Four years a founder - Time
in Startup
Learnings and anecdotes from four years as a startup founder - timing matters, accept the past and good things take time.
Note: This is part of a series of blog posts which are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Don’t consider them as advice.
Context is important. This post is about my experience as a tech startup co-founder for the past 4 years. I spent my late 20s with the former as my primary identity, for better or worse.
I am 31 years old, and based out of India. I have been a misfit since much of my adolescence in most social situations. I had a middle class upbringing and spent much of my childhood in tier-2 cities. I am fascinated by technology, especially AI, and its impact on the human experience.
My startup, Looppanel, operates remotely and was started in late 2021 during the pandemic and is VC-backed. Along with an amazing team, I am responsible for ensuring that we solve our customer’s problems by building the best possible product using the best available technology. We serve customers in more than a dozen countries in 6 continents including large enterprises and some names that you would have heard of.
Overview
The startup experience is interesting because you don’t just learn new things, you get to dig deeper into the meaning of lessons you already knew.
Three big learnings in my journey are related to time. They are:
- Timing matters
- Accept the past
- Good things take time
Over the last few years, I faced situations with an intensity and frequency which instilled a deep appreciation of the above principles.
Timing matters
The most tactical and frequent way I have seen the importance of timing play out at Looppanel is when prioritising product decisions. We frequently make decisions, right and wrong, to deal with unexpected occurrences such as sales requirements or taking advantage of a market tailwind. The scale of the relevant time period in such situations can vary from hours to years.
If you do something a week later than it was supposed to be done, it may turn out to be meaningless. If you are too early to market, you will struggle. We were early when we introduced our AI features and struggled with customer scepticism. As AI became mainstream, our approach gained wide acceptance quickly.
This principle plays out in personal life too. A difference in personal situations compared to professional life is you can’t and maybe shouldn’t rely on logic as much. Your gut/heart can often give a better answer than cold reasoning would. This can mean something as simple as returning a friend’s call when they need you for a few minutes instead of waiting until the weekend.
Shifting back to work, Looppanel benefited from starting up during a global lockdown. Our product’s first version was a meeting assistant and analysis tool for user research calls. We were able to get our first customer even before I wrote any code.
Related: Why now?
On the flip side, I am also aware of multiple startups that started before the 2020 pandemic with a similar idea and struggled simply because not enough research sessions were being conducted remotely. This leads me to my second learning about time.
Accept the past
You may understand the importance of timing and take decisions to the best of your ability. You will still often be wrong and plans won’t work out. For example, when starting Looppanel, we focused on building the best possible product for a significant time period at the expense of monetization. There’s no substitute for building a great product early on but we could have revised our business goals earlier than we did.
There have also been times when I made a decision informed by emotion instead of objectivity. I can recall more instances from work where I wish I’d acted differently. Such wishful thinking isn’t productive though. It’s great to learn from the past but obsessing over it is wasteful at best and destructive at worst.
In hindsight, I should have managed my personal relationships differently over the last few years as well. I became comfortably distant from a lot of friends and family members. As an introverted person, it didn’t help that I spent much of the pandemic starting a startup and writing an O’Reilly book. All I can do now is to mend relationships to the best of my abilities and look forward.
A habit that’s helped me immensely with managing my emotions about the past is journaling. You can’t always shut down how you feel but writing about it can be therapeutic.
Good things take time
We have all heard this since childhood. It’s hard to live it though. This is especially true in the startup world where ‘overnight’ successes and rapid growth are celebrated with an almost religious fervour.
I distinctly recall an entrepreneurship lecture at my college where a business owner had mentioned that if your company survives its first 3 years, the chances of becoming successful become disproportionately high compared to the average. More recently, I recall Michael Seibel from YCombinator mentioning how the period from 18 to 36 months is the toughest for most first-time startup founders, including ones which eventually succeed. I have experienced this first-hand in the last 3 years.
2024 has been the most successful year of Looppanel by a distance. Much of our success is built on the foundation we laid for ourselves as individuals, a team and a company previously. This includes learning from the failures we endured. Even then, it was harder to envision, if not hope or believe, this success at the beginning of last year.
At a personal level, it would’ve helped immensely had I been half as good at thinking about building products and empathizing with users, not just application of technology, when we’d started out. However, I needed time and experience to become better.
Summing up
While hard work is often overrated in the professional sphere, persistence or grit is underrated, particularly in startups. The best results (and stories) emerge not just from working hard, but from staying in the game long enough and remaining mindful of timing.
Note: Knowing when to give up is equally important but more on that later.
The startup journey has taught me about understanding when to move, accepting what you can’t change, and having the grit to persist when immediate results aren’t visible. This is true as much for building a company as it’s for living your life.