Book Review: Let’s Build a Company

Two room-mates at IIT Mumbai met, fought and took a few detours in their career. Then decided to build a company. The year was 2007 That company was called CoCubes. They sold their startup to Aon for a tidy sum in 2016 and exited in 2019. How did their life change after making more money than they ever dreamt of? It did not. Beyond some creature comforts like flying business class. And maybe being able to indulge in personal passions like mountaineering or getting a private pilot’s license.

Let’s Build a Company is the story of building a company and the lessons learnt. Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal have shared their journey.

Change the market or optimize it?

They wanted to work with colleges (placement officers) and connect them to companies. They were solving the access to the talent pool. The talent pool had low employability. That made it inefficient for a company to go to a college and find the employable students. They created their own assessment to identify the students who crossed the threshold. Looking back, they believe now, they should have changed the market by working with the students and not the college. Identifying the market that is large enough is a skill. But the markets change. What is a tiny market could change drastically because of technological shifts (eg access to smartphones and cheap data) and social shifts (entrepreneurship as a viable option).

What I liked about the book

The book talks about their desire to build an organisational culture that would attract talent. They take pains to explain how much of a struggle it is to solve things end to end. This is not something that schools and colleges teach. Parents do not teach this either. Don’t spend it on a fancy office. It sends the wrong signal to those who applying to you for a role.

The Biggest Asset: People

I started reading this section with a little bit of cynicism. The first few chapters about raising funds and running out of funds or flying down to meet a client to convince them not to exit was not different from what any entrepreneur does. The differentiation comes in the way the startup makes people decisions.

I loved the way they explain their thumb rules about hiring. This is probably the biggest take away for me. A fancy office signals to a candidate that it is business as usual. In a start-up the investor’s money is like jet fuel. Use it to build the product faster, not to have a fancy office. Stay hungry and don’t hire people who are not hungry to succeed.

“You need a person who is comfortable with ambiguity, who is comfortable with things that are broken, who likes fixing stuff.”

Most startup founders are terrific at building a product or service. They are not focused on building the organization. Most startups do not invest in a CHRO whose role is beyond recruitment and payroll. Things like creating the culture or communicating with every single employee when things are going south is tough. Have a coach they recommend. If you are in a hurry, this is the section you should read. The section on people decisions on how to hire the leadership team and how to do performance management etc are fabulously crafted. For me that was what made the book worth reading. I wish the entire book was about that. that is when they really shine through with an individual point of view and challenge many traditional perspectives. I loved the somewhat irreverent humour that comes through.

Many of the other chapters talk about individual perspectives or challenges that did not hold my interest. Autobiographical sections or stream-of-consciousness writing is hard to get impressed by, unless the adversities or circumstances are exceptionally overwhelming. Middle class Indians are rarely at those crossroads. Those are the sections I skipped.

After selling the pace to Aon, what were the changes they noticed? The CoCubes employees noticed that things were slower, hikes in salary were modest. Legal decisions took more time. Both the founders are doing something different today.
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If you have read the book, let me know what you think of it. Leave your comments below.