"This notion of a startup should be centered around the founder is a mindset. It makes for great stories. It makes for great heroes. And that's the reason why that sustains But, you know, there are great organizations that have been built where founders did not believe in that. And the organizations sustain even after the founder leaves."
That's what Alok Mittal, founder and MD of Indifi, an online lending platform, had to say about startups getting caught up in the founder-worshipping trap.
I hope you have heard my first episode with him. I often ask founders if they believe in the concept of a founder-led organization. Or how they're planning for a post-founder future for their organization. Because like Alok, I do believe that just like a parent's role is to eventually step back and let go of their child, so it is for founders.
But that's not easy when we're living in the golden age of founders. Where co-founder tags are coveted much more than CEO titles. It's not easy for many founders to let go.
But that was just one of the things that Alok and I discussed in our conversation. Alok, if you didn't know already, is involved in a lot of things. His day job might be MD of Indifi, but he is also the founding board member of Indian Angel Network and co-founder of Plaksha University.
Plaksha is a project he has been working on for quite some time and the way it is structured was interesting and something a lot of centers of education should be aiming to build in India as Alok explained:
"The notion of departments that exist in educational institutions is not the right architecture. Especially for a country like India, more and more of technology skills have to get expressed as entrepreneurship for it to be relevant to society. I don't think we have another answer for the jobs we need to create or the growth that we need to build.
Now, you take all of that, and the question that we are asking is, what does that mean for the university system? And so, for example, at Plaksha, there are no departments. There are these integrated centers of research which are oriented towards a particular problem like climate. But there is no computer science department, there is no mechanical engineering department. There is no mechanical engineering major because we don't think that students will need to be experts at mechanical engineering in a silo to be able to build.
So there is a major in autonomous systems, which means robotics, which means drones, which means all of that. But there's a major in biological systems, which means genetic engineering, which means personalized medicine, things of that nature. So that is the new architecture that we are putting in place for how technology education should be done."
If you haven't already checked out the first part of my conversation with Alok Mittal, now would be the perfect time to give it a listen. You'll find in that conversation when and how Alok fell in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur.
Welcome to First Principles—The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
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