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Do the right thing
To put it politely – the startup world is messed up. Big time. And we need to fix it. In my last startup, when we were fundraising, we met a particularly aggressive (‘sharky’) investor. During our discussions, they constantly told us to follow the...
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Take your time, focus hard, and get it done
In movies, you see heroes spraying light weapons in automatic mode, killing dozens of 'bad guys.' In real life, you never do that. Here is why. An...
Face your fears
I spent my 4 years at IIT mostly lazing around, wasting my time. But I had other classmates who slogged hard. In the final year, most hard-working...
Let us allow people to enjoy their work
In my very first engagement as a McKinsey consultant, we were trying to schedule a meeting with a senior leader at a pharma client. She literally...
Start small, iterate, and one day your progress will shock you.
Here is a two-step process for hitting even the hardest possible goals: 1. Get started 2. Iterate until success Here is the two-step process for...
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HabitStrong Scaling
Our obsession with 'billion' has made us lose touch with reality. If you are building a startup, it HAS to be a unicorn. If you are an entrepreneur, you have to be a billionaire. Gentle reminder: A billion dollars is more than Rs 7,000 crores. The...
Leadership takes the courage to be disliked
A leader who ONLY tells the crowd what they want to hear is not a leader -- he is just following the crowd from the front. Today, most political leaders across the globe are 'followers from the front.' Leadership takes the courage to be disliked....
We all start from the same baseline — “Zero.”
I took up my last job at a private equity fund after quitting McKinsey. I soon found that I had no idea about the jargon they were using. I had not even heard terms like Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and termsheet. In fact, once by mistake, I told...
When you take up something, do it like your life depends on it.
I would attribute half of my struggles and disappointments in my startup journey to just one factor: “Doing too many things.” This may seem weird – aren’t you supposed to do a lot of things in a startup? No, no, no. Don’t do that, please. And this...