As another Monday kicks off, we round up some inspirational ideas from some of India’s smartest founders so that you don’t have to scroll through the Internet to find it yourself!
To start with, we have some great personal and professional advice from founder and CEO, Nithin Kamath. In a reversion of a common complaint, Kamath claims that “nice guys never finish last.”
“People root for you when you are genuinely nice to everyone you interact with without any expectation,” says Kamath. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a customer, teammate or a stranger.”
In a similar vein, founder and CEO Kunal Shah has a simple life lesson when it comes to managing employees and building a strong culture within your company.
“Leadership is building people to build,” says Shah. “Many mistaken it as using people to build.”
Ritesh Agarwal, CEO and founder of , goes a little further as he explains what it takes to build trust with your employees. Speaking to a cohort of Sequioa’s Surge program, Agarwal goes in-depth about how you have to trust employees when you hire them if you want to build a good working relationship with them.
“You’ve got to trust people when they come in, as quickly as possible,” says Agarwal in the two-minute excerpt posted online. “Until you give them an opportunity to earn your trust, they never will.”
However, how you treat your employees and co-workers is only a part of the equation. What does it take to actually make a difference in your day-to-day job?
Vidit Aatrey, founder and CEO at , recently tweeted an example of why his startup has come to define the social commerce industry in India.
Quote tweeting a company blog about how Meesho was able to increase their order per customer by 3.5%, Aatrey had a simple message. “I often get asked how we’ve created & defined a category,” he says. “The attention is in the details.”
Tarun Mehta, founder and CEO at , had a similar reaction when seeing a message talking about Ather’s customer-focussed approach to building their company.
During the early days of the electric scooter company’s growth, Ather were often criticised for delayed production dates. Amod Malviya, founder of Udaan, remembered visiting their lab and asking why they weren’t launching a product that looked ready to launch.
Mehta’s response to the question revolved around how they wanted to make sure that the scooter was completely safe first, because they didn’t want to risk customers’ lives.
When Malviya reminded him of the incident today, Mehta had a brief but insightful response, extolling the virtues of “building over years.”
With all this advice in mind, not including all the other advice you may receive from other areas of life, Ankur Warikoo, founder and CEO of nearbuy, has an important message for us all to remember.
“It is easy to state the right values. It is hard to live them.”
Remember not to copy everything you hear from successful people, but only the values you believe in and are ready to live by!
