BENGALURU : If you have a startup idea but don’t know how to proceed further, then Harpreet Grover promises to have just the book for you. Harpreet Grover has co-authored the book, Let’s Build a Company (PenguinRandomHouse, ‘235) with Vibhore Goyal. Grover is an active angel investor, with his deals including Chaayos, ShopKirana and Avail Finance, and has seen the journey of Ola Cabs closely from before it started.
Excerpts from an interview:
We see many startups trying to hire talent exclusively from premium B-schools. Do you think this is a healthy practice?
Hiring young folks in a company is a good practice. Startups demand a lot. And many folks who are just out of college are in that mindset too, they want to be a part of something.
Good candidates, however, can come out of both B-schools and other colleges. The key is to check for the skillset the startup needs for the role. The only downside I have seen over the years is that MBA candidates from B-schools don’t want to take a risk and hence might not be the right fit for startups.
The book’s tagline is ‘minus the bullshit’. Was there any ‘bullshit advice’ you got that you were trying to avoid in the book?
Think of any corporate meeting. A 60-minute corporate meeting has generally 5-10 minutes of real content, sometimes not even that. The rest is just talking. We were trying to avoid that while writing the book. One ‘bullshit advice’ that we got was to outsource the technology we were building. This is not the right thing if you are building a technology startup.
What are some common traits you find in successful entrepreneurs?
The ability to keep working on a solution. One can get lucky by finding a product market fit earlier but sometimes it can take a long time. The second one is the ability to change tracks. Leave a bad idea and go on to a new one. This is crucial in a business environment that is changing so fast.
What are usual traps an entrepreneur falls into?
Focussing too much on the investor instead of the customer, underestimating hiring challenges, building a company in a small market or investing in areas that are not useful, say a fancy office.
What do you think investors look for in a pitch?
I think two things. A company that can give them a 100x return. The second is a simple story that investors can understand. Most pitch decks are complex. Five things need to go right in series for the company to work well. Don’t use a presentation. Show your product.
Do you have insights that B-schools don’t teach about building a company?
I remember a story of a boy who learnt how to swim on his mat by watching someone do it on TV. Then he went swimming and drowned. There is no substitute for getting your butt kicked on the road, for actually meeting a customer, and trying to build a product to solve his need. A B-school or any other school can’t teach you that.
Did you always want to write a book?
In India, we only consider becoming engineers and doctors, so being a writer was never on the horizon. I used to write poems before college. But once we started CoCubes, everything stopped. There was no time. After we sold CoCubes, a friend told me I should write a book. And I said we hadn’t done enough in life to merit a book. He said no one would write a book if they thought this way. And we read stories of billion dollar entrepreneurs but it is difficult to identify with them. You don’t read it and say, ‘I will do this, I can do this’. That was the first trigger.