After Stayzilla
About 9 months ago I moved along with family from San Francisco to Bangalore to join a mid-stage startup, Stayzilla, as Chief Product and Technology Officer. As luck would have it, Stayzilla announced a couple of days ago that it is rebooting and shutting down its operations for now. Well, I guess, c’est la vie!
Stayzilla, as I wrote at the time of joining, was the smallest, least well known and the riskiest of my four choices at the time. I took it because — among other reasons, I have a bias for alpha bets (which I guess I should correct now 😀). That bias had paid off handsomely last time I took it in Twitter. Of course, in hindsight, this was clearly not my best decision. But it does not take away from the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the company. For that, I must thank the founders (Yogi, Sachit and Rupal), my direct reports — Santanu (VP engineering), Mouli (VP product, guest, and design) and Abhimanyu (VP product, host) — and most of all, my awesome team.
This team is good
From my past experience at Twitter, I had developed some models of team building — vertical, autonomous small product teams who are as self-sufficient as possible for delivering their own metrics, are staffed with their own dedicated functional resources, and are supported by strong infrastructure and analytics. I put these into practice at Stayzilla. Under competent and motivated team leaders, I would like to think that this led to a pretty incredible culture, productivity, team dynamics and overall execution efficiency.
I am proud of this team — they will do enormously well wherever they go. For me too, it was an enormous learning to build and organize a mid-size product, engineering and design team in India and I have innumerable lessons to take forward.
Next Play
I am becoming an advisor to the two firms who were on Stayzilla’s board — Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners India and look forward to being of help. I am also an individual investor in some remarkable early stage Indian founders and startups — Shuttl, Myra, Belong and Mihup — and will look to be of more help. However, I remain a builder first and have luckily been able to convince a small team of awesome engineers to come with me to hack on some really raw ideas.
On Startups and the Indian startup ecosystem
Startups are about taking chances, and some startups will fail. This is almost a mathematical statement and independent of a particular startup’s market, timing, or execution. But sometimes we tend to forget this. Recently, there have been instances of layoffs at a few large startups in India. And everyone seems suddenly worried. I am no expert, but startup ecosystems go through such phases. What the Indian startup ecosystem needs — as always — are even more dreamers and builders.
