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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~12yrs ago, I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇
By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.
We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 kinda won the war, eventually 👏
So now that Nvidia has far outstripped the market cap of AMD and Intel, I thought this would be a fun story to tell. I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today. Back then it was unimaginable for AMD to beat Intel in market-cap (we did in 2020!) and for Nvidia to beat both! In fact, AMD almost bought Nvidia but Jensen wasn’t ready to sell unless he replace Hector Ruiz of AMD as the CEO of the joint company. The world would have looked very different had that happened. Here’s the inside scoop of how & why AMD saw the GPU oppty, lost it, and then won it back in the backdrop of Nvidia’s far more insane trajectory, & lessons I still carry from those heady days:
After my MS, I had an offer from Intel & AMD. I chose AMD at 20% lower pay. Growing up in India, AMD was always the hacker’s choice - they allowed overclocking, were cheaper, noisier, grungier and somehow just felt like the underdog david to back against the Intel goliath!
Through the 90s, AMD was nipping @ Intel’s heels but ~2003 we were 1st to mkt w/ a 64-bit chip &, for the FIRST time, had a far superior core architecture. Oh boy, those were exciting times! Outside of SV, I haven’t seen a place where hardcore engg was so revered. Maybe NASA.
Speed of execution is the moat inside which live all other moats. Speed is your best strategy. Speed is your strongest weapon. Speed has THE highest correlation to mammoth outcomes. Those who conflate speed w/ 'thoughtlessness' haven't seen world class execution @ speed. E.g.:
Many confuse speed w/ impatience. Impatience is your boss pinging you @ 9pm then calling @ 6am to check if a task is done. Speed is strategic. It is a permeated sense of urgency built w/ a shared belief that what you are doing is important & if you don’t do it, someone else will.
AMZN defines speed. Their 2015 SEC filing () is a must-read: (1) deliberate irreversible decisions (~10%?) (2) expedite all else. Founding teams need to learn how to apply judgment w/ <70% of data (<50% for early stage cos). Move fast, “disagree & commit”. shorturl.at/xDEU1
For those of you following anything SaaS, you'll note there have been a lot of calls around 'saas is dead' lately. If you are wondering why, I wrote about this last yr here👇. This isn't just about saas but rather a 50yr macro CAPEX/OPEX cycle at play under the hood. : shorturl.at/sJ4IZ
Over the last 20yrs, both the cost of building and distributing software has COMPLETELY crashed. 20 years ago, it’d take a 4yr CS degree to write software, today thanks to internet anyone who wants to work hard can learn to code. In 20yrs world has gone from 5-6M software developers to 60M+ today. Second, the cost of distribution has gone to zero thanks to SaaS. I remember the days MSFT used to ship us a new MSDN CD monthly; imagine if you had to burn 60M CDs monthly as MSFT today? Software is shipped hourly, globally, all at once to everyone now.
Result? A Cambrian explosion in SaaS Globally. Every revenue pool is fragmented across lots of players now. This is also why even at $200-300M ARR scale, network effects of brand/WOM are becoming harder to see -- there are very few to none of "no one gets fired for buying IBM" type businesses today. Public markets can't foresee a 300M ARR business going to 1B ARR as easily as they would in the past. Ergo, multiples compression across the board.
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!