Lessons from Course Commencement Address by Girish Mathrubootham

Week 2/24 : SV.CO #StartInCollege Programme

Last week was a remarkable day for student startups across India. Girish Mathrubootham, Co-founder of Freshdesk was giving the batch commencement address to 135 students who have joined the #StartInCollege programme by Startup Village.

At Startup Village, our mission is to build an entrepreneurial culture in society by supporting students to build startups. Thus, the access to knowledge on how to build a business and the lessons learned by founders, which were once secrets, are for everyone to learn and build their own companies. Many new companies are required in our country to hit our full potential as a nation and civilization.

Girish and Shan Krishnaswamy build Freshdesk out of India to compete with global companies for global customers. They have raised nearly 150M USD to fuel this journey and with the last round rumored to be around 700M USD.

Girish shared his insights with students in an inspiring session, which we have recorded for everyone who is interested to learn. The story is in three parts. You can also watch the full video here.

Part 1: Art of the Start

“Big change starts from you today” — as doing a startup big transformation in life. Anyone who has done anything entrepreneurial is not then normal for rest of his/herlife. Once you understand the startup culture, you are not going to be satisfied with mediocre work.

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a. Dream Big

Dont let anyone discourage you. Talk about your dreams to your friends. The moment you talk about it, you will start living that. The Power of realizing your dream to a reality is within you.

Team Indus, from Bangalore is aiming to land a rover on the moon. They don’t have a formal education in rocket science but yet, the team was bold enough to dream about this and assembled experts and have made significant progress.

It’s a great example of how a small team with no experience can dream big and figure out along the way and achieve great things.

b. Learn from the best

Getting an engineering degree and actually learning to do useful things are two separate things. The Internet is the greatest college ever. We can learn using the Internet and learn to set global benchmarks.

This is our time to first believe that we are not inferior to anybody. We can actually build world-class software.

c. Innovate on the Product — not the business model.

Business Models components such as How to price, how to acquire customers etc are pretty much fixed. Follow the same business model but innovate on the product.

Part 2 — Ideation

a. Scratch your own itch

Solve a problem that you have. Too quote Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator — “Build something that people want”

Browser Stack, is an exciting indian company which started from college and tried three different products, all of which failed. One of the founders worked on a fourth product and it was the job of the second founder to test the product on multiple browsers. He was so frustrated with the complexity of testing that he build a complete testing environment. Today, Browser Stack is a very profitable company which is a proud story for the startup ecosystem in India.

b. How to Spot Opportunities

Look at what is changing in technology ecosystem and can it be used to change the way things are happening now. Are there opportunities to Use New Technology like AI and Machine Learning to solve current problems?

c. Combining Two Existing Technologies

Products like Intercom are great examples of Taking Analytics + Chat to build a new model of customer support.

d. Dont choose a small obscure idea

Startups need a big enough market to sustain its business operations. Products like Ricemandi.com to buy rice or watercan.com to buy water cans may find it hard to survive.

In a very small market, even if you win all the customers, you will not be successful.

Part 3 — Build

As you a young first time founder, all you have is a team of people. You may or maynot have an idea. The following tips are useful on how to build the first version of the product.

a. Focus

Decide on what not to do. Founders have too many ideas and lot of free advice available. Dont focus on building too many things initially.

b. Minimum Viable Product

At every stage, you should have a working prototype. Move to a working product fast so that you can show it to customers.

c. Build what really matters

Build the Core Feature which customers will use + Great UI/UX : Everything else can be done later

d. Making Biriyani

There are many restaurants which serve biriyani but the craftsmanship of making biriyani (product) is most important. The flavors of biriyani, like the copy on website are important so that you can create joy for the users when they use it. Biriyani without flavour will not sell globally. If you build your product with craftsmanship, it will sell globally.

e. Going all in

If anyone wants to be successful, they have to slog for some part of their career. Even If you are not in an IIT or IIM, it doesn’t matter. Its easiest to slog in school days as your success depends only on you. In a company, it depends on many factors, most of which are beyond your control.

Give your heart and soul. Give it everything. The education you gain from this learning will benefit you all through life.

Even the worst case scenario — you will learn something useful for rest of your life.

In the Medium Case scenario — you will get a job and in the Best Case Scenario — you will create a successful startup.

Lets go and change the world!