Karan Bajaj's Blog

I was pulled to the Camino De Santiago, the 800-kilometer walking pilgrimage from the Pyrenees mountains in France to the town of Santiago De Compostela in Spain, the moment I’d first heard of it in 2011. A seventy-year-old French artist was making a presentation about his Camino pilgrimage in the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Arts in New York one night. His face lit up as he talked about the physical hardship of the journey, the hospitality of the churches who opened their doors to pilgrims each ni...

Do you want to startup in 2022 but don’t have an idea yet? This simple 3- Step framework helped me generate multiple start-up ideas and select one in my generation/ evaluation phase. I hope it’s equally useful for you to generate new ideas from scratch and pick THE ONE that’ll impact millions in 2022!

First off, here are the startup ideas I considered and evaluated deeply before zeroing in on WhiteHat Jr:

How do you determine a founder’s salary at a startup, especially if you’re a mid-career founder who’s likely at 10x typical early-stage startup market salary?

I took a 90% cut from my corporate salary after WhiteHat Jr was funded, an amount my investors and I agreed with.

How did we determine the number?

Here I’ll share some principles to arrive at a startup founder/founding team’s salary, which I hope is useful for would-be founders to plan their personal financial lives and go full throttle at...

I wasn’t satisfied with the WhiteHat Jr Seed Fundraising Pitch Deck. We were following conventional wisdom, starting with the market opportunity, TAM, SAM etc. But StartUps follow a Power Law.

10% of StartUps will deliver 80%+ of a fund’s returns.
Does your deck immediately demonstrate that you’ll be in the 10%?
A top Venture Capitalist(VC) accepts 1 among 150 pitches made to them¹.
Can you be The One?
Fortunately, I learnt how to write better pitch decks in subsequent funding rounds. Here I sh...

I was fortunate to have strong leaders from late-stage startups and established corporations join us early in WhiteHat Jr. They built the company to scale. Are you thinking of building your own startup/joining a very early stage startup?

Your decision can change the destiny of thousands!

And yours too.

Here are 3 mental models to help you decide whether you should startup or continue in your job, which I used in my own deliberations-hope they’re of some use to budding entrepreneurs:

3 questions ...

How much time does it take to go from idea to startup? When to scale 10x? What is the best time to raise funding?

I couldn’t get practical answers to these questions while starting WhiteHat Jr.

So here I put together a step-by-step 24 month timeline from setting up to scaling a startup, based on one journey. Your actual timings will vary, of course, but the phases below should be a good indicator of a startup trajectory. I hope these are useful for you to go from idea to a full-fledged company.

Do you have a big idea for a startup but no co-founder?

You should go for it!

Get to the market fast versus hunting for the perfect co-founder.

I was told that you needed a co-founder to get Venture Capital funding when I started. But the reality is more nuanced. Here I share some lessons learnt on how to startup without a co-founder if you don’t have one:

First off, why do investors typically insist on co-founders?

Startups are hard. A VC from a Russian fund told me once that they never invest ...

I didn’t think I’d amount to much after Business School.

The advice I received then–”focus on your core competence”, “your network is your net worth” etc. — all made sense.

But none of it spoke to me. I was a wanderer at heart, most engaged when I was learning new things, and didn’t feel pulled to settle anywhere.

Fortunately, I’ve learnt since there’s space for both kinds in the world. The specialists and the wanderers. The vertical experts and the horizontal dot-connectors. So if you’re pulled...

WhiteHat Jr grew 100x within 9 months, doubling almost every month in this period.

How do you scale systems fast enough to meet user growth?

Here are three tools that worked, including mistakes made (plenty!), which I hope will be of use to startups and businesses on fast trajectories.

I found almost no playbook to learn from during our condensed hyper-scaling phase, so if you have better ideas/tools, kindly let me know in the comments. I will update this post for everyone’s use:

 1. Your Manage...

One great early-stage hire can make a startup. WhiteHat Jr’s destiny would be completely different if I had a different CTO or the wrong first curriculum hires. A-players hire A-players, B-players hire B-players, and so forth, and a StartUp can’t afford a single B-Team in the early stages.

How do you build an A-Team from scratch in a startup?

Here I share some frameworks, including mistakes made, which I hope are useful for early-stage founders with big ambitions but limited resources to attract...