lot of founders surround themselves by yes men and are not at all tolerant to counter views leading to their downfall. My hunch is that discourse is missing in startups which is the root of all pro...

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

lot of founders surround themselves by yes men and are not at all tolerant to counter views leading to their downfall. My hunch is that discourse is missing in startups which is the root of all problems. My way or highway never succeeds.

Is being a yes man to Founders critical for success in Indian startups?

Software Engineer

Is being a yes man to Founders critical for success in Indian startups?- Grapevine

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

I know Grapevine is full of young and ambitious people that either planning to get into Product or are already working as a PM. I don’t aim to discourage any of you. Moreover, if you need tips to break into Product I would be happy to help you.

I personally feel that knowing what you are doing is going to doom is better than normalizing it.

So I will convey my experience in simple words, how I hated every single day of it, why did I still stick around for 4 years, why product decisions are random political bullshit, why you should not let anything that happens get under your skin and affect your morale. Finally, few words for sociopathic Head of Products.

Lesson #1: Go through all stages of grief at once. Accept that product culture is broken and accept that it will not get better. Finally, you can’t fix it or improve it.

Lesson #2: Ratings are political bullshit. 
I can tell you the years I was rated worse I was probably working harder and better at my job. It just depends on the results you get in the last month before ratings and whether your DOP is vocal for you.

Lesson #3: Last piece of advice: do not let your Product years lower your self esteem or sense of self worth.

Also, some words for sociopathic Head of Products. F’ you.

You Must Get Out - My Experience of 4 Years In Product

Heavily second this. I’m a tech focus generalist who stumbled upon PMing after multiple startup exits. Absolutely bonkers role with no role definition, metric ownership, impact driving. Anyone who disagrees, is lying to themselves. What I can define PM in Indian / many valley based companies with Indian founders -> glorified bhains charane wala.

Product Manager

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

Many of them are egoistic, surrounded by yes men/women, want to be reminded of how great they are, being pursued at all times 

Have you met ones who aren't like this? Or atleast less?

Are all founders a$$hole-ly?

Founder

Founders be sharing quotes about life, learning and all sorts of things on social media, but when you see them in real, you'll get a clear sense of ego, pride and "I know it all" vibe, so clear in the way they talk. Please be a human first, founder second. 

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."

Norman Schwarzkopf

Founders in today's era

I've worked at 2 early stage startups now. The founders are absolutely bonkers. Kids born into business families who think it's beneath them to work for someone and accumulate skills. They have an idea, that's all. Based on that idea they'll raise money. Everything great till here, right?

But what they don't have and mostly don't spend time to develop any sort of expertise in -
Industry/ product knowledge 
Tech 
Design
People management 
Culture 
Writing
Public Speaking 
Finance 

Nor do they take out time to develop these. They want to micromanage. Always say the right woke stuff but be deeply conservative behind closed doors. They want to make a billion dollars startup with a kirana store mentality. 

They don't want to trust anyone outside their community. They'll show this through behaviour. They want to extract 10+ hours of work everyday but not provide you with insurance, leaves, or the opportunity to learn. 

They will retain the ability to fire anyone without notice but require 3 months notice when someone wants to leave. 

So anyone looking for jobs, please please join and early stage startups ONLY WHEN -
The founders have prior work experience.
The founders have an expertise in any one domain relevant to the business.

Early stage companies are shit

Software Developer

IIT grad here building a venture backed startup. I think 99% of folks here believe that venture backed founders are super entitled and in a much "cosier" position than employees

Just sharing a few facts about our journey so far if it helps anyone improve their perspectives-

1) Paying ourselves 33% of our campus salary & 60% of what we are paying to our employees (Talking about Pure Base Salary here, not including ESOPs)

2) Insane stress - You basically have to raise money to build (esp if its deeptech because of the high fixed costs) and there are predefined metrics you have to always chase, sometimes just beyond yourselves. 

Your product will be copied if it's good because well, they always have more money than you. You work 7 days a week for insane hours, chasing metrics required to be "afloat" 

3) 99% of venture backed startups result in 0 liquidity gain for founders. So basically in all likeliness, everything is for a net negative return compared to if we took the campus job

So, when you wholeheartedly bash founders as if they are sitting On a goldmine while you are toiling for THEIR gold Treasure, just understand that more likely than not, there is not really any gold but rather an irrational hope they are clinging to

Also, Yes-we pay above market to our employees (100% hike for the last one) but the truth is some startups just Can't afford it. And ironically, there is a much higher looking down on these startups with meagurely paid founders rather than giants like Tech Mahindra paying peanuts to their employees while having a 1000% salary hike for the executives. 

Yeah, most startups need to do better but please appreciate if someone is atleast trying to do better because trust me, it's INSANELY HARD.. 

The number of posts I see about Flipkart making hundreds millionaires is way too less than the ones I see about pinpointing at every single mistake early stage startups do & I just wanted to express my opinion on it

Peace!

People way overestimate the life of founders

Oh no poor founders, they have to pay fair salary to their employees.

So recently, I read a lot of posts on Grapevine regarding some startups having no vision, poor management, toxicity etc etc, yet, many of these startups are doing quite a good business. I understand there is no correlation between work culture of a startup and it’s business outcome, but certainly, when a startup has poor management and unclear vision, then it should have troubles. That is not the case.
Ola Electric seems to be doing well, Zomato became profitable and there are a few other MNCs with a similar scenario. As an employee, I really want to understand if we are missing something here, like maybe lack of foresight, or are we being greedy with respect to salary and stuff, or maybe we don’t empathise with founders? Sometimes I really try to understand the perspective of founders, but then nothing can justify pathetic workplace or poor management.

Are we missing something?

Machine Learning Engineer

I work as a Product manager at a series A well funded startup.
This company is run by a solo founder/CEO.

This is a wannabe tech and product startup that does not care about their product at all. The internal review meetings get 5 minutes on product and 55 minutes on business and operations on a good day!

All they care about is how to run operations and tech just works on automation instead of building the product for the end user. Every OKR cycle runs for two months where OKRs are set for product but we end up building internal tools because things get "re-prioritised" and operations "can not miss targets".

The worst part is that the strategy changes every 2 months and every week, the CEO keeps adding new "wants". Almost like a baby seeing shiny new toys.
At this stage, the product has become a mess with no identity at all!

This baby always says "But is that even do-able" acts critical and tries to seem smart in front of their employees while lying to the investors and board every other week that we are a tech and product company.

I don't know if this happens at other startups in India. 

Would love to hear what y'all have experienced.

Identifying a Baby founder

You sound like a tech bro, who thinks that only tech runs the world. Huge companies like Tata, reliance etc are built on solid operations and business insights.  
  
 Tech is enabler, if the founder is smart with business and operations, most likely he will make a good business, and unless you start valuing things beyond tech also, you will keep hopping jobs and cribbing why people don’t value you.

Senior Product Manager

Most startup’s are not founded with great altruistic purpose to elevate human condition. Most startup’s are founded where founders know they can make money or earn status points through little schemes of leveraging their network of investors. 

Most of them know they can earn more income by just raising some money from friends or VCs. Build a small tech tool and burn through money trying to acquire and retain customers. All this while hiring 100s of employees selling false narratives. 

What bugs me the most isn’t the thousands of people getting laid off, salary corrections or bankruptcies, it is the mafiaesque organisation built to “create wealth for some by exploitation of countless others” 

Most startup founders use brute force of content and media coupled with ignorance of people to perpetuate this cycle. 

It’s the virtue signalling and holier than thou attitude of most founders and VCs justifying all their mindless brutality in the name of strategy and growth which destroys aspirations and outcomes for the many. It’s more relevant in India because of large scale ignorance about money and large scale trust on educated individuals with the right college tags! 

If you have seen sopranos, most founders are like Anthony soprano - summarily violent, manipulative and ruthless behaviour primarily driven by selfish greed but juxtaposed with moments of vulnerability and struggle justifying his action with a facade of providing for his family. 

*Replace Anthony soprano with your founder/ceo name* 


1. VSS was playing fast and lose with rbi regulations resulting in stock crash and layoffs 
2. Byju’s systematically destroyed his own company and wealth of his employees just to ensure he retains majority control 
3. Ashneer G and his wife manipulated company books
4. Zerodha founders cheated in chess match or lied about their system failures which lost a lot of capital

PS: I refer to most founders because there are few exceptions who don’t fit into this narrative.

Startup founders are mafia bosses!

Incredibly myopic and pessimistic view. I'd suggest trying to be a founder yourself once before judging them. 
  
 Not every startup needs to elevate human condition, plus you still need money to make that happen. 
  
 Most founders don't actually earn much compared to jobs they could've had in companies. All you see is the flashy idiots like Kunal Shah and Byju. Not the bootstrapper shutting down their 10th project for xyz reasons. Because no one likes talking about their failures, and no one listens to people who fail. Only those who succeed.  
  
 You have a problem with the human condition buddy, not founders. Humans can be real shitty given the right kind of conditions. Everyone's fallible, even you.  
  
 If you think you can be a better founder than some of the names you mentioned, then you're only indulging in holier than thou behaviour, which you allegedly hate about founders.  
  
 I do agree with some of the things you said, but much of it is way off.

Generalist

Consultant

Absolutely sad to see the state of the startups, most of them.
I am a founder myself, and this is a post with equal disappointment with myself as much as it is for anyone else who relates.
Look at all these companies that have raised shit tons of capital, and now make a fraction of money that has been invested in them.
The raised money is spent on outsized, non business sense making acquisition costs, only to keep repeating it till the tap runs dry.
Then when all stakeholders get bored, the service quality plummets, the employees are fired and whole sectors are admonished as being bad.

But, my question is, which sector where large sums of money was invested in early days have come out with flying colours. Fucking nothing !
Edtech, proptech, agritech, ecommerce etc. etc. etc. kuch bhi nahi. 

Is there any sector where a startup which has raised in the 100s of millions in the first 5 years have actually built a sustainable business at any scale ?
Then scaling down, isse acha, scale slowly.
The worst part of this whole drama, is pushing the innovation wheel backward and destroying customer sentiment.

Isse acha, raise less money inititally, build slowly, and only scale when the market is ready. Artifical growth makes no sense, unless you have a treasure chest that shall never run out.
Even in that case, spend the money on assets and not on random acquisition costs, direct or indirect.

As founders, let's do better, nahi ?

Rant or is it ?

Majority of Indian startups has toxic work culture and the same is not true for any US or Europe based startup. Indian startups just copy paste ideas from the west and apply it to Indian context. We don't have original product barring few such as Postman and all. Why is it so and how we can improve the situation?

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