When you start a company, the initial challenges tend to be around hiring your first few employees, raising capital, and most importantly figuring out that elusive thing called “product-market fit”. In the case of a typical B2B start-up, once you have ~ 10 customers and around $1 M in ARR…

Founders rarely start companies because they want to manage people or scale teams. In fact, many founders have never managed people and don’t really want to do so. …

Last Friday, I was standing on stage, at the Annual Akshay Patra Gala, facing hundreds of Indian immigrants who had gathered to celebrate Akshay Patra’s success. I found myself comparing Akshay Patra to a start-up. Started by a young IITian, initially no-one took the program seriously. After-all, how could an…

Slack recently raised $ 427 M at a valuation of $ 7.1 B. In ~ 8 years, the company has grown to 8 M daily active users (DAUs) and more than 3 M paid users. There are now more than 1500 apps in the Slack app store and many of…

I recently sat down with Dheeraj Pandey, founder, chairman and CEO of Nutanix, one of the fastest growing enterprise companies of the past decade. A common theme I noticed throughout our conversation about his journey from engineer to CEO is his unwavering commitment to people. As Dheeraj puts it: “Business…

Ban Facebook! Are you nuts ? Can’t even imagine a world without WhatsApp! How dare you even suggest such an idea! As a libertarian who has decried the “license raj” and believes in small government/minimal regulation, even asking such a question feels heretical. Furthermore, the question is almost silly; after…

For several years, MarTech has been out of favor. AdTech in particular has become a waste land. And then out of the blue, there have been 3 significant martech acquisitions: 1. ATT buys App Nexus for close to $ 2 B 2. Salesforce buys Datorama for $850 M 3. KKR…

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my new podcast, “How to B2B a CEO.” It’s a show about how to scale a startup (particularly an enterprise startup) and how to grow from a founder (especially a technical founder) into a full-stack CEO. …

In the last week, my twitter feed has been filled with stories about how Automation Anywhere (AA) has raised a $250 M Series A to “automate mundane jobs” and “make business processes self-running”. The articles are filled with buzzwords like “AI” and “bots”. In a press release, Mihir Shukla, the…