According to Serial "failure" entrepreneur claims startups should only "play the gap" and not do innovation. 🍇🍇 Thoughts

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Innovation or lining your own pockets

Product Manager

Innovation or lining your own pockets- Grapevine

Two months ago I posted this rant on Grapevine (https://share.gvine.app/CLkpBuEqcCvrzKvx6) which I think is one of the most viral posts on the platform.

Since then I took a break, learned Vipassana, went to the mountains, read, and reflected. Here are some truth bombs that have been exploding in my head

1) There is a leadership crisis

Is it me or do today's self-proclaimed leaders just suck? Look around Grapevine: insecure toxic managers forcing people back to the office, overhiring CEOs who don't know WTF to do, and founders just abandoning ship. 

"Leaders" and founders today are about as disconnected from reality as the political class, because like politicians most of them are privileged, sheltered, and already wealthy.

2) Technological innovation doesn't mean progress. 

I couldn't laugh harder when I saw the Indus Valley report basically saying that maybe all of us VCs overestimated how much money we could make funding lending and consumer apps. 

Maybe funding lending apps that "open up credit for the poor" isn't sustainable when the rate of interest is >18%?

Technological innovation doesn't always mean real-world progress. A lot of times, it just ends up perpetuating and amplifying pre-existing inequality. 

3) Endless growth toward nothing 

Most of India's startup money comes from the West. Most of that money was just printed to repeatedly get out of an economic crisis. That's it. There was no great vision to fund the future of humanity behind all this new capital. Just Central Bankers and Presidents pressing the "Create Money" button to delay the inevitable.

Most of us here owe our wealth to Easy Money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpMLAQbSYAw

PS: A book, that completely flipped my worldview during this time is this: https://www.amazon.in/Debt-First-Years-David-Graeber/dp/0143422715. I urge all fellow foot soldiers of capitalism to read this.

Until the next rant, stay sane, safe, and debt-free!

Follow-up to the most liked Grapevine post ever

Product Marketing Manager

Kya dikat hai bhai, udane do paisa. Tumhare thodi hai. 

Good firms genuinely perform well and return money. The ecosystem is not forgiving -- you don't survive very long if you don't create any big wins. It's an extremely high stress job with very little WLB. You do make money but it comes at a cost.

Layoffs are sad but at least those jobs existed in the first place? They wouldn't without VC money. India's VC scene is extremely young and it'll take time before we produce a Google. Entrepreneurs are not always right, they are not always nice either; but they definitely are courageous.

Unpopular Opinion: VCs get a lot of crap for no reason

VCs kill many startups with unrealistic targets that the main problem. Not every business is designed to give ultra quick returns VCs want . They ruin well potential startups

Software Engineer

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

Lately, I have been thinking very deeply about my college days when the Flipkart story had inspired the entire lot of my batch at IIT-D. We were starry eyed college kids who wanted to do something innovative in India and break away from the "three" most popular moves after IIT:

1. UPSC
2. MBA
3. MS/PhD abroad

I proceeded to then work in various Indian startups and noticed an alarming thing. I began to realise a pattern across all my stints:

The initial founding team does exceptional work innovating, they excel at what Thiel calls "Zero to One", the act of creation. I will concede that although most founders fail to innovate by often copying what worked in the west but the initial founding team usually excels in execution. It allows for initial traction as it breathes a fresh breath in the\ space that they are operating in.

Almost always, when Product Market Fit is "achieved"(whatever that means), the founders begin to deploy insane amounts of funds into growth. 

By definition, Growth is not a bad thing. But, I have been noticing that across all startups I have worked at( all raised funds from the largest global funds) that it comes at the expense of product building. And during this era of hypergrowth, the product starts to stagnate while focus becomes marketing and sales. 

I often felt that this was temporary. That once we reach enough scale, we would start to innovate again. 
But time and time again, the ability to innovate atrophies over time.
Rather than building something that has enduring value by executing faster than anyone, the focus becomes achieving growth at all costs. 

This ultimately leads to two outcomes:
1. The startup cannot sustain this growth and retention begins to look dire. The churn becomes unbearable and the startup goes out of business.

2. The startup gets acquired by someone bigger, allowing founders and investors to believe that they created value where none existed in the first place.

I am completely dejected at this.

The Death of Indian Innovation: Why Indian Start Ups are failing to Innovate?

Growth Manager

I am Thankful to the funding winter it has revealed true colors of so called Founders, who would not stop talking about culture, Growth,  scale etc on Twitter and LinkedIn

Take Byjus, for instance, they claim to be revolutionizing education, it's all a facade! All they care about is squeezing every penny out of parents' pockets. Putting large amount of people in debts they didn’t even signup for. 

And let's talk about Dukaan, shall we? The absolute 🤡 of a founder with zero empathy( 90% staff laidoff and the guts to project it as some AI ML innovation)


These startup founders have lost touch with reality. They've become obsessed with valuation and funding rounds, completely forgetting the essence of why they started in the first place. It's all about becoming the next "unicorn" and impressing investors, while the customers and sellers are left in the dust.

Gone are the days of genuine innovation and passion for solving real-world problems. It's all about the money now, and they don't care who gets hurt along the way. The startup ecosystem has become a rat race, with everyone trying to outdo each other and sacrificing ethics and integrity in the process.

It's sad to see the true colors of these startup founders shining through, and it's high time we demand more transparency, accountability, and genuine value from these so-called "disruptors." Enough with the facade,

At the end all these founders will get an exit with generational wealth, the employee and people who have built it will be left in Dust. 

My laanat to all such founders and company. May the boat sink and hopefully someday we have accountability in place for these people.

Rant on Indian Startup

Business Development Manager

Something as a founder I have decided over the years.
Everywhere around you, you hear stories of founders who worked 16-18 hours a day, made their team work as hard, were assholes, shouted at people, made people cry.

You start to think, that's an absolute must to succeed. 
I don't think it is. For every 2-3 founders that are toxic, there's the one good natured founder who succeeds. They're rare, but they do exist. 

1) I've been in many toxic jobs. I've hated them, and had some form of anxiety. To become successful, if I subject people through the same, what was all of this for? 
2) I'm not saying I'll keep it too chill at my startup. I actually expect people to work harder than typical corporates, but only if they have good ESOPs in the early days, a chance to actually learn and do well (and that should be pre-aligned) 
3) But what about the mission? Don't you want to make sure your mission becomes true, whatever you're chasing actually reaches 1000s/millions of people? Sure. But it solves for many vacations for me, and maybe better lives for my kids, and perhaps some problem gets solved. But what if it doesn't. It cannot come at the cost of miserable lives for my team. I'll never be proud of my work if that happens. 

We all have a decision. Why just be a successful founder? Why not have a higher aim... be a successful non toxic founder? You'd be truly 1 in a million then. 

That's how I'll always see it, I hope.

Note: Okay with failing, will not create Toxic Culture

Your true test will come when investor pressure arrives at your doorstep.

Data Scientist

Founder

For the folks working in startups, do you actually think the leadership is working towards making a profit or just playing pleasing the investor game by doing layoffs and building products that don't sell just to get the next round of funding?

Opinion on Company

BYJUs, Dunzo are dead. Which unicorn will tumble next?

Program Manager

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

What an absolute shit show
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/fraud-threats-sexual-harassment-zilingos-ankiti-bose-files-fir-against-co-founder-ex-coo-12706929.html

Zilingo CEO files FIR against COO & CTO

Zilingo is already defunct. A once billion dollar startup that is now literally 0. 
One of the major startup scams. Investors just kept lapping up the GMV growth.

And now when everything is over, co-founders filing FIRs against themselves.
Disappointing.

My only appeal to everyone: please call out if you're at a startup that's doing similar stuff. A lot of careers can get saved...

Corporate Strategist

Head of fin transferred money from company’s account to personal account. Where is the innovation?

Dumb ways to die

Welcome to Business Roles's Private Community

I am from a Tier 1 engineering college. Have done multiple stints in education and ed tech and am now at a VP position at a mid size edu company. Earning 50 LPA post 8 years of Work Ex. I can keep going at this rate and will have a comfortable life and also be in leadership positions which I enjoy. However I have been tempted to start up to have a shot at exponential gains in life- whether that is growth, money or influence over others. But then sanity also says most startups fail and why you want to spoil a good path. Anyone else faced this constant oscillation and how do you think about it or go about addressing it

To startup or not

Management Consulting

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

I am going to make a jargon dictionary, please give your suggestions

Corporate is more about jargons☹️

"per my last email" → "In case you can't read" 
 "To reiterate" → "for the last fucking time" 
 "moving forward" → "Don't try me again, bitch!" 
 "I've CC’d" → "Let's see you lie your way out of this, bitch" 
 "Kind regards"→ “Fuck you" 
 “Warm regards” → “Fuck you”, but warmer

Frontend Engineer

Company name - Chat360

It's pretty small and inconspicuous, but if I save even one person from joining this organisation, I will consider it worth it. Based on first hand accounts from 3 very reliable sources who are confirmed employees.

A very basic chatbot platform, being marketed as a Gen AI first product. They don't even have basic NLP and claim to be Gen AI. 

The founder & ceo is completely directionless. This is his side hustle, but while interviewing new hires he claims that he is the full time CEO (this is not true, he is barely available and always busy in his main business which is a car dealership) 

The co-founder is an IIT-grad, and due to the Founder's absence is basically running the show though he has zero business acumen. He constantly bitches about the founder to senior employees.

Of course, with such a toxic back story, it is hell to work here. No unity in the team, lot of back biting and bitching, public humiliation on WhatsApp groups, constant blame game. Basically, a shitshow. 

Do not, do not, do not join this place. Avoid it like the plague.

Toxic startup

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 ?

Was asking for some advice on fundraising. Got to know if you are building something with no revenue, literally impossible to raise.

He explained how hard it is even for the current founders and expecting 100s of startups to fail next year with talent going cheap due to all the layoffs.

Very hard to think how to monetise B2C if people don’t even link their credit or debit cards with Apple Pay and Android for in-app purchases. Also for B2B Saas, it’s better to build for US from India than building for India.

Just “profit” over growth now. Nothing else matters 💭

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