Pathik Shah

Why I Quit My Job, Dropped My MBA Plans and Joined a Startup!

Recently, I resigned from my very comfortable job at a leading investment bank (no, not as an investment banker, but as an application developer ) to pursue an MBA program at one of the best B-schools in India. Just as I was completing the formalities and preparing to leave for 2 years, to complete my MBA, I got a job offer from a startup I had known about for quite some time.

This particular startup offered me a job profile which was exactly what I was looking for, and allowed me to do and learn more about almost everything I have been interested in. Naturally, I jumped on and joined it. It is definitely a bit risky, as I will probably be the first one to be sacked if something goes wrong, and we don’t manage to get our Series B, but what the heck, I’m young, and this is probably the best time to try out something like this.

Besides, the team is truly awesome, and if everything goes well, I may not need to do an MBA at all, which I consider a waste of time anyways. In the meantime, I’m still working on some of my own startup ideas, and I would rather spend the amount I would have paid as fees for the MBA program on building out my own company.

And finally, the number one (and probably silly) reason why I did it is this. Because, seriously, a million dollars isn’t that cool. It’s just fuck-you money. And the best (probably the only) way to get to a billion is by starting up. Well, that, and a newfound epiphany that I will probably never function well as an employee. I need to have a lucrative stake in whatever I’m working on; I just cannot work for a fixed salary. I need to be my own boss. I want to be my own boss.

And also because the two people I really believe in – Paul Graham and Peter Thiel – would have done the same. Well, they already have.

If everything works out, I will probably be hanging out on my own private island, sipping beer, before I turn 30. If it doesn’t, I will just lose an year. Or two. Or some more working on some other idea. If nothing works, then another two, doing an MBA. And then many in a cubicle, working for The Man. Screw that. I’m willing to take my chances. All or nothing!

PS: I may seem irrational, and probably a nutjob who thinks he is the next Zuck. But I’m excited, and maybe a bit high. And it’s definitely worth a shot.

An excellent post about ambition, and the drive (or rather, the rush) to make it big when young.

You Are Not Running Out of Time

You know the feeling – the feeling of being left behind in the race for achievement. Of falling back in ‘the game’. For some people, the game is keeping up with the Joneses: marrying a good catch, living in a nice house, driving the right car, having a good job, kids that do well at school. For others, it is enjoying life’s pleasures – the best vacations, the most enjoyable parties, with the most exciting partiers. Then there are people who are forever pursuing harmony and peace in their lives, resolving the discordant threads one by one, and for some the game is living up to their personally defined objective definition of personal development.

For most, it is a combination with a common thread: Am I moving up in the world at an acceptable pace, or am I running out of time? Am I maximizing my potential?

What that quickly meant to me was that wasting time and opportunities were criminal, with my own potential achievements as victims that needed to be rescued from the assault of lost hours and non-productivity. It meant becoming a workaholic. Bill Gates probably felt that way once – looking back at his teenage years and his own obsessive time spent with computers, he said, “it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success.”

Keep Reading: You Are Not Running Out of Time

What Makes a Successful Startup? | Dissecting Successful Internet Startups to find the Secret Sauce

No one knows, but here’s a rough answer, thanks to the guys at Startup Genome.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.

3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.

4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)

5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.

6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.

7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.

8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.

9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.

10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.

11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.

12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.

14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

You can get the full report here: The Startup Genome Report | Direct Link

Startups are Hard

An excellent post on startups and what it means to be an entrepreneur by @jazzychad of Notifo and PicAFight.

Startups are Hard

Startups are hard. No, startups are damn hard.

Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, “I’m a founder!” Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it’s just that the investors don’t have as much leverage as they used to, but they still have a lot.

Most reporting on startups suffers from a terrible case of success bias. Nobody wants to report on a dying startup unless it is to highlight another company that has come along to kill them, but that actually turns into a piece about the better company and not the dying one.

Startups that die rarely talk about it publicly because it is frustrating, embarrassing, and most of the time the people involved want to forget the whole mess and move on rather than sit around talking about the fact that they failed.

Most people don’t want to admit that startups are hard, either, because to admit something is hard is to admit that you don’t know everything there is to know about a certain topic and to display weakness. If there’s one thing you do not want to do as a startup, it’s appear weak. Only the strong survive.

But guess what: startups are hard. At times they are soul-crushingly hard. I am not afraid to admit this anymore. I am not afraid to talk openly about it with peers anymore. So, this post serves as a counterpoint to all the recent postings alluding to the fact that anyone can suddenly decide to be a founder and the next week find themselves swimming around in a kiddie-pool full of angel/VC money.

Continue Reading: Startups Are Hard

Entrepreneurs and Nontrepreneurs

There are two kinds of people – entrepreneurs and nontrepreneurs.

I’m currently a nontrepreneur, aspiring to be an entrepreneur. And here’s an awesome post by Chris Dixon on the subject.

There are two kinds of people in the world

You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining as an early employee, or investing or advising or helping out. It means starting with no money, no help, no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family), and building an organization from a borrowed cubicle with credit card debt and nowhere to sleep except the office. It almost invariably means being dismissed by arrogant investors who show up a half hour late, totally unprepared and then instead of saying “no” give you non-committal rejections like “we invest at later stage companies.” It means looking prospective employees in the eyes and convincing them to leave safe jobs, quit everything and throw their lot in with you. It means having pundits in the press and blogs who’ve never built anything criticize you and armchair quarterback your every mistake. It means lying awake at night worrying about running out of cash and having a constant knot in your stomach during the day fearing you’ll disappoint the few people who believed in you and validate your smug doubters.

I don’t care if you succeed or fail, if you are Bill Gates or an unknown entrepreneur who gave everything to make it work but didn’t manage to pull through. The important distinction is whether you risked everything, put your life on the line, made commitments to investors, employees, customers and friends, and tried – against all the forces in the world that try to keep new ideas down – to make something new.

via Chris Dixon