Outliers

What do Dropbox, Spotify and DJI have in common? Great founding teams, obsessive focus on details and, of course, their core products.

Another common factor across these and several other successful companies of this decade is venture investor Sameer Gandhi who’s now a partner at Accel. (Disclosure: Accel India is the lead investor in SourceCode Media, the owner of FactorDaily).

Over past two decades, Gandhi has had the front row seats in some of the most important startups. He’s also sat through “the situation room” at these companies.

“Founders are the spiritual core of their startups,” he says.

Successful founders aren’t afraid to go get people on board who are better than them in certain areas

“I talked to one of my founders at one point in time. He was running the company as a founder—very inspirational,” he recalls.

“I told him to come back as the CEO after a break and not the founder.”

According to Gandhi, it’s this transition from being a founder to a great CEO that makes startups such as Dropbox, Spotify and DJI insanely successful.

What do Dropbox, Spotify and DJI have in common? Great founding teams, obsessive focus on details and, of course, their core products.

Another common factor across these and several other successful companies of this decade is venture investor Sameer Gandhi who’s now a partner at Accel. (Disclosure: Accel India is the lead investor in SourceCode Media, the owner of FactorDaily).

Over past two decades, Gandhi has had the front row seats in some of the most important startups. He’s also sat through “the situation room” at these companies.

“Founders are the spiritual core of their startups,” he says.

Successful founders aren’t afraid to go get people on board who are better than them in certain areas

“I talked to one of my founders at one point in time. He was running the company as a founder—very inspirational,” he recalls.

“I told him to come back as the CEO after a break and not the founder.”

According to Gandhi, it’s this transition from being a founder to a great CEO that makes startups such as Dropbox, Spotify and DJI insanely successful.

What do Dropbox, Spotify and DJI have in common? Great founding teams, obsessive focus on details and, of course, their core products.

Another common factor across these and several other successful companies of this decade is venture investor Sameer Gandhi who’s now a partner at Accel. (Disclosure: Accel India is the lead investor in SourceCode Media, the owner of FactorDaily).

Over past two decades, Gandhi has had the front row seats in some of the most important startups. He’s also sat through “the situation room” at these companies.

“Founders are the spiritual core of their startups,” he says.

Successful founders aren’t afraid to go get people on board who are better than them in certain areas

“I talked to one of my founders at one point in time. He was running the company as a founder—very inspirational,” he recalls.

“I told him to come back as the CEO after a break and not the founder.”

According to Gandhi, it’s this transition from being a founder to a great CEO that makes startups such as Dropbox, Spotify and DJI insanely successful.

In March this year, we published an Outliers podcast with Ryan. it also gives you a sense of how long we’ve been working to get these conversations:). We’re sharing it again as part of “How AngelList works” story to give you a complete inside view.

In many ways, Product Hunt completes AngelList’s quest to become the one-stop platform to help startups focus on their core product and not bogged down by funding, hiring needs.

From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new product launches on its platform.

In March this year, we published an Outliers podcast with Ryan. it also gives you a sense of how long we’ve been working to get these conversations:). We’re sharing it again as part of “How AngelList works” story to give you a complete inside view.

In many ways, Product Hunt completes AngelList’s quest to become the one-stop platform to help startups focus on their core product and not bogged down by funding, hiring needs.

From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new product launches on its platform.

In March this year, we published an Outliers podcast with Ryan. it also gives you a sense of how long we’ve been working to get these conversations:). We’re sharing it again as part of “How AngelList works” story to give you a complete inside view.

In many ways, Product Hunt completes AngelList’s quest to become the one-stop platform to help startups focus on their core product and not bogged down by funding, hiring needs.

From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new product launches on its platform.

With Naval becoming the chairman and moving away from day to day running of AngelList, Laws has perhaps the toughest job in the startup investment world. For many, it’s difficult to even think of anyone else as the face of AngelList. It’s a challenge that Naval himself recognizes.

Globally, AngelList moves about $175 million every year into startups, which is about 600-700 startups annually. And more than have of them use AngelList for their hiring too, according to Laws.

“There is a misperception that we make it easier for startups to raise money. Not any more likely that you will get to “yes” if as a startup you’re using AngelList. That said, the time that you spend to get to the same answer you would have got any time…..that’s a lot less,” says Laws. “Same thing for hiring. The idea is to make that time much smaller proportion of the total time spent to get to a good match.”

“The biggest challenge for us is that people think AngelList is a place where if they go, suddenly the startups get funded. That’s not quite the way it works.”

So how do you spend your time? What does a typical week look for you? These are among the questions I ask Kevin to understand AngelList works on a daily basis.

With Naval becoming the chairman and moving away from day to day running of AngelList, Laws has perhaps the toughest job in the startup investment world. For many, it’s difficult to even think of anyone else as the face of AngelList. It’s a challenge that Naval himself recognizes.

Globally, AngelList moves about $175 million every year into startups, which is about 600-700 startups annually. And more than have of them use AngelList for their hiring too, according to Laws.

“There is a misperception that we make it easier for startups to raise money. Not any more likely that you will get to “yes” if as a startup you’re using AngelList. That said, the time that you spend to get to the same answer you would have got any time…..that’s a lot less,” says Laws. “Same thing for hiring. The idea is to make that time much smaller proportion of the total time spent to get to a good match.”

“The biggest challenge for us is that people think AngelList is a place where if they go, suddenly the startups get funded. That’s not quite the way it works.”

So how do you spend your time? What does a typical week look for you? These are among the questions I ask Kevin to understand AngelList works on a daily basis.

With Naval becoming the chairman and moving away from day to day running of AngelList, Laws has perhaps the toughest job in the startup investment world. For many, it’s difficult to even think of anyone else as the face of AngelList. It’s a challenge that Naval himself recognizes.

Globally, AngelList moves about $175 million every year into startups, which is about 600-700 startups annually. And more than have of them use AngelList for their hiring too, according to Laws.

“There is a misperception that we make it easier for startups to raise money. Not any more likely that you will get to “yes” if as a startup you’re using AngelList. That said, the time that you spend to get to the same answer you would have got any time…..that’s a lot less,” says Laws. “Same thing for hiring. The idea is to make that time much smaller proportion of the total time spent to get to a good match.”

“The biggest challenge for us is that people think AngelList is a place where if they go, suddenly the startups get funded. That’s not quite the way it works.”

So how do you spend your time? What does a typical week look for you? These are among the questions I ask Kevin to understand AngelList works on a daily basis.

Most organisations have separate engineering, product and business teams. At AngelList, engineers are the owners of the product too. When AngelList started building out a product for India, Sridhara led the product development.

“That doesn’t mean you have to do all that (product, business, legal) all by yourself, but it’s pretty much like running your own company,”says, Sridhara, a University of California, Berkeley graduate in computer science.