Startup RX: Recent Episodes
Prassanna Ravishankar and James Leung
The dark side of building out startups.
Most podcasts interview successful people, ventures and projects. We intend to discuss and interview the sea of failed projects, to analyse the timing of ideas, the errors in determining growth, and the risks in big bets
In this episode we share our experience with pivoting, when, how, and why. We also discuss examples of startups, some at the brink of bankruptcy pivoting into unicorns.
Premature scaling is the number one cost for startup death. In this episode we explore the premature scaling problem decomposed in three arenas - Product, Operations and Engineering
References
Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of-startup-death-premature-scaling/?sh=3f066b4e1fc9
Premature optimization: https://stackify.com/premature-optimization-evil/
Juicero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
Writing in space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space
Feature creep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep
Technical Debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
Navigating company acquisitions from an employee point of view, and how to preserve culture and momentum post-acquisition.
Advait is a pre-seed founder exploring problems to solve in the Metaverse. Drawing out Advait’s rich experience of being a product focussed person in Amazon and the Mobile premier league, we navigate the content creator space, attention spans and how to fall in love with the problem and the market instead of the product. Find Advait Alai on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/advait-alai-a6789427/
Footnotes/Resources
- Avatar creation tool : https://joinhallway.com/
- Story creating AI: https://www.hiddendoor.co/
- Simon Sinek's Golden circle (What, Why, How) : https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en
The do's and don'ts of onboarding new employees. We shared best practices from various startups. We also touch on inclusion.
Prass and James discuss the red flags in developer interviews, ranging from non-standard work hours to team dynamics to unclear vision. We mirror this episode to episode 001: Red flags [for Product Managers].
Original blog post: https://cult.honeypot.io/reads/10-developer-interview-red-flags/ Stanford productivity study: https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf An article on role ambiguity: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-clarity-vs-ambiguity-work-stress-manuel-pistner/?trk=portfolio_article-card_title Validated learning by the Lean startup: http://theleanstartup.com/ Ode to truth (ending poem): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66ve8YK7Zw
Abhinit is a Founder and CEO at decision3.ai, an off-chain secure compute layer for decentralised applications. He shares his view on the meaning of trust in distributed systems, the enabling experience of a secure compute layer, and the strategy of monetisation in a decentralised world.
Reach out to Abhinit on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinitambastha/ or via email at abhinit@decision3.ai
Footnotes/Resources
- Decision3: https://decision3.ai/
- Lex Fridman's episode with Tony Fidell: https://lexfridman.com/tony-fadell/
- The snippet from the poem, "Dance of the universe": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-C2xof7PKc
- Simon Sinek's Golden circle (What, Why, How) : https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en
Iusef is a pre-seed founder at Antler, an incubator that receives 200 applications per week. He shares his experience with Edtech and how he ended up getting accepted at Antler twice. Find Iusef on Linkedin at linkedin.com/in/iusef
wiki: Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service.
We start our podcast series by directly diving into some red flags. We discuss the timing of hiring a product manager, the connection of a product manager role with the health of the start up, differences between a product manager and a product owner and many more related topics.
We discuss Akash Gupta’s post on the 11 red flags for a product manager job description : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aagupta_there-are-424156-open-product-manager-jobs-activity-6976393792694235136-FblX.
The guru of product management we talked about is Marty Cagan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan). You can find his books on SPVG : https://www.svpg.com/books/
Look out for our next episodes where we dive deeper into more red flags and recipes around engineering and product,