Tag: Mentoring

  • What Captain Picard taught this founder

    What Captain Picard taught this founder

    I met Captain Picard in the mid-1990s. Star Trek: The Next Generation aired on Star Plus in India. Often at odd hours. No replay.

    I missed many episodes. I saw enough to stay hooked.

    What I admired most was the man. Steady. Fair. Never loud. Over the years I found he had also taught me a few things about running a company.

    Here are the ones I still use.

    1. Listen first. Then decide.

    Picard rarely decided alone.

    He turned to his crew. “Number One?” “Mr. Data?” “Counselor?” He heard each view out.

    Then he said, “Make it so.”

    Both halves matter. Skip the listening and you decide blind. Skip the deciding and you freeze. I wrote about the freezing half in What Captain Kirk can teach founder CEOs. Picard is the other half.

    2. If they don’t get you, tell a story

    In “Darmok”, Picard meets a race that speaks only in metaphor. Their words are references to their own stories. Plain language fails.

    He bridges the gap by telling the Epic of Gilgamesh.

    Founders hit this wall often. A team, a customer or an investor just doesn’t get it. So we explain louder. We add more slides.

    The answer may be a shared story, not a better argument.

    I learnt this the hard way. When I let ChatGPT expand the outline of one of my talks, it came back polished but generic. It only came alive when I went back to my own stories.

    3. Build a crew that is not like you

    Look at his bridge. A Klingon. An android. A blind engineer. A counselor who senses feelings.

    None of them thought alike. That was the point.

    Hard problems need many angles. If everyone in your room nods together, someone is holding something back.

    4. Four lights

    In “Chain of Command”, Picard is captured and interrogated. His captor holds up four lights and tells him to say five.

    Picard refuses. “There are four lights!”

    Later he admits that, at the very end, he had begun to see five.

    No founder faces an ordeal like that. But we all feel a milder version of it.

    A board wants growth. An investor wants a bigger story. A team wants good news. So a number gets bent a little to please the room. Revenue. Runway. Pipeline.

    That is the fifth light.

    Four is four. Report what is true. And know that pressure bends even the best of us.

    5. Stay with what is in front of you

    In “The Measure of a Man”, Picard defends Data in a hearing. Data is an android. Is he a person, or property?

    Great television. Picard argues it superbly. What I take from him is his calm. He met a hard question with clear thinking, not fear.

    But Data is a character in a story. He is not a forecast.

    My view is simple. Don’t anthropomorphise today’s AI. It is not a being. It is not plotting anything. I use ChatGPT and Claude Code every day. They are capable assistants. Nothing more.

    The fear of machines taking over humans is, to me, an unnecessary worry. It comes from drinking too much science fiction Kool-Aid. The later series Picard built whole storylines on fear of synthetic life. Good drama. Poor business guidance.

    Founders have real questions today. What does AI do to my costs, my people, my customers, my community?

    Work on those. Leave the far horizon to the experts in the field.

    6. Your scars stay with you

    “Tapestry” is a Next Generation episode. As a young man, Picard picked a bar fight and was stabbed through the heart. He has lived with an artificial heart since.

    Now, near death, he wishes he could undo that reckless youth. A being called Q gives him the chance.

    He avoids the fight. And wakes up a careful, forgettable junior officer who never commands a ship.

    He begs to go back.

    The scar was part of who he had become.

    I carry one too. I was 14.

    I was on an NCC trek near Pune. I had never spent a night away from my parents. We walked over 30 kilometres a day across hilltops and forts.

    On one descent, I slipped. My canvas shoes made it worse. I slid fast towards a rock face several hundred feet below.

    A senior cadet from a city college caught hold of me. He stayed by me for the rest of that day. I never learnt his name. I owe him my life.

    The scar from that slip stayed with me for years.

    It still does. Whenever I have faced an impossible situation, with no way out, my mind goes back to that slope. To the fall. And to the hand that caught me.

    Every founder carries a scar like this. A moment that never quite leaves.

    It returns when the pressure is highest. Know yours.

    Then remember who caught you. A mentor cannot stop you from slipping. A mentor is the one who catches you when you do. In The Founder Catalyst, I wrote that “every founder needs a mentor — and every founder must also be one.”

    The scar reminds you of the fall. The mentor is why it was not the end. Be that mentor for the next founder.

    7. Optimism is a working tool

    Star Trek’s future is not free of trouble. Its people just assume trouble can be solved.

    That is not a mood. It is practical. A team that believes a problem is solvable will actually work on it.

    Star Trek shaped how I think about complex issues, more than I realised at the time.

    Sir Patrick Stewart has passed away at the age of 86. AI can now recreate a face and a voice. It will never be the real Patrick Stewart. For millions of fans like me, he will always be Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

    Thank you, Captain. Rest in peace, Sir Patrick.

  • Founder lessons from the classroom

    Founder lessons from the classroom

    I was interviewing a student from VIT Bhopal for an internship. Somewhere in the conversation, she mentioned a course called Technology Entrepreneurship. I asked her to show me the syllabus.

    It read like a list of things I wish someone had told me three decades back.

    I finished my engineering degree knowing electronics and how to write code. I did not know how to read a balance sheet. A profit and loss statement made no sense to me either. Taxation was worse. So I read what books I could find and worked it out as I went. There was no other way to run a company. I have written about this in my book, The Founder Catalyst.

    What stayed with me was not the mistakes I made while catching up. It was the time it took. Every hour I spent understanding the numbers was an hour I did not spend on the product. I was an engineer who wanted to solve problems, and a good part of my energy went into things nobody had taught me.

    Her syllabus talks about customers and whether they really want what you are building. It talks about protecting what you build. It talks about money, about incubators and government support, and about selling across borders. I learnt each of these the hard way.

    A large client once came to us because of a small tool we had built. They were using it in ways I had never imagined. About twenty years ago, we built a content management system for news and media companies. We charged a licence fee on top of our services. The market did not like it. We ended up giving the system away as part of the service. I found out what customers would pay for only after the product was built.

    My first product was EasyPass, a shareware security tool that found buyers in over fifty countries. One of my early collaborators took a copy of the code and began selling it as his own. I learnt of it only afterwards. No one had taught me anything about intellectual property before that day.

    Around 2007, I expanded into the US and the UK at the same time, and I borrowed to do it. Growth came before the reserves. It was a close call. Today’s founders step into a far more supportive ecosystem than the one I began in. Incubators, angel networks and government schemes exist now. That support helps only a founder who knows about it.

    Let me be fair to the classroom. It is not the field. Forty-five hours of lectures cannot teach what a first customer saying no will teach. Students will still learn the hardest parts by doing them. But there is a difference between meeting these ideas cold and meeting them as old acquaintances.

    These are the engineers who will join your teams over the next few years. A college like VIT Bhopal now teaches this in a full semester course. They will arrive with cash flow, customers, patents and markets already in their vocabulary. I expect the questions in your review meetings to get better.

    Founders have something to offer here. Internships and mentoring hours give students the practice a lecture hall cannot. I head the mentoring programme at TiE Chennai. We see young startups welcoming the initiative and finding it useful. I suspect students would feel the same.

    An engineer’s attention is the scarcest thing a young company has. I spent a good part of mine catching up on basics. If a classroom can spare the next generation that effort, they can put it into the problems they care about. I learnt these words by making mistakes. They will learn the words first, and spend their mistakes on harder problems.