Ashish Kothari tells entrepreneurs why hitting growth targets can still feel empty. After raising capital, founders chase metrics and spiral when quarters go bad. He says to remember your original why, reframe setbacks as learning like Edison did, and value the journey itself.
Chapters
Starting a business is hard. Starting a business has, involves a lot of risk. Starting a business involves lots of hard work. So people don't do it just to make money. There's lots easier ways to make money and to have a comfortable life. But along the way, as they raise capital, as they start chasing growth, all of a sudden it becomes about numbers and we lose track of what was the why that we started this with. And so when a quarter is not that good, we go into doldrums, we go into despair versus connecting back to the why where we started with where we had nothing. So, you know, even if you have a million in revenue, you have 300,000, you have hundred million, you have 300 million. Whatever the point you've reached with your business, and you've had it down here, remember when you started, you had nothing, just the why. And so you are more than that. And even if you're still at zero, you have all of the experiences. Edison's favorite saying, what kept him going to the bulb? He said, I didn't fail thousand times, I just found thousand ways it didn't work. So even if the numbers are not showing it, you have grown, you have those experiences, you've changed along the way.
