MARL Accelerator has a robust community of founders and investors. Jennifer Sertl moderated a panel on #FutureofFunding. Here are a sliver of a sliver of some key insights.
Aparna Pujar, CEO & Founder Zemplee, MARL Accelerator Alumni
Aparna Pujar has created a dynamic career as an entrepreneur, product visionary, and technologist. With a career spanning over 20 years in business, engineering, and product leadership roles, Aparna has brought world-class products to technology companies focused in areas such as media, healthcare, and retail and in her current role as the CEO and founder of Zemplee.
If you were to write a book about entrepreneurship what would be in your playbook? So even though we are structured as a business, empathy plays a hard role in what we do. We have to marry empathy with excellence. We are a distributed global team with operations in India and Philippines. Whether we are trying to solve a customer issue or w trying to solve a product issue we try to embody that and make sure that, you know, everyone is, um, is, is rooting for each other, uh, in, in a way that makes them be a better version of themselves. Establishing our culture across all functions has been a very important part of our success.
Where do you see startups missing the mark in the preparation to pitch? Fundamental resilience. I think very few startups have the fortune of learning through distressed times. We were smack in the middle of it. I want to believe that the worst was behind us and we learned everything that we could learn about the nature of the business and our market. I feel like that makes you as a founder better prepared to address any future challenges that might come your way.
Mentorship is such a huge part of the MARL experience. Share the best advice you either give or have received. Don’t do it all alone. Amir Khan really sat down with me and looked at my business goals. It was helpful to get perspective from someone outside of the business that I respect. I also want to share with other founders is that you cannot be second guessing yourself. Make a commitment to make a decision and learn from that decision.
Mariano Gonzales Vasconcelos, Founder & General Partner MGV Capital Group
Mariano Gonzales Vasconcelos has over twenty years of experience leading growth strategy initiatives for Fortune 500 companies and Private Equity/Venture Capital firms. His career includes a decade of strategy and operations consulting with Booz & Company and several years’ industry experience in information technology. As a Founder, he has launched several startups in professional services, retail, technology, and gaming. As an Investor, he focuses on early-stage technology companies.
If you were to write a book about entrepreneurship what would be in your playbook? It is very important to think of what is your essential advantage? What will not only give you the right to play, but the right to win in the market? Once you begin to think that way, the key is to identify the two or three capabilities that you will need to win.
Where do you see startups missing the mark in the preparation to pitch? I think it is the lack of having an overall strategy and particularly given the conditions of the market today. Founders work in defining the vision of the company, but are not as prepared as they should be to describe the roadmap or strategy to get there. They have to have a comprehensive view of what the next two, three years will look like — not necessarily from a financial standpoint, but from a strategy standpoint.
Mentorship is such a huge part of the MARL experience. Share the best advice you either give or have received. From my standpoint, the best advice I’ve ever received was that you really need a team behind you. So many founders get burned out. There is so much stress, often there is struggle both meally want to encourage people to manage their well being and also build a team.
Dr. Ashish Mehra, Entrepreneur — Product Leader — Author
Dr. Ashish Mehra has over twenty five years of experience in business and engineering leadership, product management and innovation, software development, and customer success. He has expertise in multiple technology domains: storage and file systems, software-defined infrastructure, distributed and real-time systems, modern web apps / services, Big Data / data analytics, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Has held senior leadership positions at venture-funded startups (Allocity — acquired by Dell EMC, iScale) and established public companies (NetApp, Dell EMC, and IBM). Holds 3 U.S. patents, 6 invention disclosures, 20+ published papers in reputed technical conferences and journals.
What is the primary message of your upcoming book StartUp To Win™? You have to be really conscious about who you are and what you are trying to win. You also have to know the kinds of metrics that can help you get to where you need to go. You have to be very conscious of the health of your startup. That health is not just reflected in revenue and the usual metrics that we talk about, but the heart and soul of your startup including the culture and the team. People are the currency.
Where do you see startups missing the mark in the preparation to pitch? I think there are four key elements:
One is to show very clear metrics demonstrating month over month growth, more than 10%. That traction has to be a combination of usage or retention as well as revenue
Two is to have very clear evidence of product market fit that you can build upon. You must be able to articulate why there is product market fit.
Three is to have a very credible path to a hundred million in revenue. You have identified and narrowed down your most effective go to market channels. You have actually understood what works: core competence and value proposition.
Four is to have the team that you manage attract and build out core skill sets that were missing in your founding team.
Mentorship is such a huge part of the MARL experience. Share the best advice you either give or have received. The most insightful advice I got many years ago was very simple: know your numbers. It clearly meant financial numbers, but over the years, I’ve interpreted “know your numbers” to apply to many levels of a person’s professional and personal life. It reveals a lot of insight into the life you are creating and also the life you want to create.
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