Find the Elephant!

By Paula Mariwala, Founding Partner at Aureolis Ventures

Many of us have heard of the parable of the elephant and the blind men.?

This is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and have to imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the ear, trunk or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and as a result, their descriptions of the elephant are quite different from each other. They all seem to be with a different creature altogether!

This analogy is applicable to many real life scenarios, particularly in the context of building a business, which in its infancy can be a rather complex and amorphous creature.

I recently invested in a company that is building an AI-driven enterprise solution, with multiple potential applications and business models. Like all good founders, the team was obsessed with their product and the underlying tech. They’re extremely talented engineers and scientists who are audaciously driven to build a world class product that can scale globally.

But this singular obsession with the product can be a double-edged sword. It can create many blind spots. Like the blind man feeling the elephant’s tusk and concluding that the elephant is like a spear, the founders missed out on many aspects of the business and missed the big picture. For a startup to be successful, product development is undoubtedly important, but so is attaining product-market fit, building a scalable business model, and ensuring efficient operations. Only then will the full picture of how to transform this elephant into a unicorn become clear!

The team behind this company over-indexed on product development, spending most of their raised capital on engineering resources and talent, without realizing good product-market fit or a robust go-to-market strategy. As a result, they had a high burn-rate with little to no market traction. This also meant that their product quality wasn’t great, since their iteration frequency was bottlenecked by their lack of early adopters who could have provided feedback.

In order for this team to succeed, they needed external insights from the other proverbial blind men who could help them piece together what this elephant of a startup was actually all about. That’s where their early stage investors came in.

Most early stage investors are angels or VCs who are betting on the founders’ ability and passion to build a company that will scale very quickly in a very short amount of time. Each one will view the company’s trajectory through a different lens coloured by their own experiences and functional expertise, bringing a diverse set of views to the table. In this company, the investors included CXOs of iconic software companies, a VC with several successful enterprise software exits, and fund managers with deep domain expertise in AI. Each investor had a distinct insight on how the company could succeed, but all were aligned on ensuring that it would grow to its maximum potential.

Good founders will recognize that these diverse views are an asset, and in times of crisis turn to their investors to help piece together the bigger picture. When the team met with their investors, they heard from one who urged them to adopt a services model to help drive sales. Another one told them to pivot to B2C and go after virality. Yet another suggested that they double down on building out the tech platform and sell it to a big tech company.

This discussion gave the team members the opportunity to see each part of the startup from a different perspective - like the blind men who each thought the elephant was like a tree, a snake, and a wall. However, the founders decided to have an open and collaborative discussion of these perspectives, and it was an eye opener. It made them realize that their best course of action was to take what they had built so far, strip it down to an MVP, and aggressively go after getting pilots, even if it meant shipping an imperfect product or having to provide additional service support.

At the end of the day, getting out of their silos and embracing the bigger picture was essential for this team to determine their next steps and milestones. Having a collaborative discussion helped them open up their blind folds, enabling the team to move forward with a refreshed and holistic vision towards building a valuable company.??

I myself came out with some new perspectives. I understood another well known cliché: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Collaboration and respect for multiple perspectives are the key to problem solving. Finding the elephant or even a unicorn, may not be so difficult then.?

The next thing to think about would then be – what to do with the elephant, when you recognise its presence in the room!! Watch out this space for more on this elephant and other stories..

DISCLAIMER: This is a "fictional" account based on multiple real life experiences, not representative of any particular company or founding team.

Cover image: Sketchplanations