I’ve made (still continue to) a lot of mistakes while building Interviewstreet – bad product decisions, terrible demos, wrong hires, screwed up relationships and many more. Morale of founders is probably the biggest determinant of how long a startup will sail. Every failure dents the morale a little bit and when it hits zero, the startup dies.

Mentoring programs like YC, Morpheus, etc. are primarily built to guide founders so that they make fewer mistakes on the way thus keeping their morale level in place. Obviously, there can never be a program nor a mentor who can predict every mistake that a founder might do beforehand. If there was one such place, building startups would be really easy.

I’m glad to have wonderful mentors around me who’ve ensured the number of mistakes I make is less. But I’ve made many more and this is my attempt to share it with the rest of the ecosystem in the hope that it would help some entrepreneur(s).

It’s a warm fuzzy feeling to know that you’re making mistakes. It either means you’re experimenting a lot or you’re dumb, but let’s ignore the latter case for now. I promise to write blog posts about the mistakes I make in this journey.

The journey never ends

The hyphen in “start-up” is on purpose since it acts as a verb here. I get slightly worked up when people refer startup, the company as “start-up”. There is no hyphen in it, refer wikipedia if you don’t believe me. So what’s the best time to start-up a startup?

I have been interacting with a lot of “to-be-entrepreneurs“, majority of them being either college students (or) 1-2 years experience in an MNC. I could easily relate to what they would be going through and here’s my 2 cents on what to do before jumping in.

The best path before starting up is to work in a startup and understand the environment. However, the term “startup” has become a fancy word these days (just like how “entrepreneur” is) and some companies which have grown past 1000 employees still claim themselves to be a startup, nothing wrong in it, but that’s not the kind I am referring to. The ideal one would be…

• Product: An innovative product and a potential to disrupt the existing scheme of things. You should believe in it and have a sense of passion to work on it.
• Work: Be the 3rd (or) 4th employee in the company and work on your forte – if you are primarily a programmer, work on building the framework and not get hired into marketing / sales. There is a common notion that startup is just for marketing / sales, it’s not true. The joy of building a framework from scratch and seeing people use it is unparalleled. In the process you learn a LOT on how to build things.
• Rockstar CEO / founding team: Often this factor, influences the journey & life of the startup. The CEO should have a good domain knowledge and must have done something really impressive in the past. The ideal CEO is one whom you are a big fan of – For eg: if I had received an offer from Joel Spolsky for a tech startup, I would have closed my eyes and grabbed it.
• Cup of coffee: The culture should be transparent with hierarchies,etc. taking the back seat. You should be able to talk to the CEO / CTO over a cup of coffee once/twice a week to understand the plans, the metrics they track,etc.. and understand the business
• Networking & Sales: Accompany the CEO on his sales talks and understand the “how to sell” part in the business. Get to know more people, increase the size of your linkedin connections and network with a lot of top level people.

Well there aren’t any rules to start a startup, but working in one which follows such a culture helps in reducing the number of mistakes (both in technology & sales) you would do when you start off on your own. As Drew Houston once said in a presentation – “Work and try on someone else’s dime initially” – this is not verbatim but pretty much the crux of what he said.

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