Startup Founders Are Clerk -2- CEO

I have been thinking this ever since I met Kashyap of Inkfruit at the first Startup Saturday I attended in February 2009. Apparently the founders of Inkfruit have titles like ‘Maharaja’ and ‘Nawab’ instead of CEO and that made me think if a Startup founder should really use a CEO tag?

While it most cases it makes no difference to what business one does, but we do have people who would frown at a CEO tag used in a 5 people company. I wouldn’t care much on what a founder labels himself, but if I am to propose a title, Startup CEO’s are ‘C2C’ (Clerk to CEO). That’s what you really do. The day you have a CEO tag, you are probably a mid-sized company, not a startup anymore 🙂

PS: You can always act like a startup. No matter how big you are.

Startup CXO

The 1-10-50 Rule

Over the past few months a very important side of startup life has been discovered by me. For me and a number of folks around me the journey gets a boost from an Inspirational talk, either in person or YouTube. Yes, the billionaires speaking (or say any large entrepreneur) does give us a push, but the rule I want to put forward for a startup is: 1-10-50 (One Ten Fifty…)

If you are a 1 person company, the best advice and help you will get is from a person running a 10 person company. If you are a 10 person company, your best advice would come from a 50 people company. Go talk to them.

—————-

Update May 2020: This post was originally written in 2012. And as I read this again in 2020, I find the rule still very relevant, but with one caution. I have used the number of people in the company as a proxy of ‘what stage is an entrepreneur at’. So hope common sense will apply and one will understand the rationale behind the rule.

Startup Weekend: Cambridge To Hyderabad, The Experience

Startup Weekend Cambridge

Back in March (2011) I disappeared for a month to UK and while I spent a month there, there are only two significant things I did. The First being a visit to Stone Henge (picture below) and the other being ‘Startup Weekend Cambridge.’

Startup Weekend is this 54 hours madness that brings together business folks, developers, designers and jack of all trades like me to build a startup over a weekend. Ones with an idea pitch it, voting follows and teams are formed organically. These teams have to come back with a product / prototype / demo / whatever by Sunday evening and present to the judging panel. In march, Startup Weekend, which has as of today done over 100 cities and 250 action packed weekends, came to India.

My friend Pankaj Jain was (he still is) passionately spearheading the India leg of SW and I decided to jump in and help organize Delhi and Bangalore. Events were planned, dates final, lots of pre-event work done and then UK happened at the same time as SW Bangalore and Delhi. And right then, Pjain pointed me to Startup Weekend Cambridge and I signed up for it immediately. So as the folks in India were organizing Bangalore, I participated in Cambridge. Left home with a view of seeing startup action in UK, getting a feel of the event, floating around multiple teams and chilling over the weekend.

What happened was crazy. Read More