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Losing and finding your mojo as a founder

This article is the fourteenth in the Startup Series on FirstPost’s Tech2 section and first appeared on April the 21st, 2017.

The journey of a founder can be exhausting. Those in solid founder teams too don’t just have a collective experience; they also have their own, personal experiences of the founding journey. It is not always easy to be in sync with others on the team, or their level of focus or motivation. Decisions are not always easy to make or consensual. Role cleavage is not simple or trivial, and yet without it, things may start to slow down. Given all this, it shouldn’t surprise us to know that founders often lose their mojo.

An entrepreneur I advise has had several such phases through the years. Helping him work through them has been a lesson in human resilience and the purposiveness that drives founders. Crucially, he has come out of each such phase with renewed vigour and focus. That should give hope to other founders in the same situation.

Building a venture is hard work but also strangely exhilarating. Even the tiredness is satisfying because you know you are building your dream and you cannot wait for the morning to come so another day could dawn and you get on with it. Intrinsically rewarding activities can be quite motivating for founders and others.

But what when you start finding all that work fills you with negative feelings instead of the exhilaration you expect? It is time to ask tough questions, to answer them honestly and to take appropriate action.

One of the more business-related, less soul-searching type, questions to ask is about founder-product or founder-market fit, which is more crucial than product-market fit to the success of a startup, especially for first time founders. This fit could come from the founder’s or founders’ core values, or their commitment to a cause, or their deep interest in the product category. Is it a lack of this fit that is dragging on you? If so, what can you do to change that?

It is also worth thinking about the specific things about your work that take the wind out of your sails and the things that energise you. The founder I mentioned earlier found the CEO responsibilities difficult to balance with the creative aspect of the work he wanted to do. There were also other activities that needed developing and executing but neither did he enjoy doing those nor were they the best use of his time or skills. With some introspection, he identified the need to expand his team to bring in skills that he did not have, and the skills that could be hired in and scaled without needing him to be involved in managing. He also realised he had to get really good at planning and time management so he could fulfill both the roles he wanted to.

Crucially, it is worth delving deeper. If the venture does not really excite you as much as you anticipated at the very beginning, why are you still here, working your socks off? Is it your ego at work? Do you feel beholden to commitments made to others? Do you fear failure? Is it a sense of deontology at work? Are you indulging in sunk cost fallacy? Something else? The founder I mentioned earlier has an overarching commitment to practising and defending certain values with vigour. When he has bad days, we talk over the issues separating the operational niggles from the strategic challenges. The exercise helps him not be overwhelmed and instead focus back with renewed vigour on what matters most to him and the startup.

Last but not the least, building a startup venture is like any long term relationship. There will be good days and there will be bad days. Good days are easy, uplifting, energising. However if you cannot hack the bad days, the relationship will feel toxic and draining. But if the bad days are too numerous and frequent, and overwhelm the good days, it may be advisable to consider quitting altogether.

What happens next?

Most people who quit a really bad relationship don’t “fall in love again” without a shed load of hard work either by themselves or in therapy. Founders who quit because the bad overwhelms the good may need some time with themselves to understand how to avoid the same fate the next time around. Knowing what sort of person you are is a good and essential first step.

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Risk culture and your startup

This article is the tenth in the Startup Series on FirstPost’s Tech2 section and first appeared on January the 23rd, 2017.

A healthcare startup founder I know was in a dilemma. For a pretty sizeable chunk of the equity pie, she had agreed to take on as cofounder a tech development guy. He would in turn build the platform which would enable her business model. As delivered, the platform however was far from adequate. The tech cofounder however was not amenable to taking feedback. Lately he had gone completely quiet and was not responding to emails or picking up calls. Our healthcare founder was left with a platform that did not work as expected, with no access to the source code, and now a growing dread that the company was slipping away from her even before it was built. She had no more money left to bootstrap or to pay for legal advice to buy out his share so she could get the code and find another solution.

When I heard about it, I asked her if the equity was his outright or had a vesting schedule, whether there were ways of clawing back some of the equity as a BATNA, what checks and balances had been built into the agreement between them. What I found was not encouraging.

Through some wrangling, this particular situation somehow found a cobbled-up solution. It is, however, illustrative of why your company’s risk culture needs to be thought of right at the time of creating the startup.

Whenever I bring this up with founders, they ask if entrepreneurship is nothing but risk taking by any other name. It sure is! It is about taking those risks that advance your goals, not risks that destroy your dream. It helps to develop the ability to tell the two kinds of risks apart.

I am not recommending that instead of building your product and your customer base, you spend your time writing huge formal manuals or official policies. I am, however, strongly recommending that you give some thought to the values, beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and understanding about risk shared by a group of people with a common purpose, collectively the risk culture.

How to shape your risk culture in early days? Here are some tips to clarify your thinking.

First, ask if the risk advances your objectives, your dream. At what cost?

In early days of developing a product, building user communities for early testing of features and pricing, capturing feedback and using it to improve the product, all cofounders may use their own devices to write code, collect information and user feedback, keep essential documentation. This is a good move to avoid spending a lot of cash on buying hardware that belongs to the company, if indeed the company as a legal entity exists at all in the early days. There are of course several possible existential risks at this stage. How is the repository for what the cofounders are learning being built and accessed? Where is the essential information — source code, names of suppliers, passwords for services to name a few — kept? Can all cofounders access it? Can it be lost or tampered with easily? What is the backup plan?

Second, think of mitigation plans required, should the undesirable event you anticipated comes to pass.

What if cofounders fall out, someone wants to leave, or someone dies? Can one cofounder hold the entire venture to ransom? What if your only supplier decides not to work with you, and they have copies of your sketches which they could as easily manufacture and start selling? It goes without saying that this mitigation planning needs to happen when you are making key decisions about cofounder relationships, product development, suppliers etc. One can, of course, deal with undesirables as they arise but it is likely to cost more money and time to fix than to prevent or have other recourse.

Last but not the least, by thinking through, however uncomfortable it may be, what happens if it all goes to the wall.

This is the tricky bit. Our healthcare founder was on the verge of incurring a heavy cost for not thinking through the apocalypse scenarios regarding her cofounder. His contribution was essential to her startup but his temperament and working style could not be mitigated by writing tough contractual terms. We don’t like to imagine doomsday situations, sometimes rightly so as they can be paralysing and demotivating. But it is important to know at some level what you would do to salvage your startup if the worst things you had not planned for happened.

Our risk propensity is about that we are willing to accept for just returns. A clear framework for the risk culture makes it easier to identify, preempt, accept or reject those risks. It is wise to start early.

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Governance is no “Indian wedding”

When India hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the then-sports minister compared the event to an Indian wedding, saying that while preparations go on until the last minute, everything comes together on the day. I am reminded of that as I watch the stories coming out of India since the sudden demonetisation of two major currency notes on November the 8th, 2016.

The reasons why the move was made were unclear, and what one could and could not withdraw or deposit changed often. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) refused an RTI (right to information) request asking about the reasons, and with its response to another RTI request, managed to create an impression that the RBI had no idea how many Rs 2000 bank notes it had printed. RBI is the Indian analogue of the Bank of England in the UK or the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) in the US. These are not confidence enhancing moves, for citizens or for investors. To cite economist John Maynard Keynes: “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.”

That is not the point of this monograph.

With my governance hat on, it is clear that no regulatory impact assessment was carried out before the demonetisation was announced. After all, the lives of so many publics – citizens, small and big businesses, state owned banks, private and multinational banks – were to be upended. If there had been such an exercise, RBI would have been more prepared rather than the ominous silence to which it treated the citizens before the Governor finally spoke nearly 2.5 weeks after demonetisation. (An alternative possibility, simultaneously more benign and more sinister, is that such an assessment was carried out but summarily ignored in favour of an “Indian wedding” type approach, and reliance on calls to nationalism and patriotism.)

Save for a top-down diktat, where was the country’s preparedness for such a massive transformation?

Does the “leadership” have experience of massive transformations involving both businesses and citizens? The committee to oversee it was announced nearly three weeks after the demonetisation. Other than Chandrababu Naidu, and possibly BCG’s Janmejaya Sinha, it is difficult to feel confident about the execution experience of the rest. Not least because the expensive failures presided over by some on the committee  are not easy to ignore.

What is the objective for this transformation? No, not the ones that changed daily, one increasingly jingoistic than the next! Minimising the black money in circulation? Reducing corruption? Making India a digital, cashless society?

For the sake of this argument, let’s assume a “digital, cashless India” was the goal.

Did anyone ask who will pay for the infrastructural investments needed? The National Payments Council of India’s (NPCI) Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is in the news but there is understandable confusion especially as different banks put out their own branded apps and the government adds to the confusion by launching its own app BHIM. The consumer-side apps are not the only solution needed. The government has asked banks to roll out 1 million POS terminals. No, nobody yet asking who will pay and how it will dent their profitability. Meanwhile, surcharges on the use of card payments have been introduced and withdrawn hastily.

(I am reminded of a friend’s wedding where a last minute Pashmina shawl purchase was made for over Rs 35,000 in 1996 money. Her mother told me, at weddings, expenses aren’t questioned. The “Indian wedding” analogy is still holding.)

Who thought ahead about the hundreds of millions of illiterate users who now not only need smart phones but also the magical ability to work their way through these apps to access and spend their own money? Apps to serve an illiterate user base will need inclusive design thinking, which is absent in the Indian public discourse, as I have written elsewhere.

What is the short and medium term impact on quality of life of citizens? Where is the mitigation for their loss of income or business? I am struggling to find any proof these questions were even asked.

There is no discussion whatsoever of who is benefiting the most at whose cost. My brief monograph on that question has remained on fire since it was published, suggesting I touched a nerve.

There is no evidence that the demonetisation was a considered policy move. There is plenty evidence that this is a case study for poor governance no matter how one looks at it. There was no clear goal, no plan. The leadership has no experience of delivering large transformations. Nobody has done any cost analysis or indeed asked who will pay. Citizens’ docility is assumed.

Governance is joined-up thinking. Absent that, it is just another “Indian wedding”.

[PS: About that Brexit thing ahead of us here in the UK, I am still looking for a culturally apt metaphor. Meanwhile, let’s go with “a giant omnishambles”.]

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Brexit and the luxury brands of Britain

(A version of this article appeared in LiveMint on November the 17th, 2016.)

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to India and trade talks with her Indian counterpart take me back to the midsummer’s day in 2016. We in Britain woke up to find that the Leave campaign, colloquially called Brexit, had won the referendum. The pound plummeted and for a while, the stock markets were in chaos. Markets stabilised but the pound continued a downward trend, beating historic lows.

Britain luxury brands are known for their heritage, design, craftsmanship, and quirky individuality which together shape a luxury narrative matched by no other country’s. London too is a choice destination for the experience of buying both British and non-British luxury brands.

The weakened pound was good news for tourists visiting the UK. The month of Ramazan, which traditionally brings wealthy visitors from the Middle East to London, followed. Flight bookings from Europe as well as Asia reportedly rose after the referendum. Premium and luxury hotels benefited from a rise in reservations and stays by overseas guests too. All this made London the hottest and cheapest luxury shopping destination this summer. Much shopping took place as is evident from UBS’s analysis of tax refund receipts. Tax refunds, which are typically sought on big ticket goods, rose by 36% in August.

So far the Brexit vote looks good for luxury shoppers from outside the UK. The picture for luxury brands is more complicated.

The iconic British brand Burberry has seen a 30% rise in sales in its British stores in the last six months. Facing headwinds otherwise, Burberry has also cut prices in its Hong Kong stores, taking advantage of the weaker pound as the brand notably incurs 40% of its costs in Britain.

It is a mixed picture for luxury watches, which are often presented as investment pieces, hence seen as considered purchases not impulse buys affected by currency fluctuations. Many coveted luxury watch brands are imported into the UK and the weaker pound has made the imported goods more expensive. Prices for brands such as Cartier and Mont Blanc, owned by the Richemont Group, have been increased while Hublot, Omega and Tag Heuer, owned by LVMH and Swatch Group, are holding on. The latter category of brands is taking the impact on its margins. For now.

The British luxury watch maker Bremont however is quids-in despite 30% of its costs being imports of Swiss watch parts, which are now more expensive. A weaker pound has helped the firm deal with falling sales in Asia and come out stronger.

To complete the picture and London being a hub for creative entrepreneurs, I spoke with proprietors of several upcoming luxury brands. My conversations revealed a mixed picture. Many small luxury brands source parts, finished products or packaging abroad while serving mainly local British customers. After the referendum, the bill of materials is decidedly more expensive by 10-30% depending on where they import from. As small businesses and nascent brands, however, they cannot always pass on the costs as price increases to the customer. Some however are slowly edging up prices of some products while keeping other prices steady. Overall this does not bode well for smaller, upcoming British luxury brands. Tighter margins will hamper their growth, and in many cases, their ability to survive.

It is also important to remember that despite the outcome of the referendum, Britain is, at the time of writing, still operating in the single European market with free movement of people. This makes it easier for people from Euro countries to travel to and shop in the UK. Any change in the ease of travel will affect Europeans travelling to and shopping in the UK just based on a weaker pound.

Luxury marques already under pressure, such as British car maker Aston Martin, expect a short term lift from the weakened pound but that may only last till Britain quits the single market. The automotive supply chain is global, and that will continue to affect the brand’s margins and profitability especially if Britain loses single market privileges and is not able to strike similarly attractive deals with the many countries where Aston Martin sells.

Some luxury brands are already thinking long term. For instance, Bremont is collaborating with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Sheffield to reduce its reliance on imported parts. Aston Martin too has made recent investments in product development and a new plant in the UK although its reliance on imported parts will continue for a while. But absent any clarity on the nature of trade deals Britain may be able to make, the return on these investments remains uncertain.

The pound recorded a brief recovery on November the 3rd, 2016 after the High Court ruled that the government will need parliament’s approval to trigger Article 50 which is essential for the official start of negotiations with the European Union. The judgment has temporarily buoyed the Remain voters. The uncertainty is further compounded by the government choosing to appeal the decision in the Supreme Court.

Luxury brands, like many others, will just have to sit tight and watch. After all, what is a couple of years in the grand schema of luxury brands that have lasted or intend to last for centuries?

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Our mothers, ourselves and risk literacy

The web is on fire with Ms Angelina Jolie’s honest and unsentimental account of her elective, prophylactic double mastectomy, appearing in the New York Times. She writes about her mother, who died at 56, having suffered cancer for a decade. She also writes about how she is a carrier of the BRCA1 gene. Her risk profile, she writes, was estimated at “87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer”. This risk would manifest itself before menopause is reached.

Not for me to comment on how our mothers – living or not – continue to shape our lives. I lost mine when I was 4. As far as I am concerned, I will never find out what she may or may not have suffered from, had she lived to age 46 (which was the age at which Ms Jolie’s mother’s cancer was diagnosed, according to publicly available information). Or longer. Every day I live defies all risks I may or may not know of.

But in this age of “austerity”, and living in a country with a publicly funded healthcare system being ravaged by budget cuts and the looming threat of privatisation, I worry. Alas the NHS’s postcode lottery is all too well-known for us to hide from it.

When TV celebrity Jade Goody died of preventable cervical cancer at the age of 25, it increased the uptake of pap smears in the NHS. When Kylie Minogue made the news of her breast cancer public, there was a 20-fold increase in the uptake of mammograms and early screening. There may now well be a worldwide surge in the uptake for genetic testing for BRCA mutations, which may be attributable to Ms Jolie sharing her experience.

Which is not all bad news. An estimated 20000 breast cancer related deaths could be prevented every year in the UK, not all attributable to advance knowledge of genetic markers.

I am sure you all know everything I have written so far. So I come to my main point. It is both a policy concern and a societal concern.

Risk literacy in the general public is rarely if ever discussed, even as risk communication remains ever-present, slightly sensationalised, yet incomplete or poor. For instance, BRCA mutations are almost exclusively discussed as a risk factor for breast cancer, following which ovarian cancer. Why not discuss that BRCA mutations may almost double the risk of cancer of the fallopian tubes? Which can be detected early and treated.

We still haven’t fully explained, in plain English, what it means to have a risk of X% versus Y% of getting A or B type of cancer. Risk really is a two-part concept: an undesirable outcome and the probability that it will come to pass. The probability may be expressed in numerical terms — making it sound, to most people, very accurate and reliable, which may not be the case — or in generalised terms such as “negligible”, “considerable”, “very likely”. Thereon it is a case of how one’s own risk propensity matches up to the description of a risk. That is what decisions are often guided by.

Here’s a story. A friend of mine, who had her first child at age 34, was told she had 1 in 1200 chance of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome. She said she took the chance. She is a highly educated, mathematically literate, senior pharma industry executive and struggled to explain to me what it really meant. To take that chance. She finally said: “Whatever I get I shall deal with.”

So that is what it comes to. Dealing with it.

Ms Jolie dealt with her risk in a certain way and shared her decision in unsentimental language with the broader public. It will increase awareness about BRCA for sure, but will it lead to better-informed decisions? Hard to say. Not everyone who gets tested — with the myriad (if you will ignore the pun**!) of genetic testing firms mushrooming in the market — will have access to the sort of counselling Ms Jolie might have had access to. Increasingly the choice to get screened or not is being left to the patient, even as this review took place because too often women are informed of the benefits of screening but not the harms. Back to risk literacy then.

Ms Jolie’s candid sharing of her experience needs to ignite a debate on risk literacy — not just BRCA mutations, breast cancer, or preventative mastectomies.

I have a final point. Men get breast cancer too. Because the absolute risk is low, the increase in the chances of a BRCA mutation carrying man getting breast cancer by age 70 or beyond is dramatic. This is also the age, when a lot of medical and health insurance policies start to enforce exclusions on the insured. With institutionalised differences between how men and women are treated by the healthcare system, surely risk communication about BRCA should include the risks to men, shouldn’t it?

Of course, I care about the issue as it affects men — I have only one parent left and it is my father.

(** If you missed the pun please read this. As well as the history of the company. Thanks.)