Being a successful founder = eating humble pie everyday

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.

I'm seeing so many posts where startup employees are cribbing about things like layoffs, work culture etc etc. Doesn't seem like they have perspective on everything it takes to build a startup. I've built a failed startup myself and have immense respect for founders who are grinding it out there in such difficult recessionary circumstances. And then you have so many of the engineers and PMs cribbing about basics without talking about important things like learning growth, building for the future etc. Why such myopia? I work at a big tech and envy the speed at which startups move, the big responsibility everyone gets to handle, the fast career growth. All these things are being cribbed about. They crib about founders wanting more. Their job is to ensure success, not to give lifetime jobs to entitled people. They have more headaches you can imagine. In my small startup I had a million headaches. I can only imagine how hard it must be to run larger ships. Is everyone joining a startup these days looking for a get rich quick scheme?

Hi All, what can help me join an early stage startup and grow up to the top close to the founders within a year? I want to be in the middle of the action Has anyone here done it before?

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!

I'm surprised to see on the comment section that people actually support this load of crap. To any newbies or freshers entering tech this year, don't follow this advice. These CEOs exploit your time to gain revenue and when the time is not good they wouldn't think twice before considering layoffs. Just do your job and go home to your life and family. This advice only applies to entrepreneurs who have huge stakes in the company. Because if the company do well they get millions in returns as dividends. As an employee, even if you work for 25 hours you only get the same salary. Don't follow any so called self procalimed entrepreneurs advocating for the hustle culture. You hustle for your life, not for your boss or your job.

Do you guys agree with the list? Anymore candidates

Which skillsets one should work upon before being a entrepreneur

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.