Discover New@Mrigank's

A small recap- You have build your product, you have a small but meaning full team, who is chugging along with you and working as hard as you are, you have a co-founder which as strategically involved as you are and you have money from your elder brother and an angel investor. You have a valuation of 12 crores and a well distributed pie chart. By the dilution which has happened in recent past, is it healthy? It is good too and bad too. Good because you have a larger chunk of money to utilize and bad because you have lost certain amount share and hence control over the company. Now your employees, your co- founder, elder brother and the investor will have right to say in most of the decisions.  But that’s alright as you are the boss and you will always have the last say till you own major chunk of your company. But make sure, you involve those people only who respect your work, your product and your plans rather than shoving their plans in your mind. So, what now? ...

Opening a startup teaches you many things and researching over some taught me many things. Equity sharing is one of those learning. Let’s start a hypothetical startup called “DiscoverYou”. It has been started by you and you have done some initial work on it like some market research or initial product designing. It looked amazing and you thought about going forward with it with whatever money you have right now. Let’s us discuss the stages involved in my first article of two article series- How to manage your equity? Stage1: Your Company is still un-registered, but you have started gaining some value out of it. You look happy and have not thought about equity yet. Don’t worry just chug along for some time and enjoy the feeling of being your own boss. :-) Stage 2: Phew! It’s harder than you thought. What to do? Idea, let’s get a co-founder. You find someone who can help in making the prototype little better and is as crazy about your idea as you are for it. You find som...

Lately, “Startup” as a term has caught my attention and it’s a whole new world with endless possibilities and high riding dreams. Earlier it was considered as a “Not so cool” thing in India, where people were not ready to invest at monetary as well as daughter (Talking about marriage: P) level. But today things have changed.  Entrepreneurs have become talk of the town. Now I see, a special page in newspapers, dedicated forums and large number of investors lined up to even catch the sneeze of a startup aspirant, having a nice plan and workforce to execute it successfully. Almost every day, one learns about new B-plan they come up with, new marketing strategies; whether “Ambush Marketing” or “Single day Complementary joint ventures”, things which one can’t find in books and journals. A person starting this endeavor is like a one man army, who has to decide the line of defense (from other competitors), the strategic points of attack (targeted consumer base), the ammunition power...