Are we missing something?
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.
Why cant it be both? Why cant x be profitable on paper and yet you hear experiences from employees who’ve worked there in real time saying its toxic and terrible for work culture? People unfortunately have families to feed and they will go about with toxic management because lets face it, most of us dont have the balls to quit or financial troubles or just too much shit tying us down. So I could be doing my job and helping a place become profitable and at the same time know its pathetic and toxic.
Good
Yeah I understand that toxic work culture has no correlation with business outcome, and that’s what I have written as well. But, how come businesses with poor management, no clear vision still succeed.
Regarding poor management, Ola electric possibly has the worst attrition, yet the business seems to be doing really well.
One of the main reasons Indian (or most) startups fail is because they lack a clear and compelling vision.
This can be for a number of reasons, such as the founders not having a strong enough sense of what they want to achieve or not being able to articulate it clearly to others. It leads to the team not having a sense of purpose that is existentialist for a lot of employees. A whole lot of people quit because they don’t have an answer to “What am I doing here?”.
Without a clear articulated direction (aka vision), it's very difficult to get people on board with your idea and to get them excited about it.
The startups that were incubated with the express purpose of solving “a” problem run out of steam once the market makes them realise that this is a limited problem and there isn’t enough yield for the effort / expense. Thats again lack of vision. Every problem doesn’t need to be solved and small canvas startup founders realise that to their peril.
The most common thing I have first hand experience of in India - Some founders are just out of depth after reaching a certain scale - they have no experience in scaling up or execution and are also not eager to ceed control to professionals. A lot of startups flounder at this stage. Thats lack of vision in handing over to professionals when you reach an inflection point. But classic Indian control freak-ery wreaks havoc here.
It's also difficult to make decisions about what direction to take the company in, and you are more likely to make wrong turns that waste time, money, energy and resources. You see umpteen examples of this - people trying to be everything for everyone. PayTM is a classic example - Games, Mall, This, That, what a waste of resources.
Layoffs are an aftereffect of lack of vision. Fail fast is great for 0-1, but beyond that the impact is severe, hurts a lot of people and plays out publicly.
Very well written. Thanks a lot for this comment. And yes, I have all the same observations as you have. As a founder, two things are very important.
- Focus.
- The ability to trust outsiders and devolve different facets of work. Without focus, you’ll build a lot of things that either vanish into oblivion, yet waste your time. And without ability to trust, you can’t really grow your team.
Shantanu mentions it a lot on his barbershop podcast. Growing a startup from 0-1, 1-100, 100-1k and onwards all require different skill sets and different people. Also requires putting your ego aside and hiring people who know more and are better than you, which is challenging.
Startups are very complex. Came across this image that captures all the aspects very well. Check it out -
https://twitter.com/polak_jasper/status/1705223162533708199?t=dbGbm5M6_pqib9GBKw17Rg&s=19
Wow, this is so precise. Thanks a lot for sharing.