Startup Vows — Till death do us part and others
Every morning, thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, much like ourselves, come online to catch up on interesting news about startups on websites like VCCircle or the startups section in the Economic Times. Or if they’re more globally inclined they might head out to TechCrunch for their daily fix. For the past few days, no matter what you read, a lot of the news-space has been dominated by Uber’s troubles and Travis Kalanick’s resignation as its CEO. While Uber and Travis will most likely survive the storm, after all they’re one of the most successful global startups, it did make us ask ourselves some fundamental questions. How did it come to this? How do we make sure this never happens to us? Lernr barely exists, should we even be thinking about all this now?
We concluded that it was definitely premature for us to be worried about our future troubles, when our future itself is so ambiguous. But we had some time on our hands and some sheets of paper lying around so we decided to give it some thought and we sat down to draw out certain ground rules for ourselves; our Startup Vows. We are obviously no experts in these matters, but our insights might be interesting for some of our peers, who’ll find themselves faced with similar questions at some point in their startup journeys. Here are our vows:
1. Our product and our business will only ever be half of what we do.
This might sound ridiculously counter-intuitive coming from a nascent startup which demands a full-time 24 x 7 commitment from its founders. But the truth is that we’ve realized that what happened with Travis Kalanick at Uber is not an isolated case. From the harassment issue with TVF’s Arunabh Kumar to the turbulent times at Snapdeal, it seems the founders spent all of their time and effort building the business, leaving very little for building themselves as people. We do have immense respect for all that they’ve achieved and can’t even begin to understand the challenging circumstances they face, but we can also see a definite collateral damage to their own and consequentially to their company’s image.
Startups are very demanding on time and resources, and it is only obvious for passionate founders to fuel ideas with their lives. But we understand that beyond the payday, there’ll also be a day of reckoning. Put simply, today Lernr needs us, because we believe in it. If we’re lucky, the day will come for us, when we will need to prove our worth to our prospective board members and investors. We’ll need Lernr to believe in us. We’ll need to be individuals around whom a brand or a business could rally as it achieves newer heights. For that day, we need to be ready. Investing at least some part of our efforts, everyday, towards becoming better people than we are today, is now a top priority at Lernr.
2. Organizational Culture is as important as our idea
Businesses respond to economics and mostly abide by their rules. But the people making up an organization are not purely economic entities. Expecting them to organically develop the best culture and behavior as an organization is like expecting an infant to grow up into an upstanding member of a society, without an upbringing. Those of you who’ve watched the 2015 movie Chappie, would probably agree that even the most intelligent consciousness has very little behavioral wisdom of its own. As startups, culture talk is largely understood to be about the way we dress, the timings followed and if it is cool to drink beer in office breaks.
But what truly drives our people to do what they do? How do people treat each other; their superiors, those reporting to them and their peers? How does a company engage with external individuals and other organizations? Do people feel like they work for the company or that they own the company? All of these questions will obviously get answered in time. But each of them represents an opportunity to shape the culture that is most likely to keep us happy and successful. We could choose to either wait for these answers and let these opportunities pass or address these questions through a conscious plan of action. We will be defined as much by these answers as by what we do, so we will carefully nourish them into existence.
3. We’ll not be dishonest nor live in denial
The flip-side of passion and motivation is irrational thought and denial. Ideas fueled by ambition are often poorly judged by those who have them. Founders often spend so much time convincing the world of the greatness of our ideas, that we forget to impartially judge it ourselves. We can become oblivious to things that are obvious to the bystanders, in our ideas or execution, or very fundamentally in ourselves. This can get immensely catastrophic if there is a lack of honesty about what we do. We could start believing in our own lies.
We need to be brutally honest about how good an idea, a business plan or a revenue model is, and not undermine its drawbacks or overemphasize the things that seem to work. It is lucrative to do this, as investors can sometimes overlook the finer details, which might work well for us. Temporarily. Once reality takes over, it could put us in an awkward spot, and we don’t want to get there. Living in denial of our own drawbacks isn’t just a recipe for disaster, it also prevents us from addressing those shortcomings. This would rob us of our chance at preventing catastrophes or at least having a plan of action.
4. We will pay our debts.
Every cent of money, every line of code, every pixel of a design, every iota of effort and every user that chooses to trust your product, is a debt that the business must pay back. In its highest form through happiness and karmic contentment, in its most mundane form as experiences, salaries, payments and dividends to the stake holders. Whatever is left after all these debts are settled, is owed back to the business. Founders often make the resolution of the debts owed TO them a priority over other the ones owed BY them. At Lernr we want to be able to pay off all our debts before thinking about the ones owed to us.
This is important because it will help us keep Lernr at the center of our efforts over our individual selves. Founders (or investors) looking constantly at exits often relinquish the responsibility of seeing something through, in the name of pragmatism. We will not do so.
5. Learning over Egos
Lernr is about learning from everyone you meet. It delivers an opportunity for people to meet and learn from the people around them, and develop lasting social bonds of respect and friendship, eventually helping them lead happier lives. This is however possible only when we acknowledge that we do have something to learn from everyone, and the biggest roadblock in this process can be our own ego.
In our journey over the past several months, we’ve already faced several challenges related to this. Feedback can get hurtful, we disagree among ourselves about who has a better sense of design and especially the people who love and care for us will be extremely critical of everything we do. It is important for us to understand that all these people and their feedback, are doing us a favor. They’re taking time out from their own lives, and investing their mental resources into evaluating our idea. They are giving us an opportunity to learn, to improve and evolve. Our firmest vow is that we will never let our egos and inflated self-importance get in the way of our learning.
All these vows will grow and evolve over time, but we’ve resolved to keep them and guard them with as much passion and resolve as we can muster. We hope that these guiding principles will someday help us make not just a landmark company out of Lernr, but also successful and happy people out of ourselves.
Originally published at lernrproject.com on June 22, 2017.