Ashish Gupta of Helion Venture Partners is giving a great talk - something of a masterclass - at Headstart.in on execution in a startup and how to deal with many of the execution and organizational issues. The first part: Ideas are easy, execution is hard. Those of us in the tech space look at Information Technology companies - we value IP. Ideas are among the smallest part of building a company. Lots of folk thought of eBay before eBay...but the reality is that some guys are still thinking about it. The real protection of the idea comes out of execution of the idea, and not the idea itself. Elements of execution Sales & Marketing: Outside-in vs inside-out Pay attention to outbound functions - sales and marketing. One of reasons these guys talk bullshit is because tech usually works with 90% known. The sales guy is asked at the beginning of the quarter how much revenue is going to get - he doesn't know who their customers are. They're expected to deliver stuff that they don't know about. As you go closer and closer to customer, more gets known. You need to paint something RED or BLUE. Q - don't sales guys promise things that they can't deliver? So do engineers promise performance that they cant deliver. A lot of that is the process issue. Companies do not spend enough time in creating the right literature, so the client ends up assuming what they're buying. Not enough people look at why companies will not…
