A few weeks ago, a friend approached me. He was anxious and at a crossroads. A competitor had come in to acquire his company and the conversation seemed serious.  The story of this founder’s friend started three months ago when the competitor called him and asked if he would be open to being acquired. My […]

All businesses are people businesses. With the right team, founders can cruise towards North Stars and tide over cash crunches. At CloudCherry before, and now at Uniphore, I have seen that encouraging teams to play together helps the company stay together. I have always been a big believer in small stories. That is how I […]

Entrepreneurship is a difficult and lonely journey—a truism if ever there was one!  Many of us wear our invisible scars acquired on the battlefield of entrepreneurship as badges of honor. This is such an intrinsic part of startup culture, all over the world and not just in India, that we never stop to question this […]

When the bottom got unhinged during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 (GFC), a new framework saw the light of day, and the acronym VUCA rapidly gained currency to punctuate business conversations. And now, “we have a VUCA Playbook”, as Girish Mathrubootham, the Founder & CEO of Freshworks says during his tete-a- tete (read Outliers Podcast) with […]

I was recently chatting with one of my new team mates, Sudarsan (@artfuldev) at Rocketlane. We were discussing about how start-ups evolve, and eventually the conversation came to : Why does Atlassian say they “unleash the potential of every team”, or AirBnB say “we help create a world where you can belong anywhere”? It’s not […]