Founder’s DNA by Shailendra

How large companies are built

● Power of Compounding & Enduring is understated & underestimated but builds large
companies. The difference of Top 10 companies in 2005 and now in NASDAQ is a clear
indicator.
● To build large companies
○ Have a Passion to Change something authentically
○ Iterate Fast
○ Deepen moat
○ Build Multi-product/Platform

Founder’s Duties & Communication

● 3 Hats of Founders
○ CXO - Management Role
○ Board of Dir - Governance Role
○ Shareholders - Owners Role
● Has the Fiduciary duty - Keep even the minority stakeholder’s interest in mind
● Common issues in fiduciary duty
○ Own Comp/Benefits
○ Related party transactions
○ Change of Leadership
○ “When to wear which hat” - mixing up
● Communication
○ With Investor - Tell all, accuracy of claims & data
○ With Employees - All-hands meeting, Quarterly/monthly meeting
○ With Senior Mgmt - Weekly meeting is must

Founder’s DNA
● Founder’s are a force of nature
● It changes based on the type of companies they build - Clones, Mutants or New species
● Duality -
○ Your gift is also your curse
○ “And” answers are possible
○ Self-awareness helps
 ● Founder’s Challenges
○ Take it too personal
○ Lose objectivity
○ Blind spots
○ Remain in denial
○ Caught up in the moment
○ Stunted learning trajectory
● Develop A team who have Founder’s DNA
● Great companies can recruit co-founder any time
● Have +ve triggers to do work not otherwise
● Power law of people??

How to build company?

● Key to leading company is “Mission driven company”. “North-star” is the shared mission
● Building unicorn
○ Ability to retain talent
○ First Principle
 ○ Fast learning
● Build “Circle of Trust” - Confidante with you can confide.
● Pursuit of clarity - Clarity becomes alignment
● Inspire the team Vs Accountability - Balance is the key
● Mistakes mostly happen 2nd layer of the org.
● Build & treat like Sports team

Mindset
● Learning Mindset - Humility, Non-judgemental, OK to fail
● Trusting Mindset
● Vulnerability Mindset - Build circle of trust
● Gratitude Mindset

Manifestation of Duality
● Driven Vs Over-competitive
● Belief in self Vs Dismissive of competition
● GetReal Vs koolAid
● Cycles of confidence and humility
● Seeking purpose Vs Rebellion
● Sacrifice Vs Expectations
● Contribution Vs Attribution
● Intensity Vs Emotional Balance

Decision Making
● First Principle Vs Process Driven
● Long-term Vs Point-in-time

Motivation & Team building - Chatri of One Championship

Higher purpose than the organization - Builds resilience in team
#1 Be a pioneer
Courage to live innovation
Resilience
Systematic Ecosystem Leadership
Tribe Creation (created by emotion, built by stories and driven by Mission)
Infinitely scalable formula - find real life super heroes

#2 Build an Iconic brand

Values - Integrity, Happiness, Excellence, Continuous Self-improvement,Team work & Loyalty
Emotion
Story-telling
Heroes & Tribe
Purpose

#3 Be a world champion
Learn to win all environments
Inches are everywhere
Maximize pain tolerance
Obsession has no office hours
Embrace failure

5 Key Startup Success

Integrity
Law of attraction (Positive energy)
Culture (Bedrock of culture is people with values)
Execution
Adaptability

● Founder == Authenticity
● Grab (drab) Vs Go-jek (emotion)
● Think every week how can you break your company yourself, what can break it and build
against it
● Who is WORLD CHAMPION - One who takes the punch to go down but comes up again
to fight without fear… who does not shrink their body in fear but rise

Mohit on Business Building

● Plane is Startup, Founder is Pilot, VC is ATC
● Screenshot of how company perform
● Difference between fastest Indian runner and Bolt is 7% only
● Pushing daily 7% north is the champion
● There are no overnight success

TRIPOD OF BUSINESS
Letter by VC to HippoVideo in 5 Years

Hi Karthi, Nilam and Srini,

Congrats on your 100M ARR achievement. In the process you have enabled businesses
collaborate with video. You have made video as the de-facto engagement and collaboration
medium for businesses with their prospects, customers and their employees.

With the next target on Enterprise hope you replicate the success & become a bigger brand &
do IPO
As a tech extension , your R&D on AR as the next gen collaboration medium is proving early
success already and are quickly adopted by B2C companies.

This was all possible with our agile, people respecting and experimenting culture

Regards,
Shailendra

Market Lessons
● Create new market like Square
● Listen to Market - Tzinga Vs Paperboat
● AND is better than OR - Zomato Dine-out brand to Food brand would have helped win
Swiggy
Mgmt
● Speed of the ship is determined by size & shape of hull - Hull is Mgmt team
● OYO was able to attract great talent. China ops is taken care fully by Chinese
● Over time period call the founding team as Partners. Eg Jack-ma

GINGA - Brazil’s football essence. Find the company’s essence and play to it. A failure can
create doubt and we will try to change our DNA with force but will not help

Defining Culture by Peter Kemps

Results = Strategy + Culture

Gandhi quotes on Values & how it leads to Behaviour

Values - What do we stand for? - Ethics, Principle, Beliefs

Vision - What do we aspire to achieve? Where are we going? - Hope & Ambition
Mission - Why do we do what we do? Who do we do it for? - Motivation & Purpose

Circles.life - they check company culture by asking themselves as employees will we work
here?
With Ivan of Modalku & Rameez of Circles.life on Values
How to set values/vision/mission of the company
● Choose 5 values after brainstorming with the team
● Values are the one that made them happy when doing something
● Will you do it again
● Will you do it repeatedly
● Don't just work with words, explain them and ask them to explain. For eg Ownership
people equate to Accountability. Ownership is replying support ticket after hours on a
Friday night

How to imbibe values in team

● Have a pitch deck for employees too like you do for customer and investor
● Circles.start - has no titles like in Zoho
● All-hands-meeting
● In Townhall ask leaders to talk on achievements and elaborate which value helped them
● Celebrate - when someone excels in value, celebrate
● Conduct events for each value, so that team imbibes
● Walk the talk - founders should not violate values. An oil and gas chairman, in onsite, did
not cross the yellow line (its their safety value) and waited 10 minutes for the signal

How Amazon values Values by Peter Kemps

Conception of Values in Amazon
● Start early
● Introspect
● Focus on people
● Focus on stories
● Start with small group

Articulation by Amazon
● Formulate
● Get real
● Socialize
● Set the bar
● Codify
14 values Amazon have
13 values have to be strictly followed to arrive at 1 value ie deliver results
William of Tokopedia on Values
On Values
We all are pirates
● Mission - Treasure Island
● Vision - Our map to reach treasure island
● Compass - Our values to reach treasure island
● When the above are not clear in a situation follow our North star ie philosophy
Nakama - a handbook on values is given and discussed for every new employee

Leadership
● Leaders role is to hire better leader than themselves
● Be Grateful - Humility & Curiosity
● 5 Balls you juggle - in personal and equivalent in work life
○ Work - Rubber ball - Job description
○ Family - Glass ball - Your team
 ○ Friends - Glass ball - Customers
○ Health - Glass ball - Culture
○ Integrity - Glass ball - Values

● How to get to first principle on any problem

○ Purpose
○ Plan
○ Execute
○ Step back
○ Reflect - Understand why it went right and wrong
○ Change and understand the root causes
● For superseding a senior employee
○ ESOP
○ Explain the purpose of the new employee as new driver to reach the treasure
island
○ Option for that employee to unlearn and relearn
○ Have an open discussion and don't backstab

Interviewing by SJS
Personality Matrix

Control/Judgement

Creativity IQ Empathy Values

Energy

Age is the Y axis and the X axis

Energy
Hunger, Intensity, Drive

How to test
● Understand triggers
● Demonstrated hard work
● Sports background
Creativity
Curiosity, Open mindedness, the idea person & problem solving

HTT
● Interest in music/arts
● Do crazy/quirky things
● Find new solution to problems

IQ
Strong analytical, logical, structuring skills

HTT
● Academic performance
● Raw smarts

Empathy/EQ
Drives effectiveness, leadership/team-work, well-linked at work,personally secure, transparent

HTT
● Diversity in background
● Has experienced personal hardship
● Shaped by a good culture in work exp
● Travel/Global exp

Values
Do the right thing, can make non-economic choices, watch the interest of all stake-holders

HTT
● Core values, life philosophy, principles
● Institution/self
● Look for examples of sacrifice in their life

Control
Judgement - Algorithm, control of emotions, quality of decision making and maturity

HTT
● Observation/synthesis power
● Diversity of exp
● Examples of patience/persistence
FLOW THEORY - to work in zones

Applying yourself - before replying think through by applying yourself

Abheek Anand on Stages, PM & Metrics of Business
Startup is a space mission

Google vision - Organize the world's information

Stages & the Goal of that stage

PMF - Retention
Repeatable Business Model - Unit economics
Market Dominance - Growth
Profitability - Cash flow

Metrics ​- Simple vs Simplicity

Power of simplicity
● Picking the right metrics - which add value to customer and ours
● Drive organization design with those metrics
● Incremental in approach
● Consistency in tracking the metrics
● Display them for team to reflect

Growth team
● Works on the top of the funnel issues
● PM team’s client is customer, while Growth team’s customer is Company itself
● 1 coder, 1 data scientist, ½ PM is the growth team at FB
● Conduct hackathons to solve issue found by growth team
Recruiting by Anirudh

● LinkedIn - leverage it
● Send in-message and get 2 reference
● Send it from CEO
● Shortlist to 100-200 candidates through appropriate filtering
● Don't use Job title for filter
● 24:1 is the interviews vs hire ratio in general
● No bell curve, hire only top talents
● Interview
○ Have question bank for each role,discuss with the panel on how to go about them
○ Identified the values reflected by the candidate and how much
○ Strong value to referral by employees
● Onboard well
● Close the loop immediately
● 48 hours close the loop and give laptop
● ESOP as a hiring tool, explain well
ESOP with Mohit & Jiten of Citrus
● An office boy of Citrus was given ESOP & he did buy a house in Mumbai - ESOP story
● When to sell ESOP of employees - Series B/C, whenever founders sell, allow employees
to sell 10% of their vested shares, do it structurally
● Citrus paid for people who left early too
● After each round show employee how much their shares how grown and worth
● Instead of shares they gave option which had economic value but at company’s
discretion- What is option??
● Cap the value when the employee leaves the organization
● ESOP Governance doc should be the guiding principle with all rules/scenarios laid out
● ESOP related issues should not be with Founder’s discretionary powers
● Have different schemes of ESOP based on the stage of the company- ESOP1, 2, 3 etc
● There are softwares to manage ESOP
● Record every ESOP related commitments with Accounts/HR
● Set ESOP but exercise only after they prove say in 6 months
● First among equals
● Can have shares released every year instead of 1st year
● Increase vesting to 5 years
10X Engineer by Roy
10X engineers they dont apply for a job, you have to get them through referral only

Amdahl’s law - Law of limitation - Every scenario has limitations, so cannot perform beyond that

Who is 10X Engineer

● Leadership
● Driven by Excellence
● Strong opinions, loosely held
● Getting better at getting better
● Constructively lazy
● The best code is often no code
Aakash & Prateek - Business/Customer segmentation
Ankiti, Zilingo
● Mutated multiple times
● B2C → Merchant Tech → Merchant Platform → Marketplace → Fintech (loan to
merchants) → Factory → ERP for Fashion with vertical integration
● To scale existing and parallely find new business, they had different teams for each
● Recruiting based on IQ, EQ, Culture fit and Fire in the belly. Does Pyschograph and First
principle based hiring
● To avoid mental health issues, they have sessions, yoga etc
● Out of 120 engineers in Bangalore, 85 are IITians
● CRED hires only youngsters

With Roy/Peter on 90 day plan

Understand the trigger why someone is purchasing now
Time/Activity when the trigger happens
Usage based activity/trigger for purchase
Read “Nudge” book on gamification to make people do desired activity
Ask them to Pay only when they Play the video
Circles.life → Made people engage on a daily basis to change their telco plan through
gamification

Peter on Positioning
● Gossip test - do it for positioning statements and understand how people receive & tell
others
● Book on Positioning - Play Bigger by Al Ramadan
● Category is the new strategy
● What is missing → Threat → Protagonist/Antagonist → Promised Land
● James bond (customer) -- Dr Q (Hippo Video) -- Change/Threat (Personalization)
● Qualtrics → From Insights → To Experience Management (New category)
● Insider -- From Acquisition --- To Growth Management Platform (New category)

Kunal of Cred
● Elegance - is what drives Cred - Spend less resources of organization
● Predator - Spends less but gets more - deadly bite, elegance is that
● Freecharge persuaded Pepsi to do an ad worth 10M, which was basically a freecharge
ad with celebrities. Promised land for the employee was 50% increase in sales in a
winter season and they did it
 ● HUMAN PERSUASION
● To drive team to elegance - Kunal asks “is this 9/10” to their team and they dont have
review concept
● VIRALITY is key for CRED. When Chinese stayed in India, he ensured that they have
the best hospitality so that its viral and helps him close a China deal
● Shailendra did not do down round even when the company was flat
● Don't play Zero-sum game in negotiation
● How to analyze what a customer/segment wants - go to a unbiased review site and
check all the brickbats and gave 1 or 2 stars. FIX IT
● Loyalty - People value time, so they don't switch. Corollary - If you sell convenience,
then your customer should value time so they pay for it
● Has 40interns working on asking what customers/prospect want
● Dan ariely - Human Behaviour Psychology

People Management at CRED

● With offer letter they give Macbook, to bring trust
● 1st of every month, employees get next month's salary
● Trust & get out of their way
● Creativity test - “Wiki-watts” - Ask the candidate to pick a random page like “Sequoia”
and ask the user to end in “Chengis Khan” wiki page by creatively clicking on the links of
the wiki page
● Ask each member of the team to refer only one but the BEST person
● Have a checklist of 20 checkboxes to hire, but go ahead and hire when 1 or 2
checkboxes show. Shailendra does it for investment too
● STANDARDIZE, STANDARDIZE for CLARITY.
● Sequoia found that almost 90% of successful unicorn companies had avery intense
Founder influence in direction of the company
● Company is successful because of the company, you are not the reason

MOATS by SJS
● When there is less trust, trust gets concentrated - Eg, India, where conglomerates are
built or super apps are built like WeChat
● Moat is built first then scale fast, in India
● DISTRIBUTION IS GOD
● Channel is key
● Buy channel → can we buy some creator app?
● Times group is great at buying companies with good distribution but less marketing.
Once bought they turn it around with marketing
● “Switched On” founders are good at finding adjacent markets and mutate faster. For
switching it on have lot of free time everyday
C