Created by Rishabh Srivastava, Founder of Loki.ai
This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.
I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)
Context
Source URL: N/A
Why is it important: I should think hard about what kind of business I want to run before jumping into it. Conversations and insights like these are supremely useful for making decisions
Keywords
Startup, Scaling, Scale, Assessing opportunities
Summary
Have a plan for growing and scaling yourself as the company scales. Make decisions about trade-offs early (and not wait until war time). Understand what the regulatory and hyperlocal constraints of your market are, and how you can modify models that are already proven out elsewhere to build around these.
Highlights
I reached out to Bernadette Cho of Entrepreneur First after Ishan who had worked with her at Funding Societies recommended that I pick her brains on general startup advice. Had a fairly information dense 20 minute conversation.
How does the role of a founder change over time? What is the key difference between a 0-1 and a 1-n founder?
Just because you’re the right person at Series A doesn’t mean that you’ll be the right person at Series B and beyond. The founder does different kinds of work at different times. Anthony of Grab used to take all customers calls himself and used to cook for the team at offsites when Grab was young. Now, he just can’t do that.
When starting out, you need to be incredibly comfortable context switching and doing many things at once. But eventually, you need to be ruthless about delegation and hiring as the company starts to scale.
You also need to be clear about whether you value loyalty or performance. The people that got you from 0-1 are not the same as those that will get you from 1-n. You have to be laser focused in your stance between loyalty and performance. How do you portion out work to people and focus the organization on things that matter? Do you do it by attracting proven talent from elsewhere, or do you do it by choosing people that have been loyal to you and hoping that they grow into their roles?
Additionally, do you want to be the ones leading the company forever? Founders often step away – you have to be incredibly introspective about whether you really want it. PropertyGuru founders were smart about this. The loved the 0-1 process but not the 1-n process, so they ended up bringing someone in to take over from them
How do you assess which opportunities to go after as a startup?
You have to look at a mixture of the local context, government regulations, and what has happened elsewhere. China and India have leapfrogged the west in many areas related to payments and social commerce. In SEA, government regulations are still mostly similar to the West, but the long-tail structure of SMBs is more akin to that of China and India.
Most of the B2C models that have worked in SEA have been copycats from the west with a lot of modifications made to make them work for the Asian context. But B2B models have required creative solutions from founders. If you play to hyperlocal constraints and have some technological defensibility, you can create an incredibly differentiated product.
The key is to adapt quickly and learn from what the market is telling you. Design your flywheels, and then execute quickly
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech is anything whose defensibility lies in technology and the flywheels built around that technology. Grab is a phenomenal business, but it’s defensibility is not in technology. The reason it’s a juggernaut is because of the marketing and virality that were baked in from day 0. EF wants to be in segments that can be won with tech-driven flywheels.
In the larger funding ecosystem, all investors want a balanced portfolio. They want moonshots balanced with things with a high chance of working out.
When starting a company with someone, ask these questions
Alignment with values is important, but also ask a potential cofounder what they are willing to trade off in war times. Prioritising the team or prioritising the customer? Optimising for revenue or optimising for customer experience? Optimising for profit or product?
When wartime hits, things break down. Pre-compute all these decisions if you can