Ritik Malhotra shares insights from his experience with two prior company exits (Box and Brex) and discusses M&A strategy.
Ritik Malhotra shares insights from his experience with two prior company exits (Box and Brex) and discusses M&A strategy, including how to build a multibillion-dollar business and the smart timing for M&A versus funding for a startup.
Because I mean, I think that uh once you have that exposure and and and understanding of the ins and outs and the psychology, the methodology, how systematic or how to run effectively a process of raising capital, I guess what were your biggest takeaways that you knew that you were going to be implementing on down the line? I think the the biggest takeaway there based on the the this was exactly what you said. It's the having a process is actually one of the most important pieces and and not being swayed away by just a a string of no's and and uh using each meeting and no to understand is there anything take away a takeaway that you can implement for the next meeting, right? Uh going forward, I think the the that learning applied to many other situations where when you're building a new product after you raised money, uh that was also a set of trials that you have to do and uh you know,
we would make something, we'd put it in front of uh users and it would be this very minimal thing and ultimately we didn't get the feedback that we were hoping to get. And so we'd go back to the drawing board, iterate on it based on the feedback we got. So very simple process, right? You're hearing no a ton of times, but effectively what you're doing with the no's and getting the in that feedback is actually the most important part of that system. And so I'm glad that we had to go through the fundraising process because that is a much cheaper place to go through the process because if we didn't do that, then we wouldn't get have gotten good at developing the product, which eventually got to strong product market fit and then resulted in that acquisition by Box.