Hightouch founders and entrepreneurial instincts
Hightouch announced their Series B financing round today. You can read about it on Hightouches blog here and on TechCrunch here. Hightouch’s progress has been nothing short of outstanding — extremely discerning customers are choosing Hightouch with greater velocity each passing week. Hightouch is an ambitious company and long may their success continue. But this post is not about Hightouch the company, it’s about the founding team.
At Afore, we were fortunate to have led Hightouch’s Pre Seed and Seed rounds. We have had a ringside view of how the three founders — Kashish, Tejas, and Josh — and the broader team operate. Most importantly, as fellow founders ourselves, we have learned from them.
While there are many differences between running a venture capital fund and running a company, there’s one key similarity. Startup founders iterate quickly through product ideas to hone in one that might take off. In a similar way, investors meet many startups, and also need to triage quickly to pick the one that might take off. In the absence of obvious traction data it is not straightforward to get to conviction quickly.
In essence, both founders and investors have to figure out if what they are looking at is gold or bronze. If they are looking at gold but think it’s bronze, then they will miss an incredible opportunity. If they are looking at bronze but think it’s gold, they are going to waste a lot of time and money. Kashish, Tejas and Josh are really really good at quickly figuring out whether what they are looking at is gold or bronze. And then acting accordingly. They have an innate entrepreneurial instinct to act or abandon ideas with speed.
This instinct is rare and acting quickly with tremendous drive is even rarer. But both can be learned. We certainly did from the Hightouch founders!
