Lessons as an Entrepreneur

Vikram Srinivasan, Founder Zettata

Who We Are

Founders:

●Sesh Seshadri - PhD Wisc Mad->IITB Prof-

>Bell Labs->Serial Entrepreneur

●Vikram Srinivasan - PhD UC San Diego-

>NUS Prof->Bell Labs->Zettata

What?

Connect

Users To

Products

How?

Navigation

Personalized Targeting

By Dynamically Ranking Products on All

Pages of Your Site

Why?

Repeat

Customer

Revenues

and Margins

Life Before Zettata

Hiring

● Hunger

● Attitude

● Date if

possible

Measure Measure Measure

• Have a Hypothesis

• Create a metric to determine if hypothesis is

correct

• Build a solution that can be measured

• Iterate

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it - Lord

Kelvin

Perfect is The Enemy of Good

Correctly read:

●Build MVP

●Fail fast

Initial Stage

Growth Stage

● Hire and delegate

● Else don’t see forest for trees

Habits (Processes) Build Sustainable Success

● Culture

● Communicationo With customerso With employees

● Accountability

● Processes

Culture

● Foosball tables + massages

not culture!

● Transparent

● Flat

● Ok to make mistakes

● Respect

● Accountability

● High bar for excellence

Setting Expectations and Accountability

● Set appropriate expectations with customers

● Set appropriate expectations

with employees and hold everyone

accountable (including yourself).