Startups

I started my first venture when I was in college. I bootstrapped it to over $1 million in annual revenue and sold it to a large company for millions of dollars when I was 26. I am now onto my new venture GreyLabs AI, and six months ago, I raised $1.6 million for assembling the best AI team for Financial Services in India. Here are some of my key learnings about building and leading teams:  1. Hire generalists in the early days. In a startup’s early stages, you need people who can wear multiple hats and figure things out. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “Hire people who are generally smart.”  2. Hire smart people and trust them. Once you’ve hired smart individuals, empower them. Focus on the "outcomes" you want, and let them decide "how" to achieve them. 3. Don't micro-manage. Smart people thrive on autonomy. Micro-management not only wastes your time but also demotivates them. Instead, set clear goals, define weekly or fortnightly milestones, and sync up regularly to track progress. 4. Communicate the bigger picture. Keep sharing your company's vision and larger goals. The more your team understands the big picture, the better they’ll align their work to achieve it. 5. Understand individual strengths. Spend time learning what each team member is great at. Creative individuals often excel in product and design, while great storytellers might shine in sales. Play to their strengths. 6. Build a culture of trust. Trust your team members. If someone breaks that trust, part ways respectfully and kindly. Offer a severance package and help them find a new role if possible. 7. Simplify job profiles. Avoid creating too many job profiles. Each one needs a well-defined description, salary band, objectives, appraisal criteria, etc., which can complicate things. Keep roles focused and meaningful. 8. Encourage experimentation and accept failures. Innovation comes from genuine experiments. Create a culture that encourages moonshot thinking and embraces failure when efforts are genuine. Penalizing failure kills creativity. 9. Support your team holistically. Help your team not just succeed in their roles but also grow in their careers and lives. When you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your customers - and your business. Building great teams is an art, and I’m still learning every day. What are some of your biggest learnings about leading a team? Let’s share and learn together in the comments! 👇 #startups #business #entrepreneurship #leadership #teamBuilding

Is innovation killed due to bad ideas? Or from easy rejection. When “no” requires no effort, every bold idea gets filtered through risk aversion and bias. The path of least resistance becomes the path of least innovation. Amazon’s approach forced leaders to think deeply before blocking ideas. One of the businesses born of this approach is AWS, an entire business line worth billions today. The uncomfortable truth we must face up to. Most organizations are built for efficiency, not experimentation. We optimize for saying no quickly. India’s startup ecosystem raised $11B in 2024, but how many of those funded companies have cultures that genuinely encourage bottom-up innovation? Three actions you can implement for your business. 1. Create friction for saying “no” → Before rejecting an idea, ask your team to document why in writing → Make rejection more work than exploration → Track how many ideas you greenlight vs. reject 2. Embrace small experiments → Stop asking “should we do this?” Start asking “how can we test this for ₹10,000?” → Shift from permission culture to experimentation culture 3. Make your bias visible → Document your reasons for saying no—you’ll see your own patterns → Share those patterns with your team → Ask: “Am I blocking innovation or genuinely protecting resources?” The hard part isn’t having ideas. The hard part is creating a system where ideas survive contact with management. Amazon’s culture isn’t about saying yes to everything. It’s about making thoughtless rejection impossible. If this changed how you think about innovation culture, share it with a founder who’s building their next dream.

In 66 months, I helped grow Gong from $200k ARR to $7.2B in valuation and worked alongside some of the planet's best sales leaders. Here's the 6 biggest lessons I learned: 1. Overinvest in great marketing early on. I’m still shocked at how few startups do this. Sales with no (effective) marketing early on to pave demand and provide air-cover is a brute-force way to build. 2. Measure twice, cut once when hiring leaders. Your first leadership hires will have cascading effects on your company that ripple through many years. Their fingerprints will weigh heavy on everything from your sales motion, to company culture, to the people they hire, whether you want it to or not. Even after they’re gone. Recruit and hire accordingly. 3. Beat the hell out of what’s working. Finding what works in growing a startup is like drilling for oil. You’re going to drill a number of "wells" and come up dry. But soon, you’ll find one to go DEEP with. Drill it for all it’s worth. Don’t screw around trying to find too many other oil wells when you haven’t even maxed out your best one. 4. Hire salespeople who thrive on ambiguity. Not just those who CAN do that, but those who LOVE to do it (because they'll be doing this for a while as your market evolves). Do this, and you’ll accelerate your learning curve to a repeatable sales motion. Hire entrepreneurial reps. 5. Inject risk into the business as you scale. As you scale, your “portfolio” of growth initiatives should contain more and more risk. It's as if you're a fund manager. Early on, find what works and cling to it. But as you grow and you’re able to rely on several well-established growth vectors, start to introduce risk into your portfolio. Examples: Experimenting with channel partnerships, international, new segments of the market or use cases. 6. Realize the "growth at scale" playbook is different than the "scale up" and "startup" playbooks. What got you to $50M or $100M will not get you to the next level by itself. The path to $100M, and going beyond that (“growth-at-scale”) are two very different situations demanding different means of growing. Early on, nothing matters but (the right) customer acquisition, controlling churn, and making your product absolutely amazing. But if you’re going to continue growing at a fast rate, several other methods have to start firing: high net dollar retention (NDR), multi-product and multiple streams of ARR, going hard and fast on international expansion, and crossing the chasm into “low tech” industries. This list is non-exhaustive. For those of you who have ridden that tornado, what would you add? P.S. Turn "open opps" into paying customers at any phase of growth with these 10 closing motion scripts: https://lnkd.in/gtxYd9Vs

Is working at a startup the right decision to gain exposure? I see people advising job-seekers to join a startup for the exposure, and honestly, they’re not wrong. You definitely get to wear many hats and learn a ton quickly. But here’s why it’s more than just "exposure": 1/ You learn by doing In a startup, there are no long onboarding or training sessions. You get thrown into real situations and have to figure things out fast. One day you’re helping with marketing, the next you’re dealing with a customer issue or brainstorming new ideas for the product. It's hands-on learning at its best. 2/ You take more ownership In a bigger company, you might be just one piece of a larger puzzle. But in a startup, you're trusted with a lot more responsibility. – You get to make decisions, – Take ownership of projects, and – Rally see how your work impacts the business. It’s like you’re treated as a mini-founder of your area. 3/ You’re part of innovation Startups are all about doing things differently. That’s real exposure to what it takes to build something from scratch getting to be part of the creative process is a huge opportunity. But the thing is exposure doesn’t just happen on its own. You’ve got to make the most of it. You need to be proactive, learn fast, and ask questions. If you're someone who loves the hustle and figuring things out on the go, a startup can be a game-changer. But if you prefer a clear structure and a slower pace, it might feel overwhelming. Startups are great for learning and growing quickly, but it’s not for everyone. Would you prefer a startup or a big company for exposure? #Startup #growth

0 to 1 in B2B SaaS (without much budget) Most founders overcomplicate/overthink it. Here’s some tips how we went from o to 1 with trumpet 🎺 with no fancy tools, no full-time sales team, and an MVP product.. 1. Get painfully specific about your ICP You can’t sell to “SMBs” or “startups” or “marketers”. You can sell to “RevOps leaders at B2B SaaS startups with over 500 employees and a sales team over 10 who have no visibility of their sales team progress and want repeatability in their sales cycles" The more niche, the better. You’re not trying to convince the world at first, just your first believers. 2. Sell before you build You do not need a finished product to start selling. What you need is proof that people want what you’re building. We used Figma prototypes, Looms, and raw Notion pages. If people were excited enough to take a meeting, give feedback, and even pay, we knew we were onto something. 3. Use the founder card...hard Founders underestimate the power of reaching out as the founder. It’s not “cold” when it’s personal. Say why you're building this, how you think it helps them, and what you want from them (feedback, early access, etc). We did 100+ voice notes, manually messaged prospects and followed up like maniacs. . It’s scrappy and not scalable but it builds momentum fast. 4. Content > cold outbound (at the start) We shared everything we were learning; what wasn’t working, what users were saying, why we were building trumpet. LinkedIn became a magnet. Suddenly people were DMing us asking for early access. You don’t need to “go viral”, you need to be visible. Post consistently. Educate. Share behind-the-scenes. Build in public. It's free. 5. Turn friends into intros People you know - friends, ex-colleagues, mentors are sitting on gold. Ask: “Do you know anyone who fits this profile and struggles with X?” Be specific. And follow up. Twice. We got our first investors, customers, and partners this way. 6. Make your early users feel like insiders We didn’t say “join our beta”. We said “Help us shape trumpet - here’s what we’re trying to solve. Want in?” And when they joined, we over-delivered. Regular check-ins. Fast fixes. Fast product updates. Personal updates. They stuck around and told others.

India’s Rocket Moment: Global Demand Soars, But Can We Deliver at Scale? From Mission Mode to Market Mode, India’s Space Sector Hits a Crossroads. India’s rockets are having a global moment; everyone wants them, but we don’t have enough to sell. Former ISRO Chairman S. Somanath says it plainly: Demand is booming, but manufacturing capacity is the bottleneck. India’s launch systems are cutting-edge. But unlike off-the-shelf goods, they’re built in mission mode, slow, centralised, and bespoke. That model won’t work in a world that wants volume launches and commercial scale. ✅ What’s Holding India Back? ISRO’s supply chain still leans on a few core suppliers, with limited capacity. Spacecraft and rocket assembly is still in-house and one-off. The global commercial space economy is exploding, but India risks missing the bus without scalable production. ✅ Enter India’s Space Startups: AgniKul Cosmos & Pixxel 1. Agnikul: 3D-printed rocket engines, private launch pad, and modular SSLVs. Raised $26.7M, aiming for 24 launches/year. Customers? ISRO and global satellite clients. 2. Pixxel: India’s first private satellite constellation. Focused on climate & Earth data via hyperspectral imaging and is now targeting the $19B Earth observation market by 2029. 18 more satellites to launch, riding on SpaceX rockets. At Coherent Market Insights, I have worked with such innovative startups that are changing the space economy. DM to know more. ✅ Numbers That Matter - India’s space economy: $8.4B (2025) → $44B (by 2033). - Global space pie: $1.8T by 2035—India aims for 8% share. - Startup boom: 190+ space tech firms since 2021. - Government reforms: From FDI to IN-SPACe, the policy tailwinds are strong. ✅ Why This Matters for the Indian Industry Advanced manufacturing & composites will scale, high-skilled jobs in deep tech, analytics, and supply chain. Satellite data & services become a key Indian export. Downstream impact: From agri to climate, telecom to defence. ✅ The Big Pivot India Needs India must shift from space “projects” to “products.” That means: Building tooling hubs, not just labs. Training manufacturing talent, not just scientists. Unlocking private scale, not just public prestige. This is India’s shot at being not just a spacefaring nation, but a space economy superpower. Agnikul and Pixxel are lighting the spark. Can the rest of the ecosystem catch fire? The rocket tech is ready. The world is watching. All that’s left is to build. #space #innovation #India #manufacturing #startup #exports

A hard truth about startup growth teams: Being on all sides of the table (operator → investor → board member → full-stack fractional CMO), I've noticed founders often build their growth teams backwards. The typical approach: - Hire specialists for each channel - Focus solely on marketing metrics - Create departmental walls - Chase "best practices" blindly Here's why this fails: - Burns cash 2-3x faster than you gain market understanding - Creates silos that kill early-stage agility - Forces premature channel commitments - Misaligns incentives (vanity metrics vs. real growth) What actually works: 1. Start with strategic alignment - Map company metrics to marketing activities - Build systems for cross-team collaboration - Create clear feedback loops between product and marketing - Focus on scalable processes over hasty campaigns 2. Hire a strategic generalist first - Look for someone who can craft strategy AND execute - Prioritise data-driven decision making over channel expertise - Find people who can teach and enable others - Value business acumen over marketing-only experience 3. Get the foundations right - Deep customer understanding before channel selection - Cross-functional collaboration (marketing + product + sales) - Data infrastructure for measuring true growth (not vanity metrics) - Clear stakeholder communication (drop the marketing jargon) After working with hundreds of startups, here's the truth I keep coming back to: The cost of fixing a poorly structured growth team is always higher than the time it takes to build it right. The most successful founders I work with focus on the bigger picture: Building teams that operate as scalable growth systems. How are you structuring your growth team for scale? ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost to share with your network. ⚡ Want more content like this? Hit follow Maya Moufarek.

Interning at a startup can offer a wealth of valuable lessons. Unlike larger, more structured companies, startups provide a dynamic environment where you can quickly adapt, learn, and grow. In these fast-paced settings, you often take on a variety of tasks, which gives you exposure to different aspects of the business. Whether it’s marketing, product development, or customer relations, you gain a comprehensive understanding of how a business operates. You also learn the importance of wearing multiple hats. As an intern in a startup, you’re often expected to pitch in wherever needed. This can teach you to be resourceful, creative, and adaptable. One of the most important lessons from a startup internship is resilience. Things don’t always go as planned, and projects can evolve quickly. Being able to adapt, pivot, and stay focused on the bigger picture is a skill that will serve you well throughout your career. Startup environments are also highly collaborative. You’ll have the opportunity to work closely with talented and driven individuals, often alongside founders and senior leaders. This fosters an atmosphere of mentorship and learning. Another key takeaway is the value of time management and prioritization. In a startup, resources can be limited, so you learn to focus on the most impactful tasks and deliver results efficiently. Interning at a startup can be a great way to hone your skills, build a diverse portfolio, and gain insights into entrepreneurship. The lessons you learn can be transformative and stay with you long after your internship ends. Ultimately, an internship at a startup is an opportunity to grow in ways that larger organizations simply can’t offer. The hands-on experience, the challenges, and the opportunities to make a real impact can shape your future career in profound ways.

95% of first-time founders I’ve spoken to regret giving their co-founder too much equity… or sometimes too little. The biggest mistake they make? Treating equity like a one-time negotiation instead of what it really is - a long-term incentive system that determines who stays committed when things get tough. A great startup takes years to build. Your equity split should ensure that your co-founders stay committed through the highs and the inevitable lows. What founders get wrong: -They assume co-founders fully understand the long-term grind -They hesitate to be generous but also fail to use vesting as a safeguard -They focus on “fairness” today instead of what drives future commitment Here’s how you should be thinking about equity: 1. Ask yourself: Do you even need co-founders? If you’re hesitant about giving equity, take a step back. If they’re not worth a meaningful stake, should they even be co-founders at all? Sometimes, hiring a strong early employee is a better choice. 2. Use equity to drive commitment A well-structured equity split ensures your co-founders stay motivated for the long haul. You don’t want to be in a position where you have to push them every day - their ownership stake should do that for you. 3. Be generous, but protect the company A 4-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff is a good baseline. If someone leaves within a year, they get nothing. After that, they earn ownership gradually over four years. 4. Factor in long-term contribution, not just initial effort The person who had the idea isn’t always the one who builds the business. Your equity split should reflect who will create the most value over time, not just who was there on Day 1. 5. Don’t let ‘fairness’ today destroy the company tomorrow Equal splits might seem like the easiest option, but they don’t always align with long-term contribution. The right split should maximize motivation and retention, not just keep everyone happy in the short term. - At the end of the day, a startup isn’t just built on ideas - it’s built on commitment. Get the equity split right, and you set the foundation for a company that lasts. What’s your take? Have you faced any problems with ownership? #entrepreneurship #startups #equity

If you’re building with another person in the startup space Then there's 1 contract you cannot afford to ignore. It's probably the main agreement I always tell founders to get The co-founder agreement. It’s the foundation everything else stands on. Most founders delay it because the early days feel good for building the company. There’s momentum, energy, and optimism. Everyone assumes things will “work themselves out.” And being positive about it is good. But at least 60-70% of companies fail because of co-founder disputes. I’ve seen this play out too many times. A founder steps away after a few months. No agreement. No clarity. But they still hold a large chunk of equity because nothing was written down. The remaining founders are then forced to grow a company while carrying a silent partner who no longer contributes. Legal trouble aside, the emotional weight is heavy. When co-founders finally sit down to formalize things, the same tension points always show up: • Equity split • Roles and decision-making • Time commitment • What happens if someone leaves And equity is almost always the biggest fight. Everyone has a different idea of what’s “fair,” especially once work has already begun. So there’s one 1 clause I consider non-negotiable. Vesting. Equity should be earned over time, not handed out on day one. It protects the company and protects the relationship. If someone leaves early, they shouldn’t walk away with a large stake.  Vesting keeps everyone aligned on the long-term journey. Founders often resist discussing “what happens if someone leaves.” They see it as pessimistic. But it’s not about expecting failure - it’s about creating clarity. Because with an agreement in place, the team operates smoothly. Roles are clear. Conflict reduces. Decisions move faster. Without one, confusion eventually turns into resentment. And the founders who say, “We trust each other, we don’t need paperwork yet”? They’re missing the point. Agreements don’t replace trust. They protect it. If you trust your co-founder enough to build a company together, trust them enough to write it down. Your business - and your relationship - will be stronger for it. --- ✍ What would make you trust a co-founder enough to put it in writing?