Mahesh Guruswamy
speaker
43 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mahesh Guruswamy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Have a strong sense of what made you successful and make sure you build your team the same way that exhibits those same principles. Pay attention to community and threes go against the grain is what I would say.
I would say obsess over customers is what I would say is the common theme across all these companies that have made them successful. Start with the customer and work backwards. What does your customer want? What are their pain points? What do they wake up thinking? What do they go to bed thinking? And if you understand that, then you can basically build a billion-dollar brand.
And that's how Amazon did it. That's how all these other companies did it.
I would say, you know, I advise a lot of startups on the side. So people ask me advice on, hey, I'm building this product. Like, what do you think about this? And my advice to all of them would be talk to your customers first. If you can't find 10 people to give you feedback on your idea, you're probably not going to be super successful as an entrepreneur, right?
So find those 10, 20, 50 fans of yours or for your idea who are like behind you. And I do the same way for my network too. So you find your fans, ask them for feedback, draw them like a little sketch of this is what I'm thinking. What do you think about this?
And you'll be surprised how many people will volunteer their time to come talk to you because they're passionate about the project you're working on. So I would say like that's the number one thing. Talk to your customers before investing any time or money into an idea or
And you have limited time on this planet, so you have to make it count.
That's right. That's right. That's right. Most people, and it's kind of interesting to observe it, most people will not Google their product idea to see if there are competitors in the market. That's the very first thing I do when somebody reaches out to me for advice or venture capital funding. I will Google their product, their ideas, if there are other competitors.
And their pitch deck doesn't have a competitor slide. I'm like, wait, you haven't thought through this fully. Yeah.
That's right. And going back to Amazon, like that was drilled into my head. So if I ever presented or anybody presented an idea with the competitive aspect of it like left out, you would get skewered because the question would be, well, we know Google is doing this. We know Microsoft is doing this. Why is this not in this proposal?
Like, what are you doing against, you know, to compete against these competitors?
Yeah, exactly. I think it's not copying it. One, it shows that having a competitor is actually a good sign that the market is healthy. There's space for you to compete. That's number one. Number two, it shows that you have done your research. And I think you mentioned that phrase when we were talking. What is the blue ocean here? If it is a competitive market.
what are you doing to like navigate this this path to find like a blue ocean in this in this you know in this like sort of ocean you're in so i think it's just like i think it's common sense i think like most entrepreneurs not most but many entrepreneurs they feel like their idea is so cool and so awesome that there's nobody else doing it but chances are somebody is doing it somewhere
Well, A, they don't start with a no. So I think that's the first thing you want to look for. And B, you don't need to hire a super senior experienced person as your first tech hire. I think if you're hiring your first engineer, you want to look for kind of cultural match. Does this person like match your speed? And that's what you're looking for. And do they believe in AI, like speeding them up?
That's number two you want to look for. And number three, do they understand the realities of the world we live in?
you know engineering software development is not as sacred as a cow as it was 10 15 years ago so do they understand the dynamic and they're more geared towards you know i want to get this product out so that we can get customers to use it and make some money versus i want to do something for puristic integrity or something like that right so and there are many engineers and things like that um so obviously like those three are what i would recommend like people look for
Yeah, that's exactly right. Like what you need is a first tech hire is a plumber, right? Who can just like jam things together, duct tape stuff together and get the water to go from A to B.
That's a good one. I think the release of my first book, I would consider that as my kind of big win. It sort of indicated that I sort of made it. Again, like I don't, you know, made it is very subjective, but in my mind, I feel like I made it with my first book.
That's right, that's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think another thing that will be interesting for your viewers is I was never academically talented. I was always, like, the average student in class. And I think back to my class, I was like, oh, I think I beat, like, 90% of them. So, you know, I feel good about it.
I was broke once. I think right after my son was born, you know, we were living on, we were both, my wife and I were making tax salaries, but we're spending way too much living above our means or living paycheck to paycheck. And one month we just were flat out broke. And I think that day we decided that we're never going to be like this again. So I think it was a good lesson learned.
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