Arunkumar Krishnakumar - Restartup: A Founder’s Guide to Crisis Navigation

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9

ARUNKUMAR KRISHNAKUMAR

MAXSON J.Y. TEE

This edition first published 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Krishnakumar, Arunkumar, author. | Tee, Maxson J.Y., author.

Title: Restartup : a founder's guide to crisis navigation / Arunkumar Krishnakumar, Maxson J.Y. Tee.

Description: First edition. | Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom : Wiley, 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021000105 (print) | LCCN 2021000106 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119754404 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119754596 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119754626 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: New business enterprises. | Financial crises. | Business enterprisesFinance.

Classification: LCC HD62.5 .K75 2021 (print) | LCC HD62.5 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/056dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000105

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000106

Cover Design and image: Veda Kasireddy

This book is dedicated to the spirit of entrepreneurship.

To those who don't take NO for an answer. To those who believe they can change the world and to those who actually have. To those who work through nights to protect their firm even when they have a young family to attend to in the morning. To those who live their passions sacrificing time, money and relationships.

To those who dare to hope!

It was January 2020 when we were just hearing about COVID-19 in China. It already feels like a decade ago. That's been the nature of the year 2020. We had unprecedented forest fires, geopolitical tensions between Iran and the US, the Beirut blast, the Brexit episode, the American elections and Harry and Meghan moving to the US. A year of chaos, not just crises.

In early 2020, I was on a panel at an event focussed on women entrepreneurs. At the end of the discussion, I had over a dozen founders asking me questions around how I thought the startup landscape would change if COVID-19 hurt the economy. I am not sure if the air around us in the room had the virus, but I could sense that it was filled with anxiety. I felt I had to do something about it, more than just giving them piecemeal answers.

I came home and started working on a blog series with several topics on how a startup could deal with a crisis. I looked across my portfolio firms and how they were dealing with it. They all had different plans, some of them felt they would fly, some of them felt they may have to slow down, a few others wanted to see how the market changed for them through February and March 2020 to then make a decision. There was a minority who felt they would be irrelevant if lockdowns happened.

It was quite clear that a crisis didn't have a homogenous effect on the innovation ecosystem. Yet, there was one homogeneity across these startup founders I spoke to. They were all anxious, if not depressed, because they didn't have enough information about the nature of the crisis. Remember, we are still in early 2020.

As we entered March 2020, it was dawning on us how bad the world was going to get hurt by this crisis. My portfolio firms had by then drafted several plans A to B to C and some of them had implemented their plans, too. A couple of them got lucky as the lockdown brought growth. Yet, one common theme across the firms was that founders who were agile and quick in making clear and tough decisions seemed to be do better.

By then my idea of writing a blog series had grown just because of the number of topics I could cover. In the past few years, I have had the pleasure of working with Max at our VC firm, Green Shores Capital. We had a little office at Mayfair in London and had numerous discussions, brainstorming sessions and heated debates using the glass walls of the office as our whiteboard.

Both Max and I felt that we should come up with mental models and thought road maps to help entrepreneurs be better prepared for a crisis. We spent a few days working on Miro mind maps and putting together various strategy topics that we would like to discuss in the book. We still hadn't considered one critical topic that this book now has mental health.

However, as we started talking to entrepreneurs through March and April of 2020, we understood that even those we rated as the best entrepreneurs were too close to the problem, too stressed and had trouble communicating effectively to their teams. We also saw many of them struggle with time management and a couple of them struggle with anger issues. These interviews were eye-opening for us because we hadn't ourselves realised the criticality of mental health amongst entrepreneurs.

We spent quite a lot of time researching about the topic, speaking to professional coaches and mental health experts. Legends in the venture capital industry such as Jerry Colonna, author of Reboot, and Brad Feld, the managing director at the Founding Group, openly discussed their depressive episodes with us when we reached out to them. In a world where we are taught to brag I am Superman and I am immune to the deadliest virus, we found vulnerability refreshing and genuine.