The outcome of starting a company as an entrepreneur is not binary, and in any of the case, the real value of the startup journey is the personal growth of founders. Building a startup is a long term game with lots of hard work required from lots of people and right things happening at right time hence most of our short term thinking/ judgements do not apply.

Let me share my story with you and what I have learned so far related to co-founders/ good founding team

Initial Days

Earlier, I founded a company called cvbhejo.com which was incubated by The Morpheus. I scaled the venture to 105 paying clients and also got selected as top 10 upcoming entrepreneurs by Bloomberg TV. Unfortunately, things did not work out as expected.

Second chance

After shutting down Cvbhejo, I worked for Morpheus gang and started doing theater. I made a short film too and realised filmmaking is very much an entrepreneurial activity. So started a platform to showcase filmmakers and their work. During this process, I interacted with many video makers and realized this gap of a dedicated marketplace.

Learnings

In my last 4+ years of startup life, I observed few traits that make a good founding team, hence mentioning them. Please feel free to disagree.

Qualities that I admire

• You give more weight to execution than equity.
• You are willing to scale up your knowledge/ skills as fast as you dream of scaling up your startup
• You want to live an independent life; you should not have any intention of going back to a job or getting an early exit unless situation demands so
• You are willing to survive on minimum salary to take care of your survival for initial months/ years
• You are willing to learn anything that makes startup rolling.
• If you have not founded a company earlier, you must have at least one story of courage so far
• You have respect for every stakeholder involved
• Skills – taking ownership, taking initiative, taking care of people be it employees or customers or vendors and being very careful with usage of resources

At Morpheus gang, we started an initiative – “RIP startup’s founders” where we connected ex-founders with existing startups. In this initiative, I interacted with 50+ ex-founders out of which 11 possessed above traits and therefore got hired by one or other startup. I used to wonder how people with no experience and knowledge in a particular domain excelled in that domain in very short time in a startup. The answer I got is – because of one’s attitude, desire to learn and willing to get one’s hand dirty. People who are willing to offer themselves for a cause rather than thinking about what is in it for them make them a good startup team player.

Things that don’t matter

• Your Qualifications/ college name
• How much you used to earn earlier/ what positions you held
• How much you know about the startup ecosystem
• If you are not an expert in any particular field

Good to have

• Technical knowledge
• Worked with startup/s or founded a startup earlier
• Willing to learn any skill and scale up your skill set

What I am building now

Stagephod.com is a dedicated marketplace to hire videomakers. We all know, video is the in thing in marketing, and everything which is text and image is getting replaced by video. As demand for video is increasing so is the demand for professional video makers. So far 200+ video makers/ production houses are associated with us and 100+ startups (including Snapdeal, Commonfloor, Cashkaro, MySmartPrice) are using our services.

Apart from startups and filmmaking, my interests lie in friendship, badminton, swimming, movies, travelling, cooking and jokes.

So, if you are bullish about learning, independent life, entrepreneurship, startups, creativity, marketplace, mobile, B2B services, videos (almost in this order) then I extend my invitation of sharing your professional journey with me and Stagephod.

If interested, write to me directly – ntayal(at)stagephod.com

~ Nikhilesh Tayal – Linked In profile Facebook profile