Founder's Grit by Gaper.io (2020)

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FOUNDER’S GRIT

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EDITOR’S NOTES As Gaper set out to share more of its knowledge reservoir through digital magazines, we did not anticipate that the nature of our content would adopt such a specific theme. Recent research, interviews with business founders, statistics and our own client experiences were tinged with discussions on pandemic-induced shocks. This edition captures and catalogues some of these dynamics. We hope that business founders, entrepreneurs, and others facing similar challenges glean some value from the very first edition of our digital magazine.

On Gaper’s Approach to Remote Work: Gaper has been a staunch believer of remote working methods ever since our company’s inception.

Some trials and errors had to be done at first, but we adapted to every challenge encountered and never let inflexibility disrupt our workflows. Regular evaluations and fine-tuning of our remote work processes took us to a stable realm where robust teams of devoted individuals are achieving new targets of productivity and efficiency regularly.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 6

FEATURE ARTICLE: AMOS SCHWARTZFARB – TECHSTARS’ INVESTING WIZARD

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A STATISTICAL INSIGHT INTO STARTUP FOUNDERS’ RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL PANDEMIC TECH-SAVVY TO SAVVY: REVOLUTIONIZING RENTAL MARKETS WITH CHOU HOYTT TRIO CHAT: WHY IS A LANDSCAPE OF REMOTE WORK TOOLS BETTER THAN ONE “SUPER-APP”

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GAPER ACADEMY – FILLING THE EMPLOYMENT GAP A GAME CHANGER FOR REMOTE TEAMS – NOTION FOR BUSINESSES

CONTRIBUTORS

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Sabeen Sadiq Emma William Sarah Harris Ayesha Irfan Hira Zahid

FEATURE ARTICLE

Amos Schwartzfarb Techstars’ Investing Wizard Amos Schwartzfarb will not sugarcoat things for anyone that just does not work in current times anymore, not least for start-ups and budding entrepreneurs. Being the Managing Director at Techstars Austin, a seed accelerator with a market capitalization of over $18 billion USD, Amos is a seasoned investor and a capable leader with an eye for entrepreneurial aptitude. Techstars undertakes a remarkably broad range of startups with diverse profiles and helps them flourish through access to relevant expertise and resources.

Amos is also the author of a comprehensive and straightforward guide for entrepreneurs whose businesses are still in the nascent stages titled Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Start-Ups. Talking with Gaper, Amos described this title as an “intentional misnomer”. This is because his sales strategy and advice is not characterised by fast-paced decision-making or the unsustainable steps taken by inexperienced entrepreneurs in their quest to generate some quick revenue. He believes in starting slower with a thoroughly disciplined and self-regulated attitude.

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The W3: Amos’ primary advice for business owners is to assimilate the three basic elements pertaining to their firm called the W3: ● Who are you selling to, ● What are they buying, ● Why are they buying?

Though evidently basic, answers to the W3 are very pertinent and relevant to the world order right now. A comprehensive, honest and rigid overview of these questions can unravel deep-seated issues and problems with a business that might have otherwise remained unaddressed.

Disruptions In The Accelerator Business Model?

What with a global pandemic and a slowdown in world economies, it is no secret that capital flow has greatly stagnated. Venture capitalists, seed accelerators and other investors have become more cautious and riskaverse and want their capital to be exposed only to the most reliable and secure assets and entities. Amos covers these points in the first two chapters of his book which are free to read on Amazon.

With everything going virtual and remote nowadays, accelerators and other investing platforms are also finding ways to conform to the “new normal”. New businesses are admittedly in an even worse pickle since a great portion of their revenue streams, marketing efforts, and work operations have been hampered by the pandemic. Amos believes that this places accelerators in an even more significant position in the startup arena than before.

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Amos does not shy away from acknowledging the harsh realities of the startup world.

Venture capitalists, to him, are not out there trying to build businesses up and helping them achieve sustainability in these constrained times. Their interests lie in preserving and securing capital. The common perception of VCs being the spearheads of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit may need to be put aside for the time being.

The Importance of Your Financial Model

To respond smartly to the consequent dearth of fresh capital, companies and owners need to be very efficient about their use of existing capital through strategies driven by available metrics and analysis. Not only that, Amos also firmly believes that it would be unwise to fall prey to wishful thinking and not plan for the next 12 to 24 months amidst slow business activity. Due to such circumstances, accelerators become even more pivotal in helping young businesses navigate their way through these unfamiliar, uncertain territories.

One advice Amos imparts for budding entrepreneurs is to build a usable and feasible financial model being mindful of your customers in the coming 12 to 24 months. Go through your model perpetually - every week, every month, every quarter‌ This approach also falls neatly in line with Gaper’s approach to doing business: being agile and flexible. Reevaluate, readjust and redesign your plans in accordance with where your company stands. No one can predict fickle dynamics of variables like customer tastes, technological developments or economic factors.

Indeed, no one saw a pandemic-induced worldwide shutdown coming!

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On Remote Teams And The Future Gaper has been a staunch proponent and successful implementer of remotely operated teams of professionals even before the global pandemic. We have observed that companies that hire remote software engineers are faring far better amidst the economic uncertainty as compared to firms who relied solely on office-based workflows. Amos has spent considerable time managing remote sales teams as part of his work, an experience which lead him to draw a few useful conclusions: - Get regular updates from your team. Just because they are not working in a communal office space, does not mean you don’t check in with them.

- Learn how each team member needs to be motivated and collaborated with.

Everyone is different and acknowledging this would make workflow smoother.

- Learn who needs to be micromanaged, and who doesn’t.

- Work with your team to gain a know-how on how your business is evolving and how its productivity needs to be measured in a meaningful manner. The same metrics may not be useful across different departments. Changing business environments can also determine how you gauge your success.

- Be patient with your team members.

Our chat with Amos made one thing clear: business owners need to be vigilant of the business environments they work in or will likely be affected by. They need to exercise a healthy amount of flexibility when taking their firms forward so that any unexpected challenge can be tackled head-on without the company faltering due to complacency or lack of readiness.

Being consistent in assessing the progress of your business is also essential. It is better to do it with your team so that owners’ biases are filtered out when there is a need to be stringent and critical. Regardless of the type of product or services you are endeavoring to deliver, this pandemic has caught everyone off-guard. Don’t become a case study for business failure due to unwary strategies and mismanaged teams.

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A STATISTICAL INSIGHT INTO STARTUP FOUNDERS’ RESPONSE TO A

GLOBAL PANDEMIC Gaper.io is on a mission to revolutionize the startup landscape.

From talking to hundreds of stakeholders, to consolidating data from all points, to bringing it in a simple format for our audience – we have built a stronghold for seekers to find information at their fingertips. We bring all the latest information on what is going on in the Tech World and beyond.

audience to provide a snippet of all the conversations we’ve had so far. Owing to COVID, our questions were bound to elicit answers on how to navigate through this pandemic. A snapshot on hiring decisions, creativity lost or gained and even the future of office real estate. We held nothing back!

What is the top founder doing right now? What’s their bedside table read?

Tips and tricks on getting it right? Take it from someone who made it right!

Gaper publishes the first survey for its Founder’s Grit | Gaper.io

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So without further ado, let’s get on with the report.

Did you know that a whopping 60% startups stated that they would restructure their hiring process? Plenty of them are already on a lookout to outsource their HR responsibilities to companies who are more adept at taking up the headache of offshore hiring and compliance.

Only a meagre 14% said that they would not make any change in their hiring policies while 26% said they would freeze hiring for now.

The founders were next asked if creativity could be achieved over video conferencing.

Surprisingly 32% of the respondents said yes. Not far behind, 30% said maybe, and 20% said no. The remaining 18% said that it was too early to gauge the potential of achieving creativity online.

In our next question, Ukraine snags the top spot as the area for hiring offshore software engineers. At 43% it has a comfortable lead ahead of all its counterparts.

Brazil comes in at 29% while India and Pakistan trail at 16% and 12% respectively. It is prudent to note that although India seems to be a huge competitor and talent pool for the world to hire remote workers from, they did not manage to come on our respondents’ radar as a strong candidate. We have to wait and watch as to how things pan out in the coming months.

Our founders do not peg their bets on Airbnb, We, and Oyo to survive this pandemic wave. These top three unicorns have left their best days behind them.

An imperative question for a majority of our startup and VC founders is their insights on when they think VC funding would adapt and operate in the new normal. 9% are super positive that funding would come to rights in the last quarter of 2020. Well, we sure hope to see some normalcy this year – we wouldn’t mind a good turnabout for an extra trying year on all of us.

12% are a little more hesitant, but, just as hopeful and looking at the bright side, stating that they feel VC funding would come to rights in the 2nd quarter of 2021. 25% think we can start seeing some movement in the last quarter of the same year.

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54% of the respondents state that 2022 is the year when we will see higher capital injections into the economy. While this may not seem too far off into the future, for startups, this can prove to be disastrous. However, to sum everything up, all respondents do agree on one thing: VC Funding would never completely stop. There is a lot of money out there, it is just how risk taking or risk-averse any venture capital or investor is at this point in time.

While operating during this new normal, and how it accelerated Remote Work and Work from Home modes, we cannot deny the fact that it would and did considerably impact the real estate front. And 60% agree on one thing – they would be reducing their office real estate footprint while only 30% said they would maintain it. The rest of them stated that they already had a fully remote team, so office space did not impact them in the least.

In our bid to put forward the Top 3 favorites for most admired Startup Founders, it comes as no surprise that Elon Musk came on top with 21% voting for him. And why not, his efforts towards tech is no small feat and needs to be credited as such.

15% chose Melanie Perkins in their top 3 while 10% voted for Jack Dorsey.

Rounding off this survey we asked our interviewees to share their top reads on their nightstand. The books that stand out are i) Zero to One ii) The $100 Startup and iii) The Lean Startup.

So that’s all for now. Gaper.io shares its top 8 questions put forward to founders who shared their insights on the Future of Remote Employment and more.

These founders are working round the clock and ironically, a lot of them had previously said that the Future of Work is Remote. NO ONE and absolutely NO ONE would have thought of being forced to go remote, almost overnight.

No industry was spared and everyone was left scrambling to make sense of a situation that probably hits the world once every 100 years or so.

We need to then realize that we must future proof our company NOW. Those who were already working remotely were spared the very worst of this.

However, moving forward, there is no doubt that we need to start adapting what we learnt during this period. If anything, the promising unicorns not making it out of this alive, should be an eye-opening jerk to the startup world.

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Tech-Savvy To Savvy: Revolutionizing Rental Markets With Chou Hoytt

Chou Hoytt, co-founder of Savvy, found himself amidst the settling remnants of the 2008 global recession when he graduated from university in 2009. After another year of post-graduate studies, he took over his father’s real estate firm and reestablished it back into a stable and wellfunctioning business through implementing reformative strategies. One of his key roles was rebuilding the company’s core structures which were bedevilled by outdated and non-compliant organizational infrastructure.

In addition to this, he also led the firm through Founder’s Grit | Gaper.io

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addressing numerous environmental, litigious, and operational issues.

In 2017, now armed with an MBA and a five-year work experience from his father’s firm, Chou adopted the unconventional route of starting his own business rather than securing a high-paying job from amongst the many MNEs that were hiring.

His choice was in part motivated by his specific interest in the real estate and affordable housing. Entrepreneurship was Chou’s true calling.

The Importance Of ‘Finding A Need’ In The Market Far too many founders jump into the battleground of entrepreneurship. It is not sleek offices, smooth workflows, upward-sloping revenue graphs or any of the other glamorized elements of corporate culture. Starting a new company will very likely involve a struggle to put together a dedicated team, difficulties in ensuring capital efficiency, competing with fellow businesspersons in the sector and generally dealing with a whole lot of uncertainty. It is vital to ensure that you know your products or services do indeed have some kind of demand among the target customer base; and that this demand isn’t already being fulfilled by a more experienced competitor.

Digitizing Tenant Screening Savvy addresses a common problem faced by landlords when taking on tenants - tenant screening. In this example, credit scores don’t provide a reliable and accurate prediction of future payments. Savvy proposes an end-to-end screening solution that connects tenants’ bank accounts in order to verify past rent payments, income and cashflows. Their service provides managers with a comprehensive risk summary that can be used to make reasonable assumptions regarding tenancy decisions and prevent fraud.

This is why Chou and his co-founder Andrew, took an entire month solely to find a need in the market that Savvy was going to target. The process included interviewing close to 50 property managers, brokers, and real estate owners. These interactions lead Chou and Andrew to glean information on the unfilled gaps these agents faced in their workflows - in this case, it was tenant screening. The specific identification of their aim helped them secure funding from two venture capitalists.

Pinpointing a need in the market also helped Chou and his co-founder to narrow down their target market. They were not wasting resources on customers who were, well, not going to be their customers. Their services were marketed solely towards real estate operators.

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This process also creates ease for renters. Instead of submitting tax returns, bank statements, and official pay documents, they are only required to share their bank information through a secured online platform implemented

by Savvy. In addition, this system evens out the playing field for those renters who have no credit histories but reliable and stable sources of income and a history of timely rent payments.

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Responding To A Global Pandemic The current global pandemic has drastically brought down company valuations and funding that were previously in place. Investors and clients are increasingly adopting more conservative and risk-averse attitudes towards their money. Their goal afterall, is to secure their investments in entities whose present and futures are not riddled by uncertainties and low revenues.

Managing Remote Teams - The New Normal

Savvy was not too deep in the fundraising process to feel a substantial hit that COVID-19 unleashed on other startup entities. Where they do face a challenge is retaining the real estate operators who were about to deploy pilot stage implementations with Savvy. These pilots were planned as unconventionally accelerated phases but owing to the pandemic, had to be slowed back down.

Like Gaper, Savvy’s development team was also operating remotely prior to the pandemic. For them, this was already a normal mode of doing work. This in turn let the co-founders and their teams enjoy the merits of remote working. They were spared the transitional conundrums of figuring out the new work dynamics and continue to enjoy positive workflow throughout their business.

Secondly, Savvy’s main objective for now is to conserve the company’s cash, which is also made easier by the fact that it does not incur a lot of operating costs. Both founders take modest salaries and maintain an amiable financial relationship with the development team that they outsource some operations to.

Maintaining regular communication amongst team members is key when operating remotely.

There are plenty of tools made specifically for business interactions that make communications and work progress updates remarkably convenient. Savvy’s choice of work communication platforms are Slack and Notion, both deployed by Gaper teams as well!

Our chat with Chou gives a good insight on how level-headed and judicious decision making helps new businesses keep their place in competitive and uncertain environments. The ability to embrace unpleasant realities instead of resisting them through complacency and heedless steps may bring bustling business activities to a halt, but it will also help in keeping your boat afloat in harsh waters.

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Trio Chat

Why is a landscape of remotework tools better than one “super-app”

Skype revolutionized the whole video conferencing landscape for the general public and propelled businesses to be able to link with remote teams anywhere in the world.

Over the years, while Skype took the backseat, other platforms started cropping up all over. Zoom, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, all raced to keep adding the next best tool to their applications to make it more comprehensive and enhanced. Whether it was needed or not, it was created.

Every new update had users coming to terms with how to use it. Whether it was using a code to enter Zoom, or even the necessity to download the app in the first place to be able to use it. All these marginal shifts kept reducing its ease of use. Where sharing a Zoom link was all it took to jump on a call, it now takes a bit longer to connect with the person(s) at the other end.

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Likewise, WhatsApp is a more personal, than professional platform, to interact with your contacts. While it can be used on your desktop – it gets too noisy and screens personal conversations alongside any professional conversations you may have with your internal team. If by chance your computer is connected to a screen, well then, deleting chats would be the order of the day.

While both these tools are what one will say “Super-Apps”, are they really needed for internal communications?

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Internal communications, among team members, need to be seamless and noiseless.

With Trio Chat, Gaper is cutting out all the noise and trimming away all the unnecessary features that each of these Super-Apps have.

The chat would be embedded into workspaces, like Notion, which can then be used as any other chatting platform. Deftly connecting one with their peers and superiors it would enhance each user’s dexterity to communicate across time zones without a hitch.

No cumbersome codes.

No time taken to admit members into the chat.

No noisy alerts.

No showcasing of personal chats.

Getting on a call with team members 10 times a day should not include time wasted on the above.

Trio Chat is part of a landscape of remote-work tools, which is better than one “superapp”. It is all about team tango done in tandem.

A building block in a tower of blocks, Trio will disrupt internal conversations across the board.

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Gaper Academy Filling the employment gap

It’s safe to say that the world economy is shifting. No country stands unaffected by the effects of the Pandemic. The United States saw unemployment rates hit 14.7% in April of 2020 with some states affected more than others. Massachusetts stood at 17.4% and New York at 15.7% unemployment.

To make matters worse the suspension of the H1B1 has led to a major shortfall of resources, particularly tech resources. As the world moves towards a global economy, there is more need now to invest in building a workforce that is fully suited to the task.

Gaper Academy has been conducting training sessions as part of their initiative to build a more technologically empowered community. Software development is a skill that is increasingly in demand, expected to increase by 24% in the year 2024.

In the year 2018 alone, there were 1,365,500 software developer jobs in the US market, and the growth in the field is much faster than the average of other occupations. Computer software is an area that will see a tremendous amount of growth in the coming years.

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Software developers also enjoy much higher than average salaries. Data released by the bureau of statistics states that the average annual salary of a software developer is around $110,000.

So the question remains, what exactly is the role of Gaper in all this?

According to a report by Bureau of Labor statistics, 1.4 million positions will be vacant in the year 2021 with only 400,000 computer graduates. This means there will be a gaping shortage of 1 million programmers in the United States.

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Coding Bootcamp A fully immersive program

Gaper Academy wants to bridge this gap and un-tap the potential of prospective software developers by offering intensive training via coding bootcamps. The idea is to engage communities by partnering with different cities. These partnerships will also be augmented with scholarships for which $2 million have already been allocated.

Gaper Academy aims to graduate 2000 software developers in the next couple of years. With this, the aim is to fight unemployment and to fill the growing demand for developers simultaneously.

Gaper has a strong network and has been helping startups and businesses build technology solutions and therefore understands the dynamics of the work environment.

The course curriculum was designed and formulated keeping in mind the practical aspect of a software developer’s job requirements. The idea is to foster a passion for software development and to equip graduates with the skills needed to solve real-life problems.

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A Game Changer For Remote Teams

Notion For Businesses In our endeavors to streamline remote work to achieve the most efficient workflow possible, the Gaper teams have tried several work management and productivity platforms. And what with the global pandemic forcing everyone to operate remotely, we have a sudden surge of business founders and managers running around like headless chickens without any decent idea on how to continue normal workflow exclusively online.

What did we conclude? There are many well-developed work applications out there, some of which are malleable to a broad range of work needs, some that are designed for specific teams and operations. However, as the title indicates, we found a neat little solution in Notion - a simple, comprehensive platform that supports dynamic planning of business (and personal) activities.

The Interface - Clean and Crisp Notion is not overwhelming for the senses - a characteristic which we found to be key when using a new application. It features a minimal, uncluttered interface which it lets you populate to your own liking.

To put it concisely, Notion lets you create a workspace. Within this workspace, users can add team members. The workspace can then be populated by relevant pages that can contain schedules, ideas, meeting notes, to-do lists, links, tables, and many other elements that you may require to organize work related tasks. Of course these pages can in turn contain sub-pages. If this sounds too confusing, just know that it starts to get easier once you actually begin working on it. Notion is remarkably compatible with any level of tech-savviness.

Notion is also able to host all sorts of content completely eliminating the need for you to send separate emails or messages to your team members. If you need your supervisor to check a presentation you have created, you simply attach or embed the presentation in its respective page, mention your manager, add some comments to let them know what you have done and just carry on with your work. Your supervisor can then check your presentation and make any comments accordingly. It is almost like having a face-to-face discussion in an office without disrespecting pandemic-induced SOPs.

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A Virtual Office For Your Team Once your team assimilates itself to the more advanced features, Notion becomes a workplace of sorts, a virtual office if you like. We have already explained how it allows teams to conduct smooth communication, be it to discuss specifics of some task or share meeting notes.

But Notion becomes even more powerful when used to schedule and assign tasks to team members. For example, you have a page for your marketing team. This page can in turn have another page with a table of schedule for the month of August. Each day’s task is given its own row, which clearly states who the task is assigned to, its deadline, relevant notes, associated links, and/or other appropriate categories.

As your team builds a portfolio of work, they can continue to update Notion’s relevant pages with the appropriate tags and categories. This will contribute to building a reservoir of knowledge. A knowledge base that has articles, infographics, interviews, pictures, designs and any other content present at one location, all allocated neatly through proper links.

Create Dashboards!

Batman has a batcave, Justice League has a watchtower and the Teen Titans have their Titans Tower. Your business needs one too. Even Mojo Jojo has an observatory. The closest you can get to creating a digital platform that can act as a business surveillance observatory for you and your team members is a well-built dashboard on Notion. Dashboards, when structured and created in a comprehensive way, give users an allencompassing view of business operations. Depending on how they are made, they can catalogue the progress and status of all active and completed tasks, to-dos for the coming weeks and months for each member of the team, and a compilation of all the meeting notes or ideas that may have been collected over a certain period. This list was by no means exhaustive of the endless categories you can make according to your needs. You can be as creative and detailed in building your dashboards as you please.

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Reducing The Need To Micromanage Your team will be responsible for updating their respective tasks and roles once they are assigned. In a way, the dynamic interlinking features of Notion actually eliminates the hassle of micromanaging individual employees.

Once a task and its details are added to the platform, there really is no need to call or email every member separately. They will be notified when something is assigned to them along with all the notes, additional files and list of subtasks that they are supposed to handle. Any confusions can either be addressed through Notion mentions or if required, other means.

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Your Personal Life Map Notion is most certainly not a tool for businesses or teams. It is used extensively by individuals who have transformed it into a digital journal or a planner or a general platform to navigate their way through their personal affairs. This could involve creating daily, weekly, monthly or annual to-do lists, keeping a track of all your appointments, separating tasks by work, family, or personal tags, a pool of ideas that can be reconsidered later, a catalogue of recipes, meal plans and so many more purposes that will exhaust all the real estate on this magazine.

It is difficult to overstate the streamlined benefits that Notion brings to organizing personal, family, and professional lives. It is one of the few productivity solution among the many recent ones that satisfactorily delivers on the usability and usefulness front. Notion’s charm lies perhaps in the simplicity and consistency it champions so effortlessly. For users that otherwise distribute their work across various sharing platforms, communication applications and productivity solutions, and as a result face frustration in managing and reconciling elements across these different sources, Notion warrants a try.

This is specifically apt for the business owners and managers that are still struggling to adopt efficient means of remote work and are only met with more unwieldy, exasperating solutions. Notion will perhaps lead you and your team out of the befuddling confusion during these times.

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