Navigating uncertainty as a founder
Learnings from Riad Chikani and Rob Hango-Zada
The team at Textbook Ventures were incredibly fortunate to be joined by Riad and Rob for a chat about their journeys as founders and overcoming the significant challenges that come with it. We delved into the highs and lows, the business and personal dimensions involved in building a company from scratch. Below I have summarised the hour of knowledge Riad and Rob have blessed us with into two crucial takeaways for new or aspiring founders and leaders.
Be prepared to pivot
One thing that stood out from the conversation was the importance of pivoting as a founder. Pivots in business strategy, product offering or target market, and, importantly, pivoting in the role that you play within an organisation, are required in various roles and industries. Yet, the attachment that founders have to their original ideas often blinds them to the signs of a need to change direction. In the fast-paced and dynamic environment of startups, the benefits of pivoting at the right time (and the costs of failing to do so when necessary) are magnified.
For instance, Riad’s Gamurs Group was originally a social media platform for gamers. It was on this concept that he raised $500,000 at just 19 years old. He explained that roughly a year in with no success, he was plunged into the difficult position of laying off half his team. The market had sent a short and clear message; not enough people wanted a social media platform dedicated to gamers. He recalled that after a year of ‘beating that dead horse’, they started to make pivots, guided by aiming to provide solutions to real problems. Their first shift was towards a teammate-matching platform for online games. Today, Gamurs Group is the premier gaming, esports and entertainment media publication.
Similarly, Rob recounted how Shippit abandoned the very model the business was initially centred on after quickly realising how unsustainable it was. Shippit was once (very ambitiously) marketed on a model that allowed customers to schedule a delivery in a 3-hour window, guaranteeing they won’t miss it. Today, Shippit’s success stems from providing solutions to their users’ shipping and delivery, fulfilment and customer post-purchase experience needs under one platform. Not nearly as flashy as the original idea, but the pivot toward scalability has led them to be used by thousands of retailers, such as Nike and Cotton On, across the APAC region.
If you want to succeed as a founder, you better learn to drop the ego and focus on providing innovative yet feasible solutions to genuine rather than made-up problems. If not, the market will do it for you. Recognising when a pivot is needed and doing so with conviction, even when this means realising significant losses in emotional and financial investment, can be the difference between success and failure for your startup.
Be purposeful when forming relationships and fostering culture
It was clear to me that Riad and Rob attribute a lot of their success to being deliberate in the way they cultivate work culture and establish working relationships. Founders depend upon and are impacted by the decisions and skills of those within and around their team.
To get your business up and running, one crucial ingredient is capital. Raising capital and managing investor relations are inseparable aspects of the founder journey. Accepting investment likely comes with strings attached for better and/or for worse.
Especially during the early stages of your startup, your investors offer much more than just capital. Rob shared how some of their earliest investors were chosen based on their expertise in aspects of business that he and his co-founder, William On, were unfamiliar with. By doing so, Shippit was able to cover the skills and knowledge gaps during their vulnerable early stages with the advice and guidance of their investors.
On the flip side, your investors could constantly question your team’s decision-making, creating room for potential conflicts that can sabotage growth. Rob shared that he had seen this dynamic play out many times, stressing the importance of being selective with investors and setting clear expectations on the exact role they will be playing as they come on board. Ultimately, you will know your company best. Don’t waste valuable energy or grudgingly make concessions trying to win over investors that do not believe in your company and vision for success.
‘Work culture is the most important thing for any company’.
For Riad, ‘work culture is the most important thing for any company.’ Rob, too, attributes much of Shippit’s success to the people and culture. First, no amount of funding or robustness of a business model can make up for the absence of a driven and passionate team to deliver your company's vision and values.
As your company grows and your position begins to resemble that of an executive, keeping tabs on your company culture becomes more difficult. Nonetheless, work culture is no less vital at scale than during growth. In all stages, Riad argues it is best to both ‘hire fast’ and ‘fire fast’. What he means by this is to be quick to bring on board the right people, yet not be slow to let go of those you know to be introducing conflict, mistrust and corruption.
As we were close to wrapping up the conversation, Riad and Rob shared the difficult times of being a founder and the reality of the founder's journey. Navigating particular inflection points and feeling the pressure of a fast-growing startup are defining moments of a startup’s livelihood and certainly for one's mental health. It’s not an easy feat taking an idea from zero to one, however from what we’ve gathered they have maintained their humility, generosity and ambition. Riad and Rob are two founders who have truly been in the arena and experienced the whole gamut of the founder's journey. A journey defined by micro-failures, pivots and small wins.
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