Gagan biyani biography of christopher
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Minimum Viable Testing for Startup Founders with Gagan Biyani
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris 00:05: Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or invest ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
So, it is my honor and privilege to introduce our guest for today, Gagan Biyani. Gagan is absolutely one of the most thoughtful and incisive founders, but especially humans that I know. You guys are in for a total treat today. Gagan is a serial entrepreneur. Gagan previously co-founded Udemy and Sprig, and he was also one of the earliest employees at Lyft. Today Gagan is an investor and advisor to over thirty companies, so as far as startups go he's pretty much seen it all at this point. Most notably today, Gagan is the co-founder of Maven. Maven empowers experts to offer cohort-based courses directly to their audience, and I'm excited to pre-announce that Forcing Function is going to be h
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How Udemy’s First-Time Founder Not easy $1 Gazillion For His Startup
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Finding the next Facebook
Gathered here on that day were some of the most powerful venture capitalists in the valley: David Sze, Aneel Bhusri, Reid Hoffman and every other partner at Greylock. These are the guys who backed Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pandora, Dropbox, Airbnb — at a time when they were not much bigger than Sprig. For a striving founder of a startup, pitching your business plan here is a bit like being a rookie pitcher stepping onto the mound at Yankee Stadium — with Babe Ruth walking up to the plate.
Out of thousands of business plans Greylock sees each year, only 20 or so make it to a full partnership meeting. Of those, only half get funded. Biyani was determined to show that Sprig was worthy. But what Biyani got that day was an up-close look at how Greylock picks its bets.
Here’s one surprising lesson Biyani learned: If the partners start arguing about your pitch, you’re probably doing pretty well. That means they are intrigued enough to be grinding the details.
Of course, Biyani didn’t know this at the time, which made it particularly unnerving when Bhusri began drilling down into the fundamentals of his business plan. Biyani has wildly ambitious plans for Sprig: He wants it to be the Uber of food, delivering meals anywhere, anytime with the swipe o