Ajay Prakash
speaker
105 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Ajay Prakash’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
overtaking that leap so don't just kind of limp into it because it sounds cool because it's very very challenging but if you have that feeling you've been thinking about it a lot i would encourage people to just do the work you don't actually have to quit your job and and move somewhere or do something totally different to start learning and seeing whether or not there's something that gets you excited because to me this is about waiting for those bells to go off
and knowing that this is the thing I want to actually take the leap with. And so early on, if you're talking to customers, you know, need finding, you're figuring out what your field of play is going to be, what's the area I want to get into, and you're understanding if there's a pain point that gets you excited, you can do that just through conversations.
You don't have to take massive leaps to do that. And then I think, again, gauge If I'm excited today about something, let me see if it's still in my head. And let me see a couple of weeks later, am I still thinking about that thing? Because ultimately it's not about stepping away and I'm gonna go raise money tomorrow and I'm gonna go build a product.
There's a journey and you really wanna make sure first and foremost that this is the thing you want to dedicate your time to and take that leap with. And so I think if you're feeling that itch, I also, by the way, the thing that got me to take the leap, there was a great line from a business school professor that stuck with me as I was thinking about this.
And it's the idea that regrets for the things you do can be tempered with time. Regrets for the things you don't do are inconsolable. And for me, there was this feeling of like, oh, man, I got to do this at some point. I really want to do this. I got to be I got to have that experience. And so if if you have that itch, you want to minimize regret and take a shot at it.
But I think I think you don't just go in blindly. Right. Be really intentional. Wait for the bells to go off. You know, gauge your excitement along the way. Make sure as you talk to customers, they actually care. And there's you're solving a need here. These are all steps in a longer process.
Yeah, I mean, it's very different starting a company with someone than it is just being a friend with someone. And so I think one of the things that got me excited and confident with James early on was we had such a long history together that there was a very strong foundation
uh value alignment and trust and i think that was really important for me to even want to take the leap but but this this whole founder journey it's it's a lot like a marriage right you get into a marriage because of some initial things that that's that make it seem like there's a really strong foundation but it takes a lot of work and you learn a lot about the person uh as the journey goes uh goes along and so for for james and i early on you know we knew there was implicit trust there uh we both thought highly of each other but we had never worked together
And so we spent a lot of time just early on kind of talking about, hey, what are your working styles? You know, what are the what do you want out of this? What are your expectations? Does this have to be a unicorn in a couple of years? Are you trying to build a long term business? You know what? How long can you go without taking a salary?
There's all these questions that are not like the things that would come out when you're going to dinner with a friend or hanging out. Yeah. So we had a lot of those conversations early on. But I think the key thing has been that the communication, that was sort of the start of really good communication throughout.
Because what has happened as we've kind of scaled and worked together so closely is we know how each other works. We're very different in terms of our working styles and how we like to receive feedback and how we like to communicate. And we had to kind of learn that. from each other and provide that feedback to know, you know, just like a marriage, you have to know how to communicate.
You have to know you build the trust along the way and you have to you have to make sure you're really putting in the work and nurturing it. I think that's the important piece. If you lose sight of that, the the foundering journey, the entrepreneurial journey is a pressure cooker and it'll exacerbate any sort of negative things within the relationship.
So you've got to always be working and making sure it's strong.
Absolutely. I mean, I think the idea of ruthless prioritization is being incredibly intentional with how you spend your time and making sure whatever you spend your time doing on has an impact and moves the needle.
It's very easy as a founder or early in the journey to spend a lot of time perfecting a product and not talking to a customer as an example, but you gotta talk to the customers to see if they actually care about what you're building. And so, you know, the one thing that's very kind of constant about a startup is that if you give it 24 hours in a day, it will take it.
And so as you are building it, you need to be incredibly thoughtful and intentional. And there's always gonna be challenges. I mean, the second you become the CEO of a startup, you're gonna get invited to a bunch of networking events and a bunch of dinners.
And as you start building your company, you're gonna get a bunch of feedback from everybody about why you should do X or why you should do Y. And it'll come from smart people. And you gotta be really smart about where you're spending your time, where you're placing your bets. And there's also things around...
it would be exciting to do certain things that you haven't quite earned the right to do yet. And so, you know, I mean, I found with some of my earlier experiences, we would spend a lot of time doing things that bigger companies would do as opposed to doing the things that allow you to become the big company. And so really focusing on the things that move the needle is super important.
And so, you know, I think that is the idea of ruthless prioritization is to make sure if you're going to spend time doing this, make sure the things you're doing actually matter.
Yeah, I'll give you a few. If you're early in your career, I think the main thing I would tell you is that you just need to be excellent. As you are working in your various jobs, just go above and beyond, always be excellent. And what you'll find is that your reputation is going to follow you everywhere you go. And so if you're early in your career, that's really important.
Showing 81–100 of 105 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →