SaaSBoomi

Pankaj MishraIt’s amazing how just this one question can make or break a company. What makes it even more frustrating is that there’s already too much noise and clutter of answers on this question. From founders, investors, to startup mentors, media and so on, almost everyone has their perfect answer to this question. And still, many founders hire VP sales too early, or too late. A rare few, Google for instance, get it right. Many others including GitHub, which got acquired by Microsoft eventually, didn’t get it right. So how to separate noise from signals that matter?Enter Elad Gil, a serial entrepreneur and the author of “High Growth Handbook”, a book that combines practical insights from practitioners with some of the most visionary playbooks around the world. Over the years, Elad has been an entrepreneur, investor and advisor to companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, Pinterest, Square, Stripe,  and many others. In this podcast, the first in a series of deep conversations with him on organisational building blocks, Elad offers practical insights into some of the most common mistakes founders make. When to hire your first vice president of sales, is among just one such existential questions. “Some companies hire a vice president of sales too early because they see that the market exists already. In other circumstances when there is uncertainty, you start doing founder-driven sales,” Elad says. “Many founders today, particularly product and technical founders, end up adding sales and a VP sales much too late in the life of a company.”“What you’re increasingly seeing is that people are getting “pre product market fit” advice to “post product market fit” their companies. If you go back 5 or 10 years, it was the opposite--people were given very bad advice. There was post product market fit advice to a company that just didn’t have any traction yet,” he adds. As you will discover after listening to this conversation with Elad, there’s so much to learn from the playbooks of Google, Stripe, Github and others. Elad also warns against learning from the playbooks without understanding the contextual setting for each of them. One size doesn’t fit all, indeed. So why do companies fail?“The number one reason companies fail is because of the “co-founder complex.”There’s always this advice that you need an equal co-founder. I think people need to divorce equality in terms of equity, from equality in terms of decision making,” Elad tells me in this podcast. “For late stage companies, the common mistakes are very different. Not building an executive team early enough, is the first such mistake. That’s why when you see second time founders start a company, among the first 15 people 3-4 of them are VPs and CXOs.”

Pankaj MishraOver 30 million kids use SplashLearn to play games that help them learn math, practice better.Arpit Jain, Umang Jain, Joy Deep Nath, and Mayank Jain, the co-founders of SplashLearn, were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur.The biggest tipping point for SplashLearn was when it decided to shift from $10 as a lifetime fee for using the app, to $10 as a monthly fee."We were nervous," Arpit tells me in this podcast.Today, with over 100K+ paid members, SplashLearn has navigated that transition well.As Umang adds, listening to the users relentlessly and shaping the product with them has been the key. "You co-own the product with your users."SplashLearn's journey of building a product, acquiring the product-market fit, and transitioning to the SaaS model, offers deep insights about what works and what doesn't. Their early bet on iPad in 2010 as the learning device to be used by the schools, didn't work out well. But they transitioned away quickly and learned from things that didn't work out. "Startup is a rollercoaster ride, your team is the seatbelt," says Arpit. Listen to this podcast to learn about the edtech industry, product building blocks, and managing co-founder relationships. 

The first time I heard of Icertis was when it closed its billion dollar valuation funding round last year. I wasn't alone to discover Icertis back then. Many people in the ecosystem, including some of the top investors had the same question, what does Icertis do and why is it valued at over a billion dollars? In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast with its co-founder Monish Darda, we don't just answer the questions about what makes Icertis a unicorn, but also trace the journey from the early building blocks.  As I discovered in this conversation, Icertis isn't just a SaaS unicorn. It's clearly among the companies out there who have the potential to go all the way to become what they call "BuiltToLast.""If you're building the company for the long term, you really have to think about your values....giving people a framework and giving yourselves a framework on how you behave," Monish tells me in this podcast. Monish and Samir Bodas, the co-founders of Icertis, applied all the learnings from their past failures to build a culture that lasts. "After every meeting, and during the meetings, we always ask ourselves, what if we walk out now."The culture of learning from failures is helping Icertis avoid existential failures in the future. During every company meeting, both Samir and Monish talk about their failures over the past six months. The story of Icertis reminds me of Ben Horowitz's famous book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Icertis' journey so far, and the potential ahead, underscores what it really takes to build a company that matters, not just for the next funding rounds, but a true "BuiltToLast."Please tune in to learn from Icertis' journey.

Pankaj MishraGreat ecosystems are built on building blocks that are diverse and bring different communities and ideologies together. Homogenous building blocks create commoditised environments with absolutely short-lived differentiation and a common race to the bottom.India's SaaS ecosystem brings enough diversity in terms of business models and products, even ideologies, to keep storytellers like me excited and interested in people who make it.Rushabh Mehta, this week's guest on the SaaSBOOMi podcast, underscores the diversity in India SaaS as I mentioned above. In a world focused on B2BSaaS products joining the battle of the proprietary platforms, ERPNext, offers one of the world's only open source ERP.It's a path not many have taken because it's not financially rewarding and bootstrapping isn't a choice--there's no other way.Rushabh and his company Frappe Technologies have some amazing insights about building a company based on the First Principles.Listen to this podcast to learn from ERPNext and Rushabh's journey how to build a community and not just a company. And doing all that based on the First Principles that include no sales targets or incentives, and a truly non-hierarchical organization.The following blogs make for deep, additional read on what makes Frappe an amazing culture that's #BuiltToLast A 40 Person Company That Runs Without SpreadsheetsPerformance and CompensationTowards Collective Decision Making: From a team without managers to a team with collective leadership

Wingify founders on a decade of bootstrapping, surviving profitably and staying together Pankaj Mishra What makes a company great? What does it take to build companies that outlive "startup valleys of death"? In this episode of SaaSBOOMi podcast, Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta share candid lessons on not just survival but building a culture that lasts, profitably.  "We've been lucky to share a substantial part of our value system, together. There are fundamental values that we both agree together, and that helps us have a lot of disagreements. But because we share the value system, we know whatever disagreements we're having are towards the same end goal," Paras says in this podcast.  "I actively look forward to Sparsh's disagreement rather than just agreement, to ensure that I am not stuck in some cognitive bias in my own ego." "In the last ten years, I and paras have had disagreements when we entered into a room, but every single time when we went out of the room, we both believed that our individual ideas got groomed, became better," Sparsh adds in this podcast.

A lot of spotlight continues to be on India SaaS companies such as Zoho and Freshworks, and rightfully so. But that’s not what’s shaping the future of India’s multi-billion SaaS industry alone. It’s the startups such as Atlan, and its young founders like Prukalpa Sankar who are creating the building blocks of a massive industry, learning from the playbooks of their larger peers, and applying their own lessons from the journey. Tune in to this podcast to learn how Prakulpa and her founding team applied lessons from their earlier startup in building Atlan, their journey from $0 to $1 million, and so on.

Suresh Sambandam, the CEO and founder of Kissflow, is a quintessential entrepreneur. And that's not just because he can hustle his way out of any crisis, but more because of the way he applies all his learnings egolessly in moving his startup forward. Suresh talks about "the HP Way" he discovered while working at Hewlett Packard early in his career, and the way the company puts trust in its people. "Trust isn't just about honesty or competency. It's a two-sided coin; you need to have competence and character. You won't trust anyone who doesn't have competency. You can't trust a doctor who is not a good doctor. " In this podcast conversation, Suresh also opens up about two of the toughest challenges he faced in his career--the 2008 financial crisis, and losing his cofounder during 2013, which triggered a deep introspection and challenged his beliefs, moulded him forward. Suresh recommends several books, including "the Fifth Discipline", which is about building a learning organisation. Please tune in to this episode of the SaaSBOOMi podcast to learn how Suresh is applying best practices from across the world in building a learning organisation that survives the test of crises.

 In our maiden episode of the SaaSBOOMi podcast, we bring you a deep conversation with Manav Garg, the founder of Eka. “What we are facing today is unprecedented. The degree of unexpectedness is massive. Now, it’s no more about a business--it’s about human lives, human existence and the human way of life going forward,” Manav tells me in this podcast. “I would advise taking care of physical and mental health as top of the agenda. Second is to ensure that your employees aren’t stressed because they help us build long term companies. And the third thing is to keep a tab on the cash flow on a daily basis.”Earlier this month, Manav also asked India’s SaaS ecosystem to “Brace for impact, huddle and let’s build great Global SaaS companies, together.” Please do read the blog to understand how Manav and other leaders in India’s SaaS ecosystem are preparing to navigate the pandemic as a community. “If you show your vulnerabilities, other people also talk about their problems. And then you find out, everybody is in the same boat with some degrees of differences. If you know everyone is in the same boat, it will make you feel better.”So how will this pandemic affect India’s SaaS industry?“I think SaaS waves will accelerate going forward, of course not in the industries that are deeply impacted. After every crisis, the automation increases because you want to have self-reliant systems and lower your costs,” he says. “The question you should ask is--is your business relevant anymore? If you are in an industry, which is not going to come back (for a long time) such as travel, then there’s no point wasting your time,” Manav says. “There’s going to be a shift from mad growth at all costs, to sustainable and profitable growth. Sustainability and longevity of the company will have a far greater role to play than anything else,” Manav adds.