This happens everytime!! I have been “pitching” India since 2006 — raising money for it, investing in it, acquiring companies in it, creating jobs for it, getting foreign capital into it. Everytime you sense that the India story is finally coming together (around 2004 under AB Vajpayee when infra finally started improving; in 2007–08 when bunch of NRIs returned to their motherland; in 2014–16 when Modi got a strong mandate for change etc. etc.), the govt. and its policy-makers shoot themselves in the foot? It makes me frustrated, angry, disappointed…even sad.
Over last decade, I have worked to bring several large overseas companies and institutional investors into India — selling the classic “rising up to the top-right” Internet users slide, the “demographic dividend” story that never goes out of style, the “largest democracy in the world” jingoism. For anyone who has grown up in the country, studied in the country, operated in the country and essentially come up the ranks in the country, we know that this high-level analysis completely glosses over massive structural complexities and weaknesses in the Indian economy and legal justice system. In my heart, as an Indian, I want all of this to be not true, but as a global citizen, professional and custodian of capital (which is fungible), it’s hard to not be affected by these developments. At the end of the day, emotions can’t hide the wide potholes in the India story.
I want to be a problem-solver, not a problem-identifier or a jingoistic reactionary. But I don’t know how! I have rarely reacted to such issues on public platforms in the past. But seeing this story truly made my blood boil today morning. Founders are the most giving stake-holders in any society — they take massive risks, put their comforts on the line to build something, create value, technology, products and jobs, generate wealth for everyone (and themselves) but with huge professional and personal sacrifice. Grounds-up founders don’t inherit family businesses or Millions of $$ in a trust or estate — they start-up to build better lives for themselves and in process, improve all our lives as well! This kind of one-sided #angeltax activism and freezing bank accounts just disrespects entrepreneurship and true human enterprise that moves our species forward.
I am, and will always be, a big believer in Indian talent, and will continue to back it all my life. But unfortunately, I am not a believer in the Indian govt., policy and legal systems.
Note 1: I felt the same anger & helplessness when Nirbhaya and 2G scams happened during my last years as an Indian resident.
Note 2: today, as Indian founders battle the tax authorities and essentially the Indian govt., I am for the first time truly internalizing the use case for a decentralized world and crypto.
Note 3: my personal experience with Indian real estate has been similar (non-transparent, corrupt, no way to enforce rules, full of outrightly fraudulent and criminal behavior). Couple of years back, I vowed to not invest any $$ in Indian real estate going forward.
Note 4: it’s unlikely that I will ever invest again in Indian legal entities of startups via Operators Studio.
I am really excited to kick-off 2019 by introducing ‘Operators Studio’ — my endeavor to invest in & support founders globally, by being with them in the trenches right from a really early stage. As you will see on the website, Operators Studio is all about “Backing gritty founders who are solving real problems “ — supporting innovative technology startups through early capital, deep operating expertise, global networks and a personal sounding board.
The Genesis
While I left my Venture Capital career 5 years back to become a full-time operator, I still wanted to keep that one element that I most enjoyed as a VC, in my life — partnering with entrepreneurs to solve really interesting problems and build innovation-driven companies that move the needle for the world. As I transformed myself from an ‘investor’ to a ‘builder’, I also started investing in startups in their angel/ seed rounds, supporting founders at a deep operating level, working with them through their biggest tactical & strategic challenges, as well as most importantly, being a friend & sounding board to them.
Over last 5 years, I ended up investing in & supporting >15 startups across the world, along with my full-time operating stints. As I travel on the path to discovering my own differentiated world-view, investing style and what really excites me both as an operator & investor, I thought this is the perfect time to institutionalize my efforts. Hence, Operators Studio was born!
2. How is the Operators Studio Mandate Unique?
In my experience as a VC, angel and tech operator across US, China and India over last decade, a key gap I have observed is that the entire business & venture environment leans towards only a certain kind of business — that which is attractive to institutional investors. This means characteristics such as potential ‘moonshots’, going after humongous market sizes (as per guesswork), exit potential that moves the needle for institutional funds, and aligning with trends in-vogue (AI, ML, AR, VR, Crypto etc.).
Due to these filters, an entire gamut of tech businesses that are solving true ‘operating’ problems for customers/ users, which are often unsexy and lag behind latest trends, get completely overlooked. By the way, in majority of cases, these customer-centric businesses are highly innovative in their own right, and can often be built to be economically-viable without overt dependence on external capital. And in the process, generate solid financial returns and entrepreneurial gratification for all stakeholders over the long term.
The Mission of Operators Studio is to back exactly these kind of companies — those that put the customer’s problems first, leverage practical tech innovation to solve them, and are founded by tech warriors — entrepreneurs who are visionary, humble, resourceful and believers in deep execution. It doesn’t matter if a space or product is considered unsexy, unattractive or out-of-trend by the financial ecosystem or media — as long as the company is solving a problem that matters for the world, customers/ users are vouching for it, and founders are willing to be in it for the long haul and build the company in a way that’s most suited for realizing their vision, Operators Studio will be a believer in it!
3. How does Operators Studio Add Value to Founders?
a) Early & “patient” capital — will mostly invest in friends & family/ formal angel/ seed rounds; will be flexible from a stage perspective (‘Day 0’ co-founders coming together, pre-PMF, post-PMF to even Series A and beyond).
It takes at least a decade for a business to realize its true potential. We take an “evergreen” approach, supporting founders for whatever time it takes for them to realize their vision.
b) Operating guidance — deep-dive product sessions, go-to-market strategy, hiring, user acquisition, customer introductions, pitch decks, investor connects, exit discussions.
c) Global networks — helping companies go global via access to market knowledge, business expertise and networks across the “tripod” — USA, India and China.
Operators Studio will be flexible from a mode-of-involvement perspective, as long as its Mission is being fulfilled — in addition to investing directly in companies, this could involve direct ‘Day 0’ incubation, becoming an LP in other funds to get access to the most-promising companies, partnering with high-quality accelerators/ incubators, collaborating with established tech companies to unlock synergies etc.
4. Why This Name?
I have consciously avoided names like ABC Ventures or XYZ Capital. Operators Studio stands for a fresh venture-building approach —to me, this name is very significant as it communicates key tenets of this approach:
Operators — looking for companies that are solving real operating problems for customers/ users, backing entrepreneurs that have a rigorous operating mind-set, supporting founders by adding operating value to companies, helping them work through on-ground operating challenges rather than giving theoretical advice.
Studio — rather than being a conventional investing entity or a personal asset allocator, the vision for Operators Studio is inspired from boutique movie studio models (the likes of Hello Sunshine founded by Reese Witherspoon; Blinding Edge Pictures by M. Night Shyamalan; or Color Yellow Productions by Aanand L Rai). Its ethos is based on how these studios operate — looking for a unique story (problem to be solved) to tell to a specific audience (target customer), assembling/ supporting a team that brings to the table diverse skillsets needed to tell this story most effectively (backing gritty, execution-focused founders) and executing at economics most optimized for the story to be delivered most efficiently (capital efficiency, driving optimal returns).
5. Active Portfolio
My entire portfolio of companies is now under the Operators Studio umbrella. Following are the companies (currently-active) we are proud to have backed so far (in alphabetical order):
1) Artifacia (Toronto/ Bangalore) — AI-powered platform that helps e-commerce brands create and manage shoppable photos
3) Hate2wait (Gurgaon) — queue management product for SMBs and large enterprises
4) Instashift (Estonia) — global peer-to-peer platform to buy/ sell cryptocurrencies
5) Lets Venture (Bangalore) — India’s most trusted platform for angel investing and startup fundraising
6) My Ally (San Francisco Bay Area) — world’s only AI Recruiting solution for fully Automated Interview Scheduling and Recruitment Coordination
7) Scandid (Pune) — eCommerce deals & price comparison platform, now offering omni-channel commerce solutions for the global travel retail market
8) 91Springboard (Delhi) — category-leading co-working space in India
9) Trailze (Tel Aviv/ San Francisco) — making tough-terrain outdoor navigation easy (hikes, trails etc.)
10) Tydy (Gurgaon) — global onboarding & training product suite for the distributed modern workforce, bite-sized+gamified
11) Widget (San Francisco Bay Area) — transforming images and documents into customer communication channels, all without apps, phone nos. or forms
12) Yulu (Bangalore) — re-defining urban mobility in India via smart dockless bike sharing system
6. The Future
Am super-psyched to grow Operators Studio as a passion-driven parallel track, along-side my main operating career. I see tremendous opportunities for using tech innovation to solve really interesting problems and build outstanding companies, in markets as diverse as US, India and China. At the same time, am excited at the growth prospects of the current set of portfolio companies, several of whom are already emerging as category leaders.
Whether you are a founder, startup employee, established tech exec, angel, VC or corp dev professional, am eager to connect with you — for feedback, to exchange notes, collaborate or just brainstorm. You can Email me, as well as connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I thank all the founders, startup teams, investors as well as other tech ecosystem professionals that I have had the privilege to work with over the past decade. Here’s to leveraging entrepreneurship + tech innovation to solve the world’s most pressing problems over the next 50 years.
PS: for more details on Operators Studio, check out our website.
Recently on Twitter, I came across one of the best academic papers I have ever read — “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers”. Published in 1989 and authored by Daniel F. Chambliss from Hamilton College, the paper is profound because its findings are so easy to understand, practically applicable and above all, give empirical answers to that important question we all keep asking — what’s the secret of excellence?
The paper studies the sport of competitive swimming (particularly in the Olympics) to better understand the nature of excellence. Why swimming? ‘Cos 1) success in swimming is clear and well-defined (medals, plaques etc.) and 2) the sport has clearly stratified ‘levels’ (Country Club, Junior Nationals, Senior Nationals, Olympics etc.) that allow the study of excellence via movement across levels. Between Jan’83 and Aug’84, the author studied a cross-section of non-Olympic and Olympic swimmers, with a specific objective of seeing how the eventual winners drove excellence, and consequently their Olympics success, prior to the actual competition itself.
Here are the key sections, and their respective insights, from the paper:
What DOESN’T create excellence?
Excellence meaning “consistent superiority of performance” over competitors. The Author found that the following, often-cited drivers of excellence, actually aren’t true:
1.1 “Excellence is NOT the product of socially-deviant personalities”— excellent swimmers weren’t oddballs, loners or possessing some other kinds of non-conventional personality traits.
1.2 “Excellence does NOT result from quantitative changes in behavior “— eg. putting more hours of the same swimming practice. Simply doing more won’t result in moving up a level in the sport.
1.3 “Excellence does NOT result from some special inner quality of the athlete” — usually referred to as “talent”, “gift” or “natural ability”.
2. What DOES create excellence?
The Author found that the single biggest driver of excellence in competitive swimming was achieving “qualitative differentiation”, and NOT purely quantitive increases in “doing more of the same” (eg. increasing daily practice time from 2 hrs to 4 hrs, or swimming 7 miles everyday instead of 4).
Now, am sure you are thinking — what exactly is qualitative differentiation? I love this line from the paper that neatly defines it:
“A qualitative change involves modifying what is actually being done, not simply doing more of it”.
This includes things like changing your arm-pull technique in a breaststroke, competing in regional meets instead of local ones, eating complex carbs and veggies instead of fats and sugars etc. (PS: for cricket fans, I think the Indian captain Virat Kohli has pretty much done qualitative changes on multiple fronts to take his game to the next level. Same is the case with Novak Djokovic in tennis; see this awesome article on his regimen, published a few years back).
3. How do Olympic swimmers manifest qualitative differentiation?
This para from the paper captures the difference between Olympic swimmers and country-club swimmers really well:
“…they don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts…….Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different; their parents treat the sport differently; the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events”.
Three specific elements where qualitative differentiation gets manifested in competitive swimming:
3.1 Technique — “not only are the strokes different, they are so different that the ‘C’ swimmer may be amazed to see how the ‘AAAA’ swimmer looks while swimming”.
3.2 Discipline — “…(Olympics swimmer) is never sloppy in practice, so is never sloppy in meets”.
3.3 Attitude — “what others see as boring — swimming back-and-forth over a black line for 2 hours, say — they find peaceful, even meditative”.
4. Stratification in the sport is discrete, not continuous
Few key ideas from the paper on this concept:
4.1 “A rather small quantitative difference produces a huge qualitative difference”
4.2 “…certain teams are easily seen to be stuck at the same level”
4.3 Athletes don’t “work their way up” through levels; instead they move to higher levels via “qualitative jumps” created via a change in settings
5. Calling out our collective blindspot on “hard-work”
The paper argues that just achieving quantitative change does bring success, but only within the level of sport the swimmer is currently at. There is a behavioral bias at play here around extrapolating value of hard-work using only your own limited, visible and localized experience (“If I worked this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work?”).
6. Not everyone is running the same “excellence” race anyway
The paper argues that not all competitive swimmers are running the same proverbial race of winning the Olympic gold. Some are just looking to exercise, or have fun with friends, or escape their parents. The Author calls it “horizontal differentiation — of separate worlds in competitive swimming, rather than a hierarchy”, and asks for top performers to be seen as “different”, rather than “better”.
7. Why talent doesn’t lead to success
I am preferring to just give you this takeaway here as I believe that’s more important to know, than the ‘why’ of it. However, the paper does present some fascinating arguments on it.
8. THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY — Excellence is mundane
This para really captures the essence of this paper:
“Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or super-human in any one of these actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence”.
Related point: motivation is mundane too, and focusing on “small wins” — more than the long-term goal of an Olympics gold medal, champion swimmers divided this into small daily tasks, and focused on motivating themselves towards these daily goals and achieving these “small wins”, which eventually combine together to create the long-term win.
MY LEARNING FROM A BUSINESS/ PROFESSIONAL/ PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE:
A. Focus on ‘qualitative change’ — don’t do dumb hard work, relook at the way you are doing things, change your “settings”, do things differently.
B. Check what ‘excellence race’ you are running — very often, there is no alignment between 1) what we want out of our careers and life, 2) what race we choose to run (should flow from point 1) and 3) what prep we put in to win the race (should flow from point 2). Proactively create this alignment. PS: to manage the human tendency of benchmarking against peers, first check what excellence race is each person running and whether they are even comparable.
C. Do the small things correctly and consistently — true competitive advantage comes from creating a mesh of habits that are just impossible to replicate as a group by other individuals/ organizations. Focus on the “boring, small, daily wins” and you will win long term.
A few months back, my better-half Mahak Sharma shared this podcast by Cal Newport (computer science Professor at Georgetown University) with me. The topic was “Deep Work” — Prof. Newport defines it as “focusing, without distraction, on a cognitively demanding task”. The concept immediately resonated with me, as I have been following Robin Sharma for a while now and he always talks about creating “Tight Bubbles of Total Focus” (TBTF) as key to creating game-changing value. When done well, you enter into what is called a “Flow” state, where you get fully immersed in solving whatever problem you are working on, so much so that you lose the concept of time and few hours seem to go by like minutes.
New addendum: got some comments on LinkedIn, requesting for a clearer definition of Deep Work. It’s something that I too, have been trying to get a hang of.
Personally, I see the following characteristics of Deep Work:
Focus on problem-solving, rather than straight forward logistical stuff like con-calls, emailing, paper-pushing, social media etc.
Has to be demanding on the brain, maybe something new to you that requires real learning & causes cognitive strain.
Due to the above 2 points, will typically require intense focus & concentration.
Will typically be an “alone” task, requiring you to step back, think, analyze and process individually, rather than participating/ discussing in groups where energy gets dissipated and mental free-riding happens frequently.
(This one I love) more often than not, Deep Work should result in some sort of tangible output or deliverable like a note, piece of analysis, requirements doc, assumptions list, maybe even just a powerful enough insight that you document and use as a stepping stone for further problem solving.
Based on my own experience, Deep Work is becoming so much more important in this era of increasing automation and changing economic paradigms. However, interestingly enough, people are finding it much harder than before to do Deep Work. This is mainly due to increasing levels of “noise” & distractions around us — buzzing phone notifications, dopamine-inducing short form content, multi-tasking across email, chat, meetings etc. I feel another reason is easy access to online info & content, which doesn’t make doing Deep Work obvious enough to all. When I was growing up, learning a new concept in Math or Physics required sitting in libraries for hours, submerged in numerous books. Unless you went deep, there were little other ways to become even conversationally-knowledgeable about a new topic. Now, with content, videos and social media discourse at everyone’s fingertips, it’s easy to get skimming-knowledge and talking points on any topic, in probably under an hour. While it’s good for increasing our breadth of knowledge, it decreases our ability to go deep, and persist with hard problems.
Whether we like it or not, even today, it still requires doing Deep Work to solve truly hard problems and consequently, create differentiated value that the market will richly reward. Over last few months, I have been trying to consciously train myself to do Deep Work. Luckily, it’s like a muscle that gets stronger with more training.
Here are some of the approaches that have worked well for me so far:
Focusing Deep Work sessions only on tangible problem solving & creating actual solutions — logistical work like routine ops, communication activities like responding to emails & chats, grabbing a coffee with someone, brown bag lunch sessions etc. aren’t Deep Work. Prof. Newport calls them “Shallow Work”. It’s not to say that these activities aren’t required. But let’s be clear that if we focus too much on them, they might consume 80% of our time and yet, impede our ability to create value. Good examples of Deep Work would be new product development, design, writing on new subjects, figuring out fresh ways to drive growth, thinking through new competitive positioning for your company etc.
Doing “Shallow Work” only later in the day — I have started devoting my peak hours (early morning till late afternoon) to doing as much Deep Work as possible, and reserving time in late afternoon/ early evening & even late night, to do Shallow Work. This really works, as issues that require Deep Work are hard and don’t have obvious solutions or playbooks. You need to be at your best levels of concentration to be able to tackle them.
Logging out from social apps on the phone — at least in my case, compulsively going to Twitter and LinkedIn was a big distraction. So, I have logged out of them on my phone. Having to enter a password everytime creates an inertia that breaks the compulsive tapping/ scrolling behavior. If I truly need to tweet, post or read, I can enter the password & access the app during downtimes eg. while in taxi or train or waiting for a meeting.
Creating Deep Work “blocks” — instead of blocking out entire days, what has worked well for me is creating time blocks of 2–3 hours each, where the focus is to only do Deep Work. Even if one such block can be executed everyday, it’s a big win. Doing 2 such blocks creates an outstandingly productive day.
Doing a 60 sec retrospective end-of-day — typically after dinner, I do a 60 sec retrospective with myself, trying to quickly evaluate whether I ended up doing any true Deep Work or not during the day. A way of keeping myself honest is focusing on whether I created any tangible deliverable of Deep Work value during the day. It could be a piece of analysis, a mock-up, a pitch document, a PRD, even a blog!
Deep Work is both a process and a journey. When I see so many people around “being busy just for the sake of being busy” and working for 10–12 hours but mostly doing Shallow Work, I feel the ability to do Deep Work over many years will give anyone an unbeatable competitive advantage in today’s world. A friend recently told me “I find reading a book really hard”, and my mind immediately went to “people who have the patience & concentration to work their way through books will have a natural advantage over the rest”. As all great leaders & companies have shown time and again, doing hard things over many, many years is the key to winning. ‘Cos 95% of people out there can’t do it.
What is your view on Deep Work? What rituals have worked for you in implementing it? Would love to learn from you.
Bonus Idea: here’s another great talk by Prof. Newport on “Why following your passion is bad advice”. A topic for another blog someday 🙂
