Monday, April 03, 2023

Gokul Rajaram: HBR 2025



You’re the founder/CEO of a $75M+ revenue company. You not only have PMF, you are the leading player in your category, a category that you created. You raised a humongous round in 2021 so while you’re not profitable, you have 5+ years of runway. Life is peachy, right?

Not so fast. You have 3 problems:

(a) Your growth has slowed down as buying cycles have lengthened. You were growing 50-70% YoY, now it’s 10-20% YoY. This dramatic, unprecedented slowdown has made you question your TAM, your category, everything.

(b) Your new investors from 2021 - remember them? - are pushing you to grow faster. They want to see their investment grow 3x in 3 years. You don’t want to tell them that it’s instead probably shrunk by 70% in the last two years.

(c) Your execs and employees are growing nervous. They’re questioning what the real value of the company is. You don’t have good answers for them.

What do you do? Do you pour fuel on uncertain growth, increase your burn, shorten your runway? Or do you cut back, become profitable, grow more predictably? How do you mollify your stakeholders?

It’s April 2023. You stand at the floor-to-ceiling windows of your penthouse (bought with the proceeds of your secondary sale in 2022), pondering these fundamental questions as you look out at the glittering (SF / NYC / Miami / London / Bengaluru) skuline. Your board meeting is this coming week. What is your strategy? What will you communicate to them?



As the CEO of a company that has seen a significant slowdown in growth and is facing pressure from investors and employees, it's essential to come up with a strategy that can address these concerns while ensuring the long-term success of the company.

Firstly, I would focus on understanding the reasons behind the slowdown in growth. I would review our current product offerings and see if they are still meeting the needs of our target customers. I would also evaluate the competition to identify any emerging trends or changes in the market that we need to adapt to.

Secondly, I would communicate with our investors and stakeholders transparently about the challenges we are facing and the steps we are taking to address them. I would explain that our primary focus is on long-term sustainability and that we will not compromise on this by taking short-term measures that could harm the company in the long run.

Thirdly, I would explore ways to increase revenue and profitability without compromising our product quality or brand value. This could involve exploring new revenue streams or optimizing our existing processes to reduce costs.

Finally, I would prioritize employee morale and motivation by fostering a culture of transparency and open communication. I would make sure that every employee understands the company's vision and is aware of the steps we are taking to address our challenges.

In summary, my strategy would be to take a cautious approach while maintaining a long-term perspective. I would focus on understanding the reasons for our growth slowdown, communicate transparently with investors and stakeholders, explore new revenue streams, and prioritize employee morale and motivation.



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Sunday, April 02, 2023

Does ChatGPT Melt The Chinese Firewall?

China has a very filtered Internet. But ChatGPT is, can be offline. So does it not completely melt the Chinese firewall? Will not the Chinese now have full access to all of the Internet, or at least the Internet upto the year 2021, or whenever the cutoff date is?

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Just Applied To Y Combinator

In 2010, Paul Graham and I were featured in the same BBC article.





How Y Combinator Started I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. ......... The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC fund to do: taking a long time to make up their mind. ......... As we turned onto Walker Street we decided to do it. I agreed to put $100k into the new fund and Jessica agreed to quit her job to work for it. Over the next couple days I recruited Robert and Trevor, who put in another $50k each. So YC started with $200k. ........... The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. ........ Initially we only had part of the idea. We were going to do seed funding with standardized terms. Before YC, seed funding was very haphazard. You'd get that first $10k from your friend's rich uncle. The deal terms were often a disaster; often neither the investor nor the founders nor the lawyer knew what the documents should look like. Facebook's early history as a Florida LLC shows how random things could be in those days. ........ We started Viaweb with $10k we got from our friend Julian Weber, the husband of Idelle Weber, whose painting class I took as a grad student at Harvard. Julian knew about business, but you would not describe him as a suit. ............ In return for $10k, getting us set up as a company, teaching us what business was about, and remaining calm in times of crisis, Julian got 10% of Viaweb. I remember thinking once what a good deal Julian got. ............ we wanted to learn how to be angel investors, and a summer program for undergrads seemed the fastest way to do it. No one takes summer jobs that seriously. The opportunity cost for a bunch of undergrads to spend a summer working on startups was low enough that we wouldn't feel guilty encouraging them to do it. ............. The structure of the YC cycle is still almost identical to what it was that first summer. ............ We never expected to make any money from that first batch. We thought of the money we were investing as a combination of an educational expense and a charitable donation. But the founders in the first batch turned out to be surprisingly good. And great people too. We're still friends with a lot of them today. ............ It's hard for people to realize now how inconsequential YC seemed at the time. .......... Jessica and I invented a term, "the Y Combinator effect," to describe the moment when the realization hit someone that YC was not totally lame. When people came to YC to speak at the dinners that first summer, they came in the spirit of someone coming to address a Boy Scout troop. By the time they left the building they were all saying some variant of "Wow, these companies might actually succeed." .......... it took a while for reputation to catch up with reality ....... That's one of the reasons we especially like funding ideas that might be dismissed as "toys" — because YC itself was dismissed as one initially. ........ The density of startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the weather was so nice. ........ Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same........ we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. .......

The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.



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