Take Control

I feel extremely upset when any Startup goes down. It takes years of burning midnight oil to create an enterprise. You till the soil with your bare hands, water it with your sweat and plough it with your bare feet to give birth to an enterprise. And then lack of wisdom, illogical expansion, reckless recruitments, investing in businesses with no revenue models kill the dream. In an era of billion opportunities, you don't need to follow every idea.

I won't give up any opportunity for growth. I will take risks that mature businesses won't. But I look for visibility of the future. I won't embark on investments with returns pushed into the distant future. Income and expenditure have to walk hand in hand or even with a gap. But it cannot be that one walks and the other refuses to. Can you walk only with only one leg while the other leg refuses to budge?

There are times when you have to take control of decision making - from the VCs, the investors, the internal squabbles and multiple opinions. Whatever it takes. Go back to your DNA of working with no resources and operating within constraints. It brings out the best innovation in you. Everything cannot be bought. Everything is not solved by more investments, more recruitments. You must stop categorising losses as investments. Stop investing in marketing, in back offices and invest in product development and sales. And the sooner you bring the decisive person in you to play, the safer would be your enterprise.

Raising money is not the answer to every problem. Raising your bar is.