Firstly, a happy new year! This new year brings a sigh of relief, a new hope, and a new resolve, doesn’t it?
The black swan events of 2020 changed things. A lot for some, and enough for everyone to change our lives. On personal front, it brought to the fore the importance of our health, family, and savings. And on professional front, it showed us that work can be flexible, more efficient & yet fragile.
The Indian government is considering rewriting the startup ESOP framework — a step in the right direction & great news for early startup employees in India!
Will especially bring two key benefits to the employees. Explained in some detail here.
There are several grievances early-stage founders have against startup investors, especially related to approachability & communication. Some of them are — investors never respond to emails, they can at least acknowledge founder emails, they vanish after first call or meeting, and worse, they are snobs. Of course there are other criticisms, like investors don’t know what they’re doing, they fund bad startups, they don’t respect cash or profitability, etc. — but these are topics of another post.
Coming back to the complaints on approachability & communication, the answer is that these are both right and wrong. Some investors are good at this, some are bad.
Having a Partner from a reputed law firm invest in your seed/ pre-seed round is a highly under-appreciated insurance/ leverage. I’ve seen it first-hand how big an advantage having effective, expert, lightning-fast and free legal advice can be on ‘black swan’ days for startups.
Especially in India, it may be more useful than founders imagine.
Linkedin is useful but extremely cluttered now, especially if you accept lot of connection requests (founders/ startup folk for me). Great posts used to surface easily earlier in the feed, but now it’s a chore to find even one good one.
Linkedin should have a setting where you don’t automatically follow every new connection, but can pick and choose who to follow.
Of late, have come across multiple early-stage startups making a basic accounting error. While digging their choppy monthly revenues, I realized these startups book revenues in the month cash was received, and not when the product/service was delivered. While this seems very tactical to founders early on, it’s important.
Examples – a SaaS startup charged & booked annual revenue upfront, while clients could cancel any month with refund.