The Greatest Obstacle to a Startup's Success: Overcoming Founder Burnout

Founders Giving Up

The biggest hurdle in a startup becoming successful is “founder burn-out.”

Creating a startup is difficult. Let’s accept it. You need to navigate through Sales, Customer Support, Operations, Product Engineering, HR Recruitment, Marketing, Branding and much more. A slip-up in one area can spell doom. Many founders give up due to this. And that’s what differentiates a successful startup from one that isn’t successful.

When I started Cogno AI in 2017, we faced numerous challenges:

Parents’ Disapproval

My parents did not agree to me leaving my job offers at Tower Research and Rubrik to start Cogno. It was quite challenging to convince them that a startup is not a gamble but rather a calculated risk with a high reward. To address this, I helped Rubrik India Head hire a bunch of people from IIT Bombay, Delhi, and Kanpur. In return, he assured me that if my startup didn’t work out, Rubrik’s door would remain open for me. I presented that to my parents, and they were relieved knowing there was a backup.

Payment Delays Due to GST

Due to GST being rolled out on 1st July 2017, our first large client was unable to pay us timely. They couldn’t make changes to their Vendor Payment system quickly. This led us to run out of funds. To resolve this, we invested some of our own money into the company to keep it running. It’s important to note that at that time, we had already started incurring expenses such as rent, food, and travel.

Co-founder's Departure

In just 1.5 years, my co-founder quit. At that time, I was in deep trouble. We had less than Rs. 5 lakhs (approximately $7,000) in the bank. I had 1 intern and 1 full-time engineer. It was a dire situation. I called up my college friend Harshita and explained the situation. I further showed her the vision of how big this could become. She left her job and joined me as a co-founder. Today, we are a 100-member team.

Challenging Situations

In 2019, we faced a difficult situation when a friend I had onboarded at Cogno for a senior role backstabbed us by using our developers to work on his independent project. He was managing one of our large clients. Cleaning up the mess and resolving the episode gracefully was a significant challenge, but we managed to do it.

Later, in September 2019, an Engineer from a reputed tech firm picked up a few words from one of my LinkedIn posts and created chaos to gain popularity. He wanted to ride on the name of IIT Bombay to defame me and get more “likes, comments, and shares.” He raised allegations that at Cogno, we were mistreating our employees, specifically freshers. He wrote about it on LinkedIn in a highly negative tone. I am not specifying names because doing so would not make a difference. All of my team members were shocked and in despair. Today, we are proud to say that not only do we have a 4.4/5 rating on Glassdoor but also many of the reviews are from freshers praising the company culture that has helped them learn and grow in their careers.

The final tough situation was in April 2020 when our invoicing suddenly went down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Money inflow plummeted overnight. However, we took this as a challenge and emerged successfully. We grew from ~18 members to 100 members in 18 months. We did salary increments and appraisals for all our eligible team members. We did not do any salary cuts or any structural changes. In fact, I ensured that if a tough situation arose, I would put my personal funds into the company to ensure all team members were paid their exact salaries on time.

Conclusion: Don't Give Up

If you see the pattern, there’s one thing we did – we continued relentlessly irrespective of the situation. We never gave up. If we had, Cogno would have shut down. We were clear that we needed to grow this into a big business.

Don’t give up, and you’d emerge successfully.