What is Essential When Building a Startup? Covid-19 Just Showed Me
By: Suman Kanuganti
Tags: Startup, Slack, Zoom, Venture Capital, Covid-19

February 2020 was the first official month for my new startup. This was my second time starting a company, and I would describe my energy levels for this next journey on par with lava. It felt like I was on fire with ambition. With my vision in place, I started the process of bootstrapping with a small F&F round, and began working with the great team at Daversa Partners. My first mission was finding a technical co-founder and in the process met some amazing talent from many of the FAANG tech giants. The discussions with these great minds were more fuel to my fire and then suddenly Covid strikes.

It’s now March and in dismay, I called up a few startup CEOs friends to check in on what they were seeing and doing. Most were trying to figure out the impact and implementation of “Work from home”, “Family first”, “Moving into a virtual world”, “Manage cash” and so on. Conversations with some venture friends were similar as many VCs shifted their focus away from looking at new deals and back towards their existing portfolio companies. The takeaways from these discussions were clear:

Protect, Survive and Run lean with whatever you have.

Covid 19 — My First Wall

With my first startup, I quickly learned that resilience was everything and startups are a series of walls that need to be knocked down. A good entrepreneur may go over the wall, around the wall and sometimes through the wall but never quits until they are past that hurdle. With Covid, I had to go through it, survive and just build - so I continued my search for my co-founder.

Finding a co-founder via Zoom interviews quickly became the new normal, and I was fortunate to find a talented partner. All three of her past startups were acquired and she is a leading NLP expert. While we knew of each other before, this would be our first chance to build something together directly. We did a virtual high-five handshake on March 9th and we embarked on this journey.

We quickly assembled a small, yet mighty, team and after 72 hours with little sleep, we landed on a plan. Then the market crashed.

My Second Wall — The Market Crashes

On Monday, March 16th, the stock market crashed by 25%. I watched as the VC Twitter waffled around who was still writing checks. The plan we sketched out would need funds so I returned to my F&F to give us an additional 3 months of runway. This crisis was either going to make or break my new relationship with my co-founder (who I had only ever met in person just once).

We had to go all in and do it now — build a team, build a product, and build a trusting relationship with each all while in the middle of a pandemic. That’s what we decided to do.

Move forward and build.

Once secured, the team shifted our thinking from what can we build to what can we build now? Just like that, our first product, Code 19, was born.

So now it’s the end of March, and I saw former co-workers, friends and industry leaders across the nation were letting go of their teams, and some of them furloughed or laid-off themselves. Top talent was flooding the market — and these individuals were panicked and weary — yet fresh. Rather than wait for the “dust to settle”, or seed money to come in and recruit later — we decided to pivot.

Our budding relationship as co-founders spun quicker and began blooming during the crisis.

We agreed, let’s go build our core team, and let’s build our product 1.0 to ship in 6 weeks. We scoped out a version of our product to solve a few specific use cases that got accelerated due to Covid-19 and scoped out a foundation technology architecture. We paused fundraising efforts and decided to go strong when the market recovers. So who’s building it? We made phone calls, pitched and recruited those who fell in love with vision and ready to roll on sweat equity. Here’s a screenshot from the first team call:

Now heading into April we continued recruiting. In addition to finding top-tier engineers, we gained some key talent including a commercialization expert from Amazon and a computational linguist from Google.

For the first time in my career, I engaged some key hires without meeting in person, but managed to develop that trust over a Zoom high-five.

Some of the team is moonlighting, others are 24/7. Relationships are being built on Slack and Zoom. People found the continued humor in their slack profiles, sending “GIFs” and showed creativity with Zoom virtual backgrounds. Below is a screenshot of the increased slack activity.

Building a startup to building at home

In addition to building a company — like every parent and spouse reading this — my wife and I had to figure out a way to back up my family.

Explaining to a very active two-year-old why their school and activities with friends are being canceled, why handwashing is more important, and why their world is being turned upside down, wasn’t an easy task. I used all of my training as an engineer to build dynamic pillow forts in the living, an obstacle course, a growing addition to the culinary skills, a suitable bar (of course!), and my newly beloved homemade gym. Building schedules to balance family and work life has also become the new norm, for everyone — in my house, on my team, and obviously to every family out there.

Where are we now? Shattering Milestones.

So now it’s the end of May and in the past 10 weeks of a global shelter-in-place, we have successfully built a team, a kickass product, and are headed into the next phase for our company: customer discovery calls for the commercialization of our core product. All during lockdown. All done virtually.

My lava burns hotter than it did in February and I recently looked at some of the milestones I had planned for later this year:

What’s next?

We are building our “Road Show” for the summer - which in reality will be a “Zoom Show” as we look to find the right partners to join us on the journey.

My fears of not being able to truly get to know the VCs, if you are not meeting them in person, and my imperfection to be clear on calls, is starting to brew — but that’s what my team is for.

In looking back, Covid-19 introduced us all to many things and the word essential was used more than ever before. What was essential in my first startup that reflected now again during crisis is great people and the importance of their collective strength to execute on a big audacious dream.

We learn more, we make better choices and we continue to build better than ever before.

Suman Kanuganti

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