Founder Letter #4: The Most Overrated Conversation in Startups
What a room full of 350 founders reminded me about capital, validation and the real work of building a business.
Dear Founder Self,
I was at the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women event last week. There were 350 women entrepreneurs who had gone through a rigorous three-month programme from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow. These are among the top educational institutions anyone could want an initiation into startups. It is almost like being baptised by fire.
The entire event had amazing energy. Women building across different sectors, at different stages of their startup journey, all brought together by a common desire to create something meaningful.
The event, in some way, shifted something for me. I realised how overrated funding conversations have become.
Is capital the enabler or the goal?
Capital is important. It plays a critical role in helping businesses stay competitive, scale when the market is ready, and experiment to find the right fit. Do not get me wrong. I understand that well, and I have seen the impact of what we have built at LetsVenture.
What is probably misplaced is how overrated it has become.
I have always maintained that capital is an enabler to the goal and not the goal itself. It is true about money too. If money becomes an enabler and helps create wider impact, it can become one of the most powerful instruments available to us.
Sadly, the narrative we have all created is around who has raised, from whom they have raised and how much. It has become a barometer of success.
Sitting in that room, I also knew one truth. Many founders struggle when fundraising becomes the goal itself. What if we acknowledged that building a good business is more valuable than fundraising? What if customer love mattered more than investor interest? What if we spent as much time celebrating sustainable businesses as we did for funding announcements?
Having been in the space, I know that fundraising comes with its own nuanced challenges. Sometimes, after raising capital, founders find themselves building for investors rather than building for the market.
Giving space for Founder conversations
One thing I have learnt as both a founder and investor, is that the best gift you can give founders is respect and attention when they present their pitch. I have always maintained with my team, and in my conversations, that founders deserve support because they are the ones facing the challenges of building every day.
It is easy to give advice. It is easy to offer perspectives without understanding the nuance of building. That is also why operators often make better investors. They are able to empathise with the journey because they have lived it themselves.
My own journey at LetsVenture
When I founded LetsVenture, I had a meeting with the CEO of a large bank in Mumbai, who was part of an angel network. The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Fifteen of those minutes were spent with him explaining to me why building an online marketplace for fundraising was a bad idea. The discussion was patronising all along the way, with complete disregard to my past experience and my own homework done before I launched the platform.
I was amused more than anything else. Perhaps because I grew up learning that being kind is sometimes more important than being right. That respecting ambition matters. That each one of us is on our own journey in life.
That does not mean I do not give feedback to founders. I do. But I try to do it respectfully, while letting them know that I am available if they need a sounding board.
That meeting has stayed with me as a reminder not to judge outcomes of things we may not fully understand.
I need validation. Is that really important?
The other reflection I had at the event was around validation.
As women founders, we often speak openly about self-doubt, about wondering whether we belong in certain rooms, about constantly proving ourselves and seeking validation.
Yet after one event, a male founder came up to me and said something interesting.
“Everything you say women founders face, I face too.”
And perhaps he was right. Maybe validation is not a women founder challenge. Maybe it is a founder challenge.
Some founders seek it through fundraising. Some through visibility. Some through networking. Some through being constantly busy.
The forms may differ, but the need is often the same.
Am I doing enough? Am I succeeding? Am I falling behind?
I have been fortunate to have an inner circle that is kind, generous and genuinely supportive of the work I do. Over the years, I have learnt to rely more on that than on external validation.
You will realise soon that no one has all the answers. Looking for constant validation often feels like giving away control to someone who is not you.
An important reminder here is that this journey is about resilience. Real resilience is becoming self-aware enough to stop measuring your worth every few weeks against someone else’s journey. It is learning to stay anchored while the world rewards noise.
Perhaps that is also why I no longer romanticise networking the way the startup ecosystem often does. I genuinely do not believe every room is important. I do not believe every dinner matters. I do not think relationships built entirely around utility sustain for very long.
Relationships that endure are built on meaningful conversations, generosity and trust, not on building a rolodex. That is my personal point of view. This may not represent others, but do I need validation again? :)
As I sat in that room with 350 founders, I found myself thinking about something very simple. Ten years from now, very few people will remember who raised what round. Very few people will remember the valuation. What they will remember are the businesses that solved real problems, created value and stayed the course.
I really wish we talked about that more often.
I wish we talked more about the beauty of entrepreneurship itself. About learning, fighting, adapting and staying in the game. And if things do not work out, that is okay too.
Because in the end, it is truly about the journey. Always.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Shanti
