Ashneer Grover founded one of the fastest growing Fintech companies in India and the only startup which has a banking licence in the country. This book is a play-by-play account of his journey from being a banker to an entrepreneur and then an ex-employee of the very company he co-founded. Following are the 10 learnings from his journey  that he has shared in his book:

10 Learnings of an estranged Founder

You must have an urge to achieve within yourself. You must aspire to be more than you are. Aspire to have more than you have. Aspire to be higher than where you are. Do not settle in your comfort zone.

Have  Fire in Your Belly

In order to substantially improve your lifestyle you must forego the lure of a "regular income" that your salaried job offers. As a businessman you must have the appetite and patience to not expect a monthly paycheck instead you have to know that you may make a windfall earning that is far beyond the imagination of salaried employees.

A Job Cannot Make You Rich

From childhood, we're taught to make friends with people from our own strata. While this offers a certain level of mental security to the child it erases the possibility of the child to see what all has been and can be achieved in this world. The next time someone who is financially well-to-do you invites you to their home, definitely go and quietly observe their possessions and ways of life. This will help you to set your aspirations - maybe even get the aforementioned fire burning in your belly!

Spend Time with People of Higher Status than You

As a founder, you have to be able to delegate work to people in order to clear up your bandwidth and focus on the bigger picture. You cannot be a one-man army. While self-reliance is a good thing in the beginning, as the snowball gets rolling it becomes difficult to wear all the hats and you must get in the right teams to handle parts of your business for you.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

The whole world is connected. To think what can be achieved by interacting with someone at that point in time is shortsighted thinking. Share your story with as many people as you can from a peon to a CEO or even a regulator. Remember that Collaboration is the cornerstone of Human progress. Transactional Relationships don't go very far.

Don't be Transactional

Everybody other than you (value provider) and your customer (value consumer) are secondary characters who come between the two of you. Every one of them - your co-founder, employees, investors, 3rd party vendors, competition - will come at a cost to you before you have even earned a thing. Before you start a business ask yourself:<ol><li>Am I okay carrying them along?</li><li>Am I ready for them to take a piece? Am I excited enough by what's left after they take their pieces?</li><li>Am I okay with the uncertainty introduced by adding these people to the mix?</li></ol>

As a Founder, the Game is between You and Your Customer

In a regular business, the founder's KPI is their business' profit but in the modern VC money-infused businesses, the KPI seems to have changed to the business valuation. In the bid to chase a higher valuation 2 critical mistakes are made:<ol><li>Thinking that the investor is above you in the food chain</li><li>Lose sight of the fact that the Story is between you and the customer</li></ol>

The Investor is Neither Above You Nor are they a Validation

While the Western investors may "suggest" for you to not have family members on the board, you must keep as many close ones on the board as possible. Most of the profitable businesses in India are run by families.Loyalty is not needed in good times but tested in bad times. Expecting Loyalty from your employees or investors is setting yourself up for heartbreak. After all, people are driven by their self-interest (and paychecks). In bad times, only your family stands by you.

Give Your Family a Seat at the Board

Put yourself first, always. Liquidate your stock at every secondary sale opportunity. Cash in the bank will only make you bolder. Don't wait for higher valuations in future rounds. As a thumb rule, 80% of all secondary sale proceeds should go to the founders; the balance can be allocated to the ESOP pool or angel investors. Make sure all secondary sales happen only through you. Don't offer employees liquidity greater than a year's salary or 50% of their vested stock, whichever is lower.Ask investors for more shares when you deliver a milestone beyond their expectations to cover your dilution.

Don't be a Martyr to Your Own Cause: Become Liquid ASAP

Beware of professions such as drug peddling, banking, journalism and law. These professionals and professions can give you false comfort and may even numb you momentarily.However, if you spend a lot of time on them, they may end of up destroying you. They suck all value from you and offer next to nothing in return.

Beware of Certain Professions

Ashneer's story is the story of countless entrepreneurs who have been bullied and ousted of the company they founded by their partners and investors because of lack of sense of dealing with office politics. These ideas are helpful for those jumping into the world of starting a business.

This is the unfettered story of Ashneer Grover-the favourite and misunderstood poster boy of Start-up India. Raw, gut-wrenching in its honesty and completely from the heart, this is storytelling at its finest. A young boy with a 'refugee' tag growing up in Delhi's Malviya Nagar outpaces his circumstances by becoming a rank-holder at the pinnacle of academic excellence in India-IIT Delhi. He goes on to do an MBA from the hallowed halls of IIM Ahmedabad, builds a career as an investment banker at Kotak Investment Banking and AmEx, and is pivotal in the making of two unicorns-Grofers, as CFO, and BharatPe, as co-founder. As a judge on the popular TV show Shark Tank India, Ashneer becomes a household name even as his life turns upside down. Controversy, media spotlight, garrulous social media chatter descend, making it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

books

Books

This is the unfettered story of Ashneer Grover-the favourite and misunderstood poster boy of Start-up India. Raw, gut-wrenching in its honesty and completely from the heart, this is storytelling at its finest. A young boy with a 'refugee' tag growing up in Delhi's Malviya Nagar outpaces his circumstances by becoming a rank-holder at the pinnacle of academic excellence in India-IIT Delhi. He goes on to do an MBA from the hallowed halls of IIM Ahmedabad, builds a career as an investment banker at Kotak Investment Banking and AmEx, and is pivotal in the making of two unicorns-Grofers, as CFO, and BharatPe, as co-founder. As a judge on the popular TV show Shark Tank India, Ashneer becomes a household name even as his life turns upside down. Controversy, media spotlight, garrulous social media chatter descend, making it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

Ashneer Grover

Doglapan

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Authenticity means the quality of being genuine and true (as per the Oxford Dictionary)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">You’re an authentic person if you know what you’re comfortable with, what you’re not comfortable with and you’re willing to take a stand for yourself and your beliefs.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">As and when you keep reaching outside your boundaries of comfort, your likes and dislikes keep changing and you get a deeper understanding of what you want / don’t want in your life.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Just be honest with yourself about your comfort zone and keep pushing it’s boundaries to achieve your desires.</li></ul>

Authenticity 

If you use hardness to resist force then both sides will break. Meet hardness with softness, so incoming force exhausts itself.

Someone can fall in love with you and then just as easily fall out of love. You can fall in love with someone and then fall out of love just as easily too. You can still care for someone whom you’re not in love with anymore. You can still love certain aspects about a person but not be in love with them.

About Love 

While it is easier to just hate the person for falling out of love with you it is much more stronger of you to be okay with it and move on. Your life shouldn’t stop or change its course just because one person decided to not play the role that you (alone or with your partner) had, at one point, thought both of you would play in your lives.

It’s Easier To Hate The One Who Falls Out Of Love

You should be your own sun but that doesn’t mean that you have to be extremely independent and build walls around yourself. You can find love in the most unusual places and people but you have to keep yourself open to the possibilities for that to happen.

Be Your Own Sun 

How do you know you’re being authentic, being your true self? This book helps you understand authenticity through the actions of various characters from different walks of life and their individual perspectives

Six strangers with one thing in common: their lives aren't always what they make them out to be. What would happen if they told the truth instead? Julian Jessop is tired of hiding the deep loneliness he feels. So he begins The Authenticity Project - a small green notebook containing the truth about his life. Leaving the notebook on a table in his friendly neighbourhood café, Julian never expects Monica, the owner, to track him down after finding it. Or that she'll be inspired to write down her own story. Little do they realize that such small acts of honesty hold the power to impact all those who discover the notebook and change their lives completely.

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

Six strangers with one thing in common- their lives aren't always what they make them out to be. What would happen if they told the truth instead? Julian Jessop is tired of hiding the deep loneliness he feels. So he begins The Authenticity Project - a small green notebook containing the truth about his life. Leaving the notebook on a table in his friendly neighbourhood cafe, Julian never expects Monica, the owner, to track him down after finding it. Or that she'll be inspired to write down her own story. Little do they realize that such small acts of honesty hold the power to impact all those who discover the notebook and change their lives completely.

Clare Pooley

The Authenticity Project

One's character is the complete sum of their thoughts.Every act of a person springs from their thought. Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits.You are the master of thought and hence the master of your fate.Thought and character are one.

Thought And Character

The outer world of circumstances shadows itself to the inner world of thought.Both pleasant and unpleasant external conditions are factors which make for the ultimate good of the individual. One doesn't attract that which they want but that which they are.All your past experiences, good and bad, were the equitable result of your evolving, yet unevolved self.One must stop complaining about their problems and start introspecting as to what caused them.You cannot choose your circumstances directly but you can choose your thoughts and indirectly shape your circumstances

Thought And Circumstances

Circumstance does not make the man, it reveals him to himself.

Until thought is liked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.One must align their thoughts fearlessly with their purpose.After conceiving of your purpose, you must mentally mark out a straight pathway to its achievement, ignoring all doubts and fears.

Thought And Purpose

He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.People don't see the long and hard journey but only the pleasant goal and call it "luck"They don't understand the process but only perceive the results and call it "chance"

Dreams Beget Realities

The calmer a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence and his power for good.Self control is strength.Right Thought is mastery.Calmness is power.

Serenity

Reproduction of the original: As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

THIS little self-help volume (the result of meditation and experience) is not intended as an exhaustive treatise on the much-written-upon subject of the power of thought. It is suggestive rather than explanatory, its object being to stimulate men and women to the discovery and perception of the truth that-- "They themselves are makers of themselves." By virtue of the thoughts, which they choose and encourage; that mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as they may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now weave in enlightenment and happiness.

James Allen is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. James Allen has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. James Allen's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Doglapan

The Authenticity Project

As a Man Thinketh

Shaminder Pal Singh