Delighted to host a Masterclass with Abhinav Asthana @a85, Founder of @postmanclient at #EE2019 today on “Building in India for the world”.. his perspectives on the opportunities and challenges founders will face in building a truly global product were invaluable. A thread 👇:
@a85@postmanclient Recalling the early days of Postman, Abhinav emphasised that "survival spirit" and "resourcefulness" underpinned the bootstrap phase of their journey and helped them sail through tough times.. times when bank balance was barely down to few months of making rent..
@a85@postmanclient “If you’re not ready to invest everything behind it, entrepreneurship is not for you.” It was intriguing to hear how hard he tried *not* to start a company. It didn’t feel right, until the day conviction got really strong this is something that’ll really add value to the world.
@a85@postmanclient From starting as a side project to getting immense love from developers, Abhinav claimed that constant listening (user feedback) coupled with quantitative data has continuously helped them unlock value, get clarity on their reason to exist, and make developers their champions.
@a85@postmanclient Abhinav feels strongly that great global companies can be built out of India. Talent exists, but first 10 hires are mission critical - Postman hired these slowly & carefully over 18 mos. Yet, mistakes are inevitable, and that’s when you really learn about your company’s culture.
@a85@postmanclient Moving to Silicon valley has helped Postman to embed itself in a similar breed of companies. Being surrounded by people who’ve been there done that, speak the same “language” has raised the bar and grounded the team in the reality of what it takes to build a truly global product.
@a85@postmanclient However, moving to US is not a magic-pill. Be very conscious about the “why”, but once you’re clear about the reason – move sooner than later. Transplanting cultures once they’re set is very hard.
@a85@postmanclient Practically speaking, running Indo-US teams is like running two companies. Your culture will vary no matter what. Each one feels other is making the important decisions. Managing this tension should be front-and-centre for the founding team.
@a85@postmanclient Clearly and comprehensively writing down the cultural ethos and “over-communicating” has helped Postman avoid chaos. However, Abhinav stressed that often the biggest mistake is that founding team doesn’t follow the principles themselves. There can’t be incongruence.
@a85@postmanclient Commenting on product pricing for different countries, Abhinav explained that the simpler it is, the better. It allows for better experimentation, understanding, and a frictionless buyer experience. Remember, every line in your pricing plan is a decision point & adds complexity.
@a85@postmanclient To conclude, Abhinav left founders with the thought that “Ambition evolves over time through conversations. Our north-star was to continue delighting users. To bring them real, tangible value. It is still day-one in this journey.” Thanks a lot @a85 for doing this! 🙏🤘
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This is for SaaS & esp India-SaaS but applies more broadly as well. I’ve been investing in India-SaaS since '18 & harping abt this endlessly to anyone who’d listen. I’ll say it again: the age of “business model innovation” in SaaS is over. It’s done. What does this mean? 🧵1/20
If you don’t have a fundamental product or tech innovation at the heart of your company, you are looking at a 10yr slog ending in a $5-10M ARR plateau → a [10-20]% CAGR lifestyle biz; a sub-$50M M&A by the category leader; or a slow death to $0. What changed, you may ask? 2/20
10yrs ago, “GTM as product” still had a shot. Building a basic SaaS product was *hard*. Cloud was in relative infancy. At GCP, the 1st thing customers would ask us was ‘why should we entrust our mission critical software, infra, data to a 3rd party?” Today we laugh @ this Q. 3/20
gm! We are pumped to release v1.0 of Lightspeed's India & SEA Crypto market map spanning L1 & L2s, devtools, CeFi & DeFi, NFT & P2E gaming, DAOs, analytics & more across India+SEA. See shorturl.at/lwJQ4 for the full blog & what we are looking to invest actively behind: 🧵
Circa Nov'20 we were seeing 1-2 crypto cos/mo. Today we see 2-3 crypto cos/day! India & SEA are fast emerging global epicenters for crypto. Lightspeed has invested in 50+ crypto cos since 2013 - most of it in 2021 e.g. @FTX_Official@AaveAave@OffchainLabs@solana@PintuID & more
The opportunity set 2-3yrs ago in this region was primarily in CeFi -- e.g. @CoinDCX@CoinSwitchKuber@WazirXIndia@PintuID@indodax have scaled really well. Today we see a much broader opportunity set spanning infra, devtools, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs and Gaming - v. exciting times!
The 2010s were all about the Cloud wars. The 2020s might just be about Chain wars. Before chain maxies, there were cloud maxies. I know because I was one while @Google. We ended up in a precarious race to the pricing bottom before learning few hard lessons & innovating out of it:
In early days of a stack, innovation first concentrates & then moves up. The 1970-80s were about the processor wars. The 90-00 were about the OS wars. Early days of cloud were about basic storage, compute, networks, before moving to higher level services e.g DB-aaS.
But Fragmented lower layers can't support upstream innovation; good luck building higher-order services when the underlying infra keeps breaking apart. So, not only does innovation concentrate, lower layers also consolidate as innovation starts to move up.
It was great to talk to my friend @balajis a few weeks ago. He is a quintessential futurist, living maybe 10-20 yrs in the future & has been right about so many things that sounded ridiculous back in the day. Genomics, Crypto, DeFi, Covid. Highlights in thread. #EE21 (1/11)
We asked Balaji - why is he the way he is? He responded by explaining that there are 2 types of CEOs - a COO type (those who ensure the trains run on time) & a CTO type (those who think & live in the future). While both have their merits, he gravitates towards the latter.
As the CTO type, he spoke of his interest in identifying powerful secular trends & behaviours e.g. rapid adoption of internet applications that are revolutionizing humanity - from meeting to mating! Being aware of these ‘curves’ helps in hypothesizing where we are headed.
We @LightspeedIndia are thrilled to host Frank Slootman, CEO of @SnowflakeDB as the inaugural speaker for our #MastersOfSaaS fireside chat series w/ global SaaS leaders: RSVP@ shorturl.at/hDMZ8. As a fan, I've collected Frank's quotes ("Slootisms"? :-) for yrs; some favs👇:
Frank is an absolute master of speed. As the CEO of Data Domain (acqd:EMC), ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), & Snowflake, Frank’s track record of execution + strategic vision is globally in the company of one. There are none like him. shorturl.at/avzL4. Img credit: @patrick_oshag
Frank on running fast and lean: Img credit: @Altimor