Tag Archives: startups

Entrepreneurship, India

The Indian startup ecosystem should look at Israel as a role model

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I love Israel. Having been there 7-8 times over 5 years when I worked for a company (Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP) that had its development center there, I believe they have some of the best developers, product thinkers and execution oriented folks.

They are also amazing at marketing. They have successfully convinced the world that they are the “startup nation“.

Never mind that they have 1/3 as many product startups as India produces annually and never mind that Indian companies acquire or get acquired twice as much as Israeli companies. Indians also make up 52% of Silicon valley startup founders, whereas Israelis make up less than 8%.

Take a look at those 3 data points and tell me they are not facts. The PWC report is for 2012, so its relatively recent. The # of companies we track in India versus Israel startups in our database is three times as well. The # of companies on Angel list or Crunchbase reveals a similar statistic.

Still its Tel Aviv that creeps up on Silicon Valley as the top startup center. If you read the startup genome report, you’ll be convinced of the same based on their methodology.

What are the arguments I have heard against India being the startup nation?

1. Quantity not quality:  We produce numbers, but not quality. Many of our startups are clones of Silicon Valley companies featured on Tech Crunch 3 months post launch. I looked at the 3 top Israel incubators and found that over 60% of the companies they were helping were clones as well.

2. Exits: We dont have a significant number of $billion or hundreds of million $ exits. I have found that while we do not have those exits, the number of companies listed on the stock market in the US for both Israel and India are comparable.

3. Market access: Israel has excellent knowledge, insights and know-how about US markets. Since Israel itself is a fairly small market, most Israeli entrepreneurs focus on US markets solely, even though they are geographically closer to Europe. Technically the # of people with market knowledge of the US in India far exceeds that of Israel, but they are not in product startups but at large companies.

4. Services mindset & positioning: Thanks to the ginormous success of Indian services companies who helped position India as the “world’s backend” (comparable to China being positioned as the world’s manufacturer) we have been already positioned as low value, low margin, consulting providers.

5. Late start: Even though Israel is 60 years old and India as a nation is a little older, we had a late (2001 or so) start to technology startups. Compared to Israel which had some interesting companies (need references here, what I have heard is mostly anecdotal) in the late 90’s as well.

Why do I still say Indian startups should look at Israel as a role model?

1. They champion their startups very well. They are very well vested in their startups success. They are constantly talking about how good their startups are, how they are possibly better than the valley and why they have the best talent in the world focused on startups.

2. They take significant risky bets. The # of investors in Israel (seed, angel and institutional) is comparable to those in India even though the number of startups is a third.

3. They look out for each other. The community is so well connected with each other that they genuinely look out and help each other. I dont know of any other place that supports their own as much as Israel does.

If you have been to Israel or have lived / worked with Israeli’s please tell me in the comments if there are a few data points I missed.

If you have any good data (not anecdotes, I have enough of those) to counter any of my arguments, feel free to call those out as well.

Entrepreneurship, Hiring

Why do founders split? Performance and Execution

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Both A & V met at their company cafeteria a few months before they decided to work together and start their venture. A was a front-end developer and V was a SEO and web analytics consultant. They both worked at the large company separately for 3+ years but did not have the chance to work together at all.

They were both in different teams and their paths did not cross very much. While standing in the cafeteria line, they got chatting about a weekend event and found they had several common interests and similar aspirations.

They decided to spend the next few months, talking about various ideas they had, mostly around starting a new venture in the eCommerce space. Neither had much experience in ecommerce, but they figured they would be able to add an operations person later.

4 months after their meetings they chose to build a online platform (one that held no inventory, but sold multiple products) for computer and mobile accessories of all kinds.

A, built the first version with some help from another friend who was the backend expert who offered some time in exchange for coming on board full-time if the venture got funding.

V focused his efforts on talking to suppliers and also helping A on some of the SEO work. Besides setting up their social media profiles, he also spent time taking to courier, payments and logistics partners to setup relationships.

3 months after starting they did a launch with friends and family. Response was good (relatively speaking), with 3 orders in the first day and over 5 in the next week.

I met them when V sent me their plan and asked for a meeting to discuss their seed funding requirements.

Given that I have had a poor track record with eCommerce companies and I dont like investing in them I declined the meeting.

A few months later, I met V at a startup event, when he mentioned that they both had split. He mentioned that the site kept going down and A was a good front-end engineer but not a strong developer overall, he said that they both had decided to shut down their venture.

I have not met A, but did check out his work and website. While I would not call his work legendary, it was not too shabby either.

The second biggest reason why founders split besides having differing vision is they both dont believe the other person is performing or executing as well as they are.

Rarely do they look in the mirror to see their own shortcomings.

There have been 2 other cases where I saw this similar situation. One person is either not executing at all – for various reasons or a deliverable or two is missed and friction sets in.

In one case a founder had a new born child within a month of the venture getting off the ground and had to spend a lot more time at home, which made the co-founder irritated and angry. They split and eventually closed the company.

I was surprised that they did the venture together knowing that one of them was going to have a baby.

When a pattern of execution and delivery on commitments is not set, then friction sets in very easily.

Its very hard to figure out if someone is executing well based on their “resume”. Most resumes are inflated (I am guilty as well) to “sell” and “position” the candidate in the best light. Even if they have worked at a position where its fairly easy to determine if they deliver and execute or not, it is mighty difficult to discern whether they were good because of the system built around them or because their manager extracted the best from them.

The only way to determine that is working together.

What takeaway do I have from this second reason for founder’s splitting?

I prefer to fund teams that have worked together in their new venture for more than 6 months. That’s an arbitrary number no doubt, but I dont have an alternative.

Teams which have worked together before, need to be working together again before I am sure that they know how to work with each other in a new environment without the support system they had before. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

I am hoping again that this is a demand and supply issue that resolves itself in a few years. Right not there are too many opportunities (thanks to Angel List) for good companies with high performance teams that have worked together for a while for me to even consider teams that have relatively younger working histories.

Entrepreneurship, Learning, Personal

Why do founders split? 1. Differing visions

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Over the last 4 months, I have heard of or at least 8 companies closing down because of “founder issues”. Overall this number of companies that I have been tracking personally where the company closed was 14. So relatively speaking the number of companies that closed because the founders split is larger than “lack of funding”. The only other reason I have heard have been lack of traction. These are companies in the valley and India BTW.

Why do we have so many companies which close because of founder issues?

I tried calling and talking to many of the founders separately to understand what the issues were and its not clear that there are the same that plague most “marriages”.

Most married couples split because of financial issues, compatibility issues or “cheating”.

With most founders, I cannot point to the 3 main causes yet, since I have limited data, but I can share what happened in some of these cases, based on my understanding of their situation. Sometimes, my understanding was colored by my impression of one of the founders, but I tried to remain objective about the situation.

Differing vision of where to take the company. This was cited by most of the founders.

“We  used to talk about where we wanted to take the product. We had a general direction and were fairly aligned. Then it started with a few features that we had different opinions on. In a matter of weeks we would constantly fight about every feature. The constant fighting drove our team mad and we decided to split”.

“We started with targeting large enterprise customers, since my co-founder had a few relationships there. We found that many had a long time frame to get us on board as a vendor. Then we decided to change our target to mid-sized companies. That changed the vision of our product and some key features, which the developers could not deliver on. I still thought we could focus on larger customers, but my co-founder did not and we decided to split”.

Many times, the vision of the company is considered very sacred by the founders. Which is a good thing. Alignment of vision is hugely important. I can also see how the vision changes at times, since the initial assumptions made, usually change as you go to market and meet customers.

Some founders are flexible about that change and are willing to be patient about finding that vision, whereas others want to stick to a vision they originally came up with.

If you are a solo founder and are looking for a co founder, it is hard to determine flexibility of your co-founder since most people seem reasonable and fairly flexible during the first few months. I tried to formulate a list of questions to ask – largely scenario based, such as what would happen if this were to occur, or how would you react if this happened?

Most times when I asked those questions of people I got fairly good answers which I consider are reasonable.

These questions did not help very much though, since as we talked about before, vision’s change and so do people’s impressions.

When you ask the objective question in a non threatening situation, it is easy to be collected, objective and composed.

That’s rarely the case when product shipments are behind, payroll is delayed and a customer contract is taking longer than anticipated.

What takeaway do I have from this main reason for founder’s splitting?

If you have not worked together for a “significant period” of time, its very difficult to find out if your co-founder is flexible to change.

So what do I now do as a result of this learning?

I prioritize teams where founders have not worked together for a significant period of time, much lower. If you have a co-founder you have met at a hackathon event, or a startup event, and have been working on your company for 4-6 months, then I would likely pass on your company.

Its not because I dont like your idea or product, its because of demand and supply. Right now, I get many more companies where co-founders have worked together for much longer and have recency of shared vision.

In the next post I will talk about another reason why founders split – performance and execution.

Entrepreneurship, Mentors

The fallacy of providing “great mentorship” in 1 hour chunks

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I have a good friend who has been a successful corporate executive for over 15 years. Off the charts smart and with a keen sense for the “inner issues” driving other people, he is able to figure out the root cause of most problems faster than most people I know.

He does though have a lack of time, like most other people. Having been in a large company for most of his career, he wished to live vicariously through other people and was keen to “mentor” young entrepreneurs. My advice to him was to focus on helping younger people in his company rather than entrepreneurs. He seemed to think about my tip, but chose to ignore it.

He setup 1 hour mentoring sessions with 3 entrepreneurs who he felt were working on problems that he was keen to understand more about and wanted to help them while he learned more about the market they were targeting.

Each session was fairly standard and given his corporate background, were scheduled a month in advance with consistency and a sense of purpose.

After 2 sessions, 2 entrepreneurs said they were busy and could not make the call or be in person.

He did feel he brought value to them in both the sessions and heard from the entrepreneurs that his advice was valuable. While he was in the process of scheduling the follow up, one entrepreneur told him rather bluntly that he did not have the time.

My friend took it rather well, and wanted to understand how he could make the time more valuable. Both entrepreneurs said the same thing.

There were pieces of advice that they could get from my friend, but they did not have the time to execute on his suggestions and felt that while well meaning, most of the suggestions were not precise enough.

Note that they did not say that the suggestions were not actionable enough. They said that the recommendations were not precise.

I get nearly 2 executives and mid-career professionals from larger companies and older entrepreneurs wanting to be a mentor at the Microsoft Accelerator each week.

Most we reject.

Some because they just want to add the mentor title to their LinkedIn profile and dont have enough time to provide.

Most others because they want to compress the “mentorship” in chunks of 1 hour sessions every month.

Its hard to do anything well in 1 hour chunks in infrequent periods of time. Even if its frequent the context is fairly limited.

Its even harder to provide any value in a 1 hour mentorship session.

Which is the prime reason I am not taking any new “meetings” to provide feedback and advice to new entrepreneurs who are not in our accelerator.

There’s very limited to little value that the session can actually provide is my experience.

I might feel good about it, so might the entrepreneur for about 15 minutes after the meeting. When the dust settles, though, after a day or two, they realize the multiple edge cases and scenarios that my advice or suggestions wont really work.

If you think you can provide value in 1 hour chunks as a “mentor” I’d love to hear how you are doing it and how you measure the value of your advice.

Entrepreneurship, India

The startup ecosystem in India is schizopherenic

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Okay now that I have your attention with that ridiculous headline, let me define a few things first.

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that makes it difficult to:

  • Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences
  • Think logically
  • Have normal emotional responses,
  • Behave normally in social situations

Lets try and list all the players in this ecosystem. I have provided this list sorted by the importance of the player to the ecosystem (obviously this is my opinion and hence biased).

1. Entrepreneurs – the heart and soul of the ecosystem

2. Talent for the entrepreneurs (meaning people to hire)

3. The early adopters (Both consumer and businesses)

4. Investors – Angels and Venture Capitalists

5. Incubators and Accelerators

6. Universities & research institutions

7.  Advisors, mentors, coaches

8. Startup communities, media and events organizations

9. Service providers – lawyers, accountants, etc.

10. Larger companies for partnerships, distribution and marketing

11. (Dare I say) Government – yes for things such as incorporation, taxes, etc.

12. Cheerleaders and poster girls (or pinup guys if you like).

13. Successful startups and successful / failed entrepreneurs

14. Associations, government liaisons and trade organizations

15. Interested public

Do I have an exhaustive list? Probably not, but this is a good enough start.

Every player has something unique they bring to the table and has a perspective on what’s good and bad about our Indian startup ecosystem.

Even if we mostly stick to the technology space, we say one thing and do the exact opposite.

No wonder most entrepreneurs get confused.

1. We want more innovative product companies but we end up funding mostly me-too eCommerce companies.

2. We want to build the next facebook and Google and yet most entrepreneurs have a “consulting / services” company on the side to make money.

3. We want to work on cutting-edge technologies, but end up picking yesterday’s tech stack since “there’s a lack of talent’.

4. We want to encourage the government to participate, but end up bad-mouthing them at every event (One panel member even suggested they were out to kill startups).

5. We want to have a clean incorporation, but still choose the cheapest service provider to incorporate the company (a lawyer even told me yesterday, he has to turn down 2 companies a week who want his services for free).

6. We want to be first to try a new piece of technology but are unwilling to pay to be an early adopter.

7. We want to encourage more entrepreneurs to participate in an incubator, but keep ridiculous anti-dilution clauses to maximize upside.

I could go on, but you get my point.

Is this an India thing alone? No, I have seen many of the same in Silicon Valley as well.

But at the center of the valley is an entrepreneur with an idea who wants to change something and everyone else is rooting for her.

In India I dont believe we quite know who’s at the center. We make rock stars of our VC’s, large company CEO’s and Government officials.

So if you are part of this ecosystem I would request you to please keep only one question in mind when you have to make choices:

” Will this help more entrepreneurs get excited about starting a company in India?”.

Then please do the right thing and don’t just say the right thing.