Letter from Investors to Startup Founders:
The Discipline of Time
Dear Founder,
Subject: Please don’t treat time like free Wi-Fi — unlimited and always available. It’s the only thing we can’t reinvest in.
We’ve seen it too often. Founders think their biggest scarcity is cash. Wrong. Cash can be raised again. Time? Never. Every mango season missed, every sowing cycle skipped, every Diwali launch delayed — gone forever. And we investors don’t cry because we lost money; we cry because we lost time we’ll never get back.
1. Time: The Only Non-Refundable Currency
Remember Keventers, the milkshake brand? They hit college campuses right before the “Instagram café wave” exploded. Timing was everything. Now imagine if they’d wasted a year perfecting their logo. No milkshake, no fame.
Lesson? Founders obsess over “burn rate of money.” But the real burn rate is time. Show us what you did in the last 12 months, and don’t tell us about your TEDx talk.
2. The Time-Wasting Traps
We’ve watched hundreds fall here:
• Endless Pilots: A Delhi-based organic veggie startup ran four years of “trials.” By the time they found their model, Big Basket had eaten the market and burped.
• Policy Daydreams: A dairy-tech team in Pune waited two years for subsidy approvals on cold chains. Their smarter competitor just leased existing storage and captured Maharashtra.
• Copy-Paste Models: Remember when “10-minute grocery delivery” was the rage? One team tried it in rural UP. They lasted 18 months. Villagers don’t want Zepto, they want dukaan credit.
• Premature Scaling: A millet snacks startup opened offices in five metros before Bengaluru repeat sales even stabilized. Logistics drained them faster than their salty namkeens.
Message? Don’t confuse “motion” with “progress.” Your treadmill at the gym proves that.
3. The 80/20 of a Founder’s Time
Dear Founder, we don’t care how colorful your Google Calendar looks. We care where your hours go.
• Own Yourself: Your vision, your first 50 customers, your first 10 hires. Nobody else can do this.
• Delegate or Automate: Payroll, compliance filings, social posts — give it to software or interns.
• Eliminate: Vanity conferences. If you’re on stage every week, who’s actually in the office?
One Bangalore SaaS founder admitted he spent 40% of his time chasing LinkedIn awards. Today, his company is a ghost page with great photos.
4. Seasonality & Value Chain Windows
This is where agri-startups get massacred. Crops and consumers don’t wait.
• Miss the wheat sowing window? Wait another year.
• Launch a laddoo brand after Diwali? You’re the uncle who arrives at weddings when baraat has left.
• Cold storage not ready before harvest? The produce rots and so does investor trust.
Think of it like IPL auctions. If you miss your slot, no matter how good you are, nobody’s bidding.
5. Speed vs. Perfection Dilemma
We get it, you want everything to be perfect. But ask Zomato. They started with ugly websites and red scooters. Customers didn’t care — they cared about food arriving hot.
Launch ugly, test fast. But be slow in locking. That cheap procurement contract may look fast today, but it can strangle you for years.
Mantra: Be fast to test, slow to commit.
6. Time Audits & Rituals
If you do financial audits, why not time audits?
• Weekly: Ask, “Where did we waste time?”
• Monthly: Track milestone slippages — not just rupees burnt, but weeks burnt.
• Yearly: Ask, “What could we have done with the six months wasted chasing that MoU?”
One agri-drone startup we met spent 18 months chasing a fancy MOU with a state government. Zero sales. Their competitor simply knocked on farmer doors, rented drones, and is now profitable.
7. Founder Energy = Startup Time
Your stamina is our calendar. Burnout delays decisions. Distraction multiplies mistakes. If you collapse, so does the startup.
Remember Ritesh Agarwal? Love him or hate him, the guy’s energy is OYO’s biggest fuel. We’re not saying be Ritesh, but don’t be the founder who sleeps through harvest season.
Sleep, gym, meditation — these aren’t luxuries. They’re time multipliers.
8. The Golden Windows
• First 90 Days: Validate and get a paying customer. Not your mom.
• First Year: Show repeatability. Still “experimenting wildly” after 12 months? You’re drifting.
• First 3 Years: Build defensibility — supply chains, brand, trust. Miss this, and you’re another “startup graveyard” slide in our pitch decks.
Ask Paper Boat. They cracked festivals with ethnic drinks and owned nostalgia. They didn’t wait three years “to refine.” They grabbed their window and never looked back.
Closing Thought
Founder, time isn’t your backdrop — it’s your main stage. Don’t waste it on vanity pilots, waiting for babus, or chasing empty applause. Every hour not tied to customers or core product is like pouring water into desert sand.
Bring us your messy, imperfect, half-built truth on time — and we’ll bring our money, our networks, and yes, our sleepless nights. Miss your window, and no funding round can rewind the clock.
With love and many scars,
The Investor Community
Who’ve lost millions, but what really hurt was the wasted years.
