Also, one thing people absolutely do not understand about Box (or they underestimate this aspect of Box's business): they are an 1) enterprise 2) SaaS company that 3) targets slow-moving, low-churn departments. Look, for example, this analysis by SaaStr: http://www.saastr.com/2014/12/18/saastr-on-techcrunch-box-wi...
A TechCrunch article. I renamed the article because I felt the original was a bit of hype. Nonetheless, I found it interesting because the guy kept believing and built the company and survived business terrain change over the years. Hope it spur some people on.
By the way, here's an interview with Sahil, where he talks about his "Failure to build a $1 billion company..." and how it ended up being a blessing in disguise:
Maybe that's how he started with $10,000 and built a $800,000 company in only 10 months. Dude's like a customer service (and marketing) machine.
I argued with a friend the other day that his success was just a perfect storm of such things as "great idea", "great implementation", "lucky timing", and a few other things.
But on reflection, and talking it out, we came to the conclusion that his obsessive attention to customer service and business transparency where the true multiplier that basically got him to the freedom line in less than a year instead of the 5 years it should have taken him.
It's also a lot of luck and being at the right place at the right time. It seems like the company that became ZipX was acquired for 50M but before that it only generated about 200k in revenue. If the timing wasn't right (with the onset of COVID) or no one knew about his company then he wouldn't have that success.
It really demonstrates the importance of continuing to work even after failures and pivoting often because you never know when or which idea will take off.
That's refreshing to see. In a lot of startups he would've been promoted to some high level position, hired dozens of engineers to maintain the new monster and then invited to an AWS conference to brag about how they solve their (self-inflicted) problems, all while the business is bleeding money in cloud bills and engineer salaries.
That's what I'd like to tell myself, but he now has quite a high profile in the UK startup industry. It's one thing to know how to grow a company from the very beginning, but to run and sustain a company that has tens of millions in revenue may be a more valuable lesson.
What I found interesting was that he's been working on this startup for about 5 years now, and just recently made an "overnight" success. It enforces what I'm starting to realize that those companies that explode all of a sudden are not just lucky, but they probably work for years experimenting with different models an failing, and then failing again, until they finally find something that works. It's encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
He went on to found Tarsnap about a year after that exchange.
The whole thread is really incredible. Just a bit further down[1] you see someone criticize him and his startup (Tarsnap) for having a "phenomenal misunderstanding of what it takes to create a successful software startup."
And then Drew Houston of Dropbox chimes in to say that he's building a similar backup solution.
Eccentric. To draw a parallel, Rahul reminds me of Evan S of SnapChat and Aaron L of Box, but only that Evan managed to correct his act and that's down to the mentors he had; and Aaron is very colourful as much as he is controversial, but knows his business inside-out and is driven to build world's greatest enterprise company (not sure if someone can say same about Yadav).
Either way, there much to learn from Yadav and his amazing team at Housing. They managed to create a great business in a short amount of time, sustained growth and managed to iterate rapidly. Now, I don't know for sure if all that growth happened inspite of Yadav, or because of him; but its hard to find fault with him, and he's achieved a lot in his short career already, and has to be credited for a lot of wealthy individuals he's now created in the process.
So much money has been poured into Housing at absolutely sky-high evaluations ($900m in a round led by Japan's SoftBank a few months back), and the writing was on the wall, really, the investors would never allow someone as outspoken as Yadav to remain at the top. In case Housing install a MBA at the helm, things can get worse as its competitor CommonFloor.com still has its founding team intact (that's much mature in terms of experience). And its an open secret that its hard to lead a company any better than the founders would.
Indian start-up scene is going through an unprecedented amount of growth propelled by all the talent that isn't leaving the country (most unicorns are founded by IITians that otherwise would have left the country for Silicon Valley) any more as VCs and Angles continue to pour a lot of money into the ecosystem.
Housing is a success story, but somewhere deep down I hoped it would have been a success story for their founders as well (much like how Ola Cabs is).
He sold his startup at a loss to investors and walked away with millions of dollars and a plum role at YC. That’s not moving up the corporate ladder, it’s jetpacking up it.
If you've been around HN for a long time, you'll have watched him take the path of a salaryman, to a small-time app, to a SaaS product, to consulting, to productized consulting, to a new and better SaaS product, to selling a company, to angel investing, and beyond, etc.. While he's really good at some stuff, he's also not an expert at everything. Its a really relatable story for so many people here.
And he's transparently written about all of it along the way, including a lot of financial stuff
This guy is great, he found a niche full of customers and became the expert. I wish more startups would do this.
With regards to Tesla, it is always interesting to me to see how as companies grow, they become more political, less effective and generally suck more. All the good people, like this guy, get pushed out or leave on their own.
Makes me generally not want to build or work for a large company ever again.
Okay how about "have a founder who knows Levar Burton & have him tweet to a landing page before you're even live...". This is such a huge boost out of the gate, I don't know why you try to downplay it.
I watch that video and I see an internet and logistics nerd who proudly explains he found the best way to build a company around it.
Although it's clear that profitability is important to him, the video also shows he's deeply passionate about building this "virtual store". This gives him the incredible drive the article was talking about.
Interesting to see how he kept things lean and has gone against the entire 'companies need a co-founder to succeed' stigma by single-handedly growing a multimillion dollar venture. He recruited the first three employees in 2008.
Also, one thing people absolutely do not understand about Box (or they underestimate this aspect of Box's business): they are an 1) enterprise 2) SaaS company that 3) targets slow-moving, low-churn departments. Look, for example, this analysis by SaaStr: http://www.saastr.com/2014/12/18/saastr-on-techcrunch-box-wi...
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