Can you type out the post without the names please?

Not much to say except they only care about founders already making crores every year. Others are treated like shit. Zero empathy, they only care about earning money.

Product Owner

Product Manager

I always thought it was very shady. Given the LinkedIn presence and the shady way they used to ask for investments.

They were specifically targeting shark tank featured companies too, just for popularity. Reality is many of those startups were already getting offers from other places.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. Threatened me with defamation suit when I said I'll tell other entrepreneurs how shit they are. 
  
 Hope to see them shut down within a few years. Must have paid a bomb to Cyrus for endorsement. Another red flag I should have paid attention to.  
  
 No investment platform or VC fund does celebrity endorsements for themselves.

Digital Marketing Manager

Apparently naming people is against guidelines so I'll stick to saying avoid the company. Highly unprofessional behaviour towards entrepreneurs.

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

(deleted post) Avoid Bestvantage Investments

(deleted post) Avoid Bestvantage Investments- Grapevine

Recently I was talking to a girl who was working a startup in BLR. She left the startup with some horrendous experiences. This startup was working from a startup hostel in BLR. Things she told me shook me. She was dating the founder.

So this founder who claims to be on his 2nd startup dates his own employees and then blackmails them.
The average age of his employees is 24. All these girls that he dates are not above 23/24

Apparently this guy has 2 court cases against him. One for fraud and one for a rape case. Both of them are not easily found online. He uses VC money to keep in under the hood.

The fraud case is about his first startup which was a stolen idea apparently. 

This guy’s whole life is fake.
He claims to be an IIT Madras dropout, but he's from some local college. 

There are rumours that one of the girls he dated tried to kill herself because he allegedly filmed them.

He also does not pay salaries for months to his employees but compensates by giving them expensive gifts.

He claims his parents are IAS officers but we checked and they are not. 

His last startup was around around AUTH and current one is around Fintech

Girls and boys stay away from working with such shady startups.

Tinder Swindler of BLR

Interesting, the whole story is about unknown man with unknown startup. Thanks for such an insightful post.

Founder

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

One of my besties and her office/company is at the verge of closure. Similar to Dunzo’s fate this seed stage stage startup is at the brink of closure(funding dry up, no seen of profitability) and she is worried about her job and living in constant fear. She is moving her days week over week. 

Any suggestions on how to deal with this? She is not finding appropriate job opportunities too and there is no clarity given by founders too. 

Don’t ask the start up name and the founders themselves are active on Grapevine and won’t appreciate their so called employees to bitch about them in social platform. She is worried she might get terminated immediately for what left of days they have. She want to secure the job first.

But first she needs emotional and mental support. What better community than GV for seeking advise. Hence this post. Please help her 🤲

A Seed stage start up at the verge of closure

Lawyer

Went for pitching my startup with my cofounder and found him openly flirting and trying to be friendly.  Have you guys faced this? Isn’t this blatant abuse of power? Wondering if I should name the firm but scared.

Delhi based partner at top 10 VC firm WOMENIZER

Business Development Manager

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

Which Indian VC investor is a no-go and why? 
Share in person’s name - fund - reason(s) format if possible

Which VCs to avoid

A friend is pretty upset about where they are working. They feel a bit cheated with the #edtech company not growing as the founders kept promising them. The company has reversed its initial growth and is now not sure of the next steps. 

They were largely into giving charters instead of degrees and their pandemic success has disappeared. 

They are wondering if they should cut loss and jump ship before the company shuts. Or should they sink with the team?

The founders are pretty cool guys outside. With a good reputation. But they haven't been able to scale the company and promises have dried up. 

I wish I could reveal the name - but I don't want to affect anyone or point at anyone else. But my friend is really traumatised and has lost interest in work and is given new roles and responsibilities every week at '_t_a'. And everyone else is demotivated and upset with how the founders seem to cut their losses by doing secondaries but they can't do a thing! Even the investors don't seem to care much. 

My friend and a few others plan to take this up with the founders on Wednesday. And there is an internal revolt going on.

Edtech Dillema at '_t_a' - what should my friend do?

There is a second wave of layoffs happening at my company due to cost cutting. The irony is that even though our headquarters is in Bengaluru the CEO (indian citizen) stays in the UK, continuously traveling back and forth to India.  Out of many other ways they could have done the cost cutting. They are doing this.

Layoffs at a startUp

If you can't name the company even with the power of anonymity, tho beta rehne do

Investor

Software Engineer

Joined this organization as an SDE. Initially, had a great experience for the first few months, got to learn a lot. However, eventually, the management (co-founder) started showing his true colors where they would favor a few people who would say yes to everything the co-founder had to say, while others who asked for justification would suffer.

One such issue is the lack of concrete documentation for policies, and surprise, surprise, the policies change based on the mood of the founders. HR, oh, where can I begin? I honestly haven't seen them work, other than salary processing, where they have outsourced their work like LinkedIn management and basic tasks such as wishing employees on their birthdays. This is perfectly fine with the co-founder, as he considers this innovative.
Unnecessarily, we are forced to follow processes that hamper productivity, and we have to attend meetings for half the day. Still, they expect us to work for more than 10 hours when the salary is peanuts—hell, even peanuts are better; at least we can have them with alcohol.

My learning is saturated, and there’s no zeal to learn as the manager and others demotivate you. The most frustrating part is the quarterly rewards, which make no sense, as the rewards are given to people who can appease their managers (confirmed).

And now that we have increments incoming, they have all of a sudden started highlighting mistakes, finding mistakes even if they don’t exist. Like one such example was the co-founder asking us to write a script when the script was already shown, and asking for an update on a JIRA ticket when it was already given in the comments.

They lost my respect when they started canceling people’s PTOs and disturbing people on their much-needed PTOs where they spend time with their families and unwind. The co-founder asks the PO to call and disturb the developer on their much-needed vacations after working for long hours and weekends as he wants to satisfy his ego.

Rant post

I have evaluated a lot of startups as part of my work. My approach has changed from being optimistic to being suspicious of a lot of founders, even before the process starts. 

The sheer number of founders that I come across that try to game metrics/play around with data to make the startup look good. 

Most commonly:
1) Completely changing the definition of margins, repeat rates, etc. and never clarifying that they are using different definition. 
2) Often giving rebates/discounts to key stakeholders but finding ways to hide it from their P&L so that it’s not visible. THIS IS SO COMMON - lot’s of them start showing revenues, and then you will see another cost item rising at the same pace, and lot’s of times it will just be money moving around
3) Sometimes completely giving the wrong picture of how their product works on ground. You then speak with their customers, and they describe something completely else.

Things like these are eating up the ecosystem. These founders also end up fooling some VCs, and then capital get’s kept away from actually good founders who have good intentions.

There was a recent major investment in the commerce space, and that is another one such example of a startup doing this. Needs to stop.

RANT: Founders who fake metrics

Bad Culture, Politics, etc. Give some names that one should avoid at all costs.

What are the worst B2B startups?

Consultant

Hey everyone! 
Sorry for the title. 

I had applied for a company, based out of Hyderabad. A startup, hiring for its founding full-stack engineer. 
The founder had sent their calendly link to schedule the meeting. 
I scheduled once, joined and waited long enough to receive an email saying that he got caught up in another meeting. The email explicitly said how sorry they were. 
Scheduled again, cancelled 5 mins prior because of a conflicting meeting. 
They apologized again, sent the calendly link, I rescheduled. I had an personal emergency because of which I couldn't attend so I sent an email, 5 MINS BEFORE THE MEETING STARTED, asking to reschedule. 
They shared the link, I rescheduled and they completely ghosted me. 

They think they belong to the top of the world or something, because of a fricking startup? Although it's YC funded but that doesn't give them horns! 
So I'm going to name and shame the company. 

LANDEED
Founder - CJ Lin

Egotistical Founder - Such a prick!

Ye toh dhoti khol raha hai ft. Apna

Some context.
Worked at an early stage startup around 1.5 years ago. This startup works in the Computer Vision space and does a lot of experiments(no direction at all, will take some project from some fintech company one day, some project from healthcare, and then some project from some random company, basically these go nowhere), I worked with one of the projects that involved document processing and it got some revenue.

At my last day, I was made to sign some agreement which included non compete.

1.5 hears later, today, I’ve joined a startup that works in FinTech domain and has been doing pretty good, and they sent a BGV check to my previous employer, and those guys are saying they won’t do BGV and that I’m violating the non compete agreement. They think entire world is their competitor, honestly, they’re nothing and no one even gives a fuck about their existence.

What can I do here?

My ex-employer is messing up my background verification

Machine Learning Engineer

I'll start - One of the older VC firms with an office in Indiranagar (also probably planning to shut their scout vehicle fund after a few employee exits) reels of toxicity at the helm. GP who comes from a rich family has the habit of arm twisting employees and putting them down even on the smallest of the mistakes. What's your toxic VC story?

Let's discuss toxic VCs

Founder’s Office

I had an offer with Virgio but it’s been put on hold twice.  They are pivoting from fast fashion to circular fashion.  My head is spinning in circles. Should I hold out for the joining with bated breath ? Bhai log. Advice do please.

Virgio

Digital Accessibility Technologist

Welcome to Personal Finance's Private Community

What are the stocks you are betting on for next 3 to 5 years and why. Stocks less than 3 years since ipo? Or names you don't hear from big investors.


Please do not add the blue chip stocks or brand stocks just for the sake of Commenting. 


Here are my bets: each of these stocks have >2 lakh investment amount (not final value) 

Inox india : cryogenic monopoly
Suzlon : holding since 4 INR price 
Vasa denticity : online dental monopoly
Ireda (got the ipo in hni category, haven't booked profit even at 400%+)
Bls e services (booked 75% profits from ipo at 250%)
Rate gain (data monopoly) 


Paytm (controversy max but still holding) sunk cost

'lesser known' stocks you are betting on

Head Of Marketing

Till 1947 Indians were made to lick the boots of the British Raj. The overlords. The 'saviors' of an inferior race. The fear mongers.  

That fear has got coded in our DNA. It hasn't changed much.

Biggest indicator of that

NCCS A workforce belonging to the younger millennial and gen z generation fearing to name wrong doers in an ANONYMOUS app!

We are not very different from our parents and grandparents who had lesser choices to revolt and stand up against unfairness.

Sad.

(deleted post) Avoid Bestvantage Investments

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