53 Practical Suggestions to help you in your Journey
1. Strive for Excellence, Not Success – If you Excel in something, you will automatically Succeed in that
2. Make things Simple
3. Spend more Time in Finding the Problem than the Solution – Finding the right problem is actually as good as
finding the right solution – Only when you know the right problem can you know the right solution – else it’s
LUCK
4. Fight the Battles you can Win – If you are not fighting the right battles, then you are wasting time, energy and
money on fighting the wrong battles
5. Work harder in finding your Mistakes than Achievements – Every Failure has a Human Error in it – Find what you
did wrong rather than finding what went wrong
6. Success
a. Make Success a Journey and not a Destination
b. Define your Own Success
c. Success and Happiness are two different things
d. Success is Proportional to the time a Person takes to Know or Accept the Facts and Truth
e. An Entrepreneur should always be in look out for the Truth and Facts in anything rather than looking for
what will work and what will not
7. Inspiration – One of the easiest ways of learning is to open yourself to Inspiration from anything around you
8. Every Bad thing that happened to you in the past, has happened for a Good Reason which is to come in the
Future
9. Make your Own Decisions
10. The Right and Wrong Advice – Evaluate every Advice
11. Revolution and Evolution – There are two ways a Startup can do that and pretty opposite ways; Revolution and
Evolution. As the words suggest, Revolution is the ability to change something instantly and Evolution is to do it
over a period of time
12. Believe in taking U Turns when you realise a mistake
13. Short Term vs Long Term – Too many Short Term initiatives could give you success but would not add to the
larger goal of the company and would not make your Startup into a large company.
14. Get a Mentor who has the very relevant knowledge and experience about one of the following things:
a. How to build a Startup in the related Industry and Category
b. How to run a Startup in the related Industry and Category
c. How to run a large business in the related Industry and Category
d. Is an influential person in the related Industry and Category
15. Don’t reject anything without understanding it properly – You might miss a Great Opportunity
16. Perfection is a Process and State of Mind
17. Create a Culture of Open Criticism
18. Take or Share the blame for everything
19. Find some Space for Yourself
20. Pace to Run the Company – Don’t bite more than what you can chew, you will never be able to eat it or digest it
21. Preserve Equity – Distribute Equity to Co-Founders and Employees on a vesting method and raise capital only
when you need it and when your business cannot progress without that capital
22. Personal Life – Quality work needs a lot of energy, a fresh mind and a lot of stamina and that can only come from
a Healthy and Happy Person
23. Entrepreneurs either Make or Sell the Product
24. Do better than Yourself
25. Make a Plan for Yourself – If you get yourself right, high chances, rest all will fall in place
26. Solve a Real Problem or Make something Really Easier
27. Focus, Focus, Focus
28. Work on things that Matter
29. Don’t let Competition Decide your Business Strategy – Don’t work towards your competitor being able to sell less
or do bad, instead work towards you being able to do better or sell more or offer the customer a better product
30. Scale what is Working, not what is Broken – Scale should be pursued once you are very sure that the model is
matured enough and scale can bring more happy customers and more profits in the company
31. Speak to Customers a lot more
32. Leadership – Many a times, in corporate world, leadership is misunderstood as the ability to get work done from
people. In my opinion leadership is to help people do the work and do it better.
33. Company beyond a Business Model – The Company should be considered separate from the Business Model.
Survival and success of the company should be important irrespective of the Business Model it operates.
34. Set the Right Targets – I would give a lot more importance to setting the right targets and then pushing people to
achieve it than setting higher targets and allowing people to miss it. Achieving set targets should become an
attitude in the company.
35. Customer Recommendation – Customer recommendation means that a person has liked your product and is
confident of your product enough to risk the trust another person has in him / her.
36. It’s all about the Product – I feel Product is the only thing that matters in the company and rest everything is Jazz
37. Assumption and Gut Feeling – Assumption is taking something for a fact that might not exist or be true and Gut
Feeling is a Feeling of possibility that a person would get basis some knowledge or experience.
a. Don’t build anything on two levels of assumptions
b. Don’t take decisions on assumptions without knowledge
c. Don’t assume the likes and dislikes of other people
38. The Atom, the Nucleus and the difference – Always focus on the Core of your business
39. Numbers don’t Lie – 2 is 2 and 6 is 6 in all languages, religions, countries, companies, industries, businesses etc.
But ‘Good’ can have 7.2 billion definitions. If you are not using numbers to understand your business and to take
decisions, the might as well rely on planetary positions of the Milky Way to do so.
40. Data is not Information and Information is not Knowledge and Knowledge in not Wisdom
41. No Decision is better than Wrong Decision
42. 3 Examples on Employee Understanding
a. Every Good Soldier cannot be a Good General
b. Wingman is as Important as the Pilot
c. A Captain can’t do anything with a Navigator
43. Write down Everything
a. Maintain a Document on Things You should Not Do
b. Priority List Document
44. Annual Appraisal of the Company
a. Achievements in the year of appraisal
b. Failures in the year of appraisal
c. Problems and Issues in Internal Working
d. Problems and Issues in Market Facing
e. Areas of Improvement in Business
f. Areas of Improvement in other areas like Facilities, HR etc.
g. What more can be done to make the Company more Efficient
45. Annual Operating Plan – One of the biggest achievements of any Entrepreneur would be to start using an Annual
Operating Plan to run a Startup as soon as possible and then actually running it as per the Annual Operating Plan
46. Four kinds of ‘Work’ that happen in every company – Building something, Running something, Internal
Coordination, Problem Solving
47. Standard Operating Procedures
48. Advisory Board
49. 2IC of the Commandant
50. The Importance of Technology
51. Conviction Vs Calculation
52. Startups don’t run out of Money – They run out of Time
53. Common Sense – It’s only through Common Sense that Newton figured out Gravity and Archimedes figured out
Archimedes Principle on buoyancy