In this episode we share our experience with pivoting, when, how, and why. We also discuss examples of startups, some at the brink of bankruptcy pivoting into unicorns.

Premature scaling is the number one cost for startup death. In this episode we explore the premature scaling problem decomposed in three arenas - Product, Operations and Engineering

References

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Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of-startup-death-premature-scaling/?sh=3f066b4e1fc9

Premature optimization: https://stackify.com/premature-optimization-evil/

Juicero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero

Writing in space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space

Feature creep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep

Technical Debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

Navigating company acquisitions from an employee point of view, and how to preserve culture and momentum post-acquisition. 

Advait is a pre-seed founder exploring problems to solve in the Metaverse. Drawing out Advait’s rich experience of being a product focussed person in Amazon and the Mobile premier league, we navigate the content creator space, attention spans and how to fall in love with the problem and the market instead of the product. Find Advait Alai on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/advait-alai-a6789427/

Footnotes/Resources

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The do's and don'ts of onboarding new employees. We shared best practices from various startups. We also touch on inclusion.

Abhinit is a Founder and CEO at decision3.ai, an off-chain secure compute layer for decentralised applications. He shares his view on the meaning of trust in distributed systems, the enabling experience of a secure compute layer, and the strategy of monetisation in a decentralised world.

Reach out to Abhinit on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinitambastha/ or via email at [email protected]

Footnotes/Resources

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Iusef is a pre-seed founder at Antler, an incubator that receives 200 applications per week. He shares his experience with Edtech and how he ended up getting accepted at Antler twice. Find Iusef on Linkedin at linkedin.com/in/iusef

wiki: Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service.

We start our podcast series by directly diving into some red flags.  We discuss the timing of hiring a product manager, the connection of a product manager role with the health of the start up, differences between a product manager and a product owner and many more related topics.

We discuss Akash Gupta’s post on the 11 red flags for a product manager job description : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aagupta_there-are-424156-open-product-manager-jobs-activity-6976393792694235136-FblX.

The guru of product management we talked about is Marty Cagan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan). You can find his books on SPVG : https://www.svpg.com/books/

Look out for our next episodes where we dive deeper into more red flags and recipes around engineering and product,