Episode 49: Sidu Ponnappa- Lessons from entrepreneurship & investing
About Sidu Ponnappa:
About 90% of startups fail. 10% of startups fail within the first year. Failure is most common for startups during years two through five. Given such odds, why does one choose to be a founder?
Today on The One Percent Project, I am speaking to Sidu Ponnappa. Sidu is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. His startup C42 Engineering was acquired by GO-JEK in 2015, with C42's founding team joining GO-JEK's board of directors. GO-JEK grew 900X in 18 months and became Indonesia's first unicorn in 2017. Sidu has experienced building and scaling businesses as a founder, CEO, and head of engineering, sales, marketing and HR.
This is a no-noise just signal conversation where Sidu shares his observations on decision-making, why generalist vs specialist is a flawed concept, the probability of building a successful startup, why angel investing is not investing and much more.
Listen on:
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Some Key Highlights:
The best executors are people who are activity oriented because they've been practising that activity forever. Therefore they're really good at it. People who are objective oriented are great at wrangling reality in certain ways and making decisions and operating across boundaries. People who pick activities are just really good at those activities. So if you need to write great copy, you need to hire someone who writes copy all day.
If you are building a sustainable business and someone else is building an unsustainable business and the two are in competition, you winning is improbable. It's not that it hasn't happened, but it would be exceptional.
The entropy of any complex system always increases. The entropy of society always increases the entropy of the laws of a country always increases. As things get more complex, more conflicts emerge. Unless the system is static. Its entropy will increase.
In this conversation, she talks about:
00:00 Intro
01:38 Learning and experience being a founder?
02:01 Lessons and observation as a leaders
05:13 Why a generalist Vs specialist discussion is flawed?
09:47 Why should you hire someone who is objective-oriented?
10:14 Twitter tread on "Obvious Startup Truths" by Sidu
14:13 Founders mindset
19:23 Lessons from Angel Investing
24:10 Being acquired by GO-JEK
32:03 Are there 10x developers?
32:19 Why does the entropy of complex systems deteriorate?
34:55 Impact of reading
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