give your startup a fighting chance and keep it surviving as long as you can.

But ruthless as an entrepreneur, and compassionate as a leader.

Above all, always be a force of good.