Startup Pragmatism

More than a decade of experience presented in a straightforward way

The idea for this blog is to distill my learnings over the past 16 years of working in tech into pragmatic guides on various topics that are important to run a company. Note that I’m a business guy, my area of expertise lies in sales, business development, operations, finance, legal & policy, hr & recruitment, people management and strategy. I have picked up some good practices in product and marketing over the years so I will include some posts on those topics too. I don’t consider myself a world expert in any of these disciplines, however, and do believe there are much more qualified people out there writing about these subjects. The reason I’m doing this is to give something back to the community but also to connect with others in our industry to exchange ideas and thoughts about different ways to design, build and run companies well. So hopefully you, dear reader, get something out of this and if we get to discuss some of these topics together, I will too.

Let me say upfront that I don’t claim for any of my posts to be gospel or necessarily the right approach for you in your specific circumstance. One thing that working in tech and startups has taught me is that your method has to always be customised to the context of the situation, which in turn can mean a drastically different approach. However, there are some basic frameworks that should make it easier to structure our thinking to solve certain business problems. I apologise in advance if some of the content is too basic. I’ve often been surprised how things that I took as a given or as basic ended up being a value add for people I’ve been managing or advising. Therefore, my approach will be to not be presumptuous and build up from the basics rather than assuming prior knowledge.

I hope that your time spent with my writing is going to lead to some practical improvement in your business even if on a very incremental level. If it has helped, if you disagree with my writing or just want to get in touch please do drop me a note. I’d love to hear from all of you!