Start-Up Mentor - My journey

When you live in the Silicon Valley of India and are part of the IT ecosystem, it is difficult not to be having side conversations about one or other start-up or their products during the lunches or the coffee breaks. While I loved running on my corporate treadmill, I was keen to learn more about the start-up ecosystems.

The opportunity came when a few years back, a friend and a serial entrepreneur reached out for some help to review his product(logistics domain) and help him shape the product strategy – this was the beginning I needed. They gathered momentum and moved along to the next phase and came the need for funding to support the growth. This was probably the most interesting part for me - apply my academic business learnings, understand what investors look in pitch decks, cycle of investments from angel funding to the series funding, elements of valuation and building the network. It was in this phase I discovered the rich content(mostly free) available out there to build my foundation on this topic. Building my network helped me learn first hand from few experienced angle investors and start-up mentors.

The next opportunity came along when I joined as a mentor in my organization’s Start-Up Accelerator Program to build the PoCs with the onboarded start-ups. Building products and mentoring multiple cohorts of these internal and external start-ups across geographies was an exhilarating experience. The intrapreneurial initiatives are a great way to bring in fresh innovative thinking and empowering employees and help them get close to understand the 360 degrees aspect of running a venture. At the same time, an opportunity for big enterprise to partner with external start-ups on joint product developments helps bring in more agility and explore new technologies as well as thought process.

Personally, I enjoyed mentoring the raw talent, sharpening their product thinking and reviewing their promptly built prototypes (to learn and validate with customers). The opportunity it gave me to deep dive into the new technologies ranging from blockchain to AI/ML and the functional space of KYC to Fraud detection was immensely enriching. Product Management is a vast cross functional domain and while mentoring these start-ups I honed my Pricing strategy and GTM Strategy thinking.

A casual note from a friend to be a Jury member for Nasscom 10K start-ups across verticals was another opportunity to learn some fantastic ideas, business models and I have thoroughly enjoyed being in various Nasscom and Karnataka Start-Up cell programs as a jury member in the last few years. There is a lot of energy and support system from the government and various other bodies to enable the founders from various backgrounds and stratas of society.

Being part of Zero to One journey is filled with lot of emotions and hard work. It feels gratifying to be able to contribute and play a role in their successes or even bounce back with a new strategy when you fail but not lose focus of your goal and proceed with all your passion. It is very inspiring, and you take lot of this back to your own game in day job and as a mentor. To be able to do all this I definitely had to give up a little on my personal time but then “Learning is my favorite”..:-)

Besides the hard skills learning, I have had lot of other learnings from these experiences which I shall share in my next write-up.