B2B SaaS Founder Newsletter: Startup Risk, Early Decisions & Building with Trust | Factors.ai

Hi,

I’m Srikrishna, co-founder and CEO at Factors.ai.

This is the first note I’m sending out here, and I thought the best place to start would be a story from the early days of the company.

So let me take you back to early 2020.

At the time, Praveen, Aravind, and I were working at InMobi. One day, we walked into a meeting with the founders.. Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Piyush Shah, Amit Gupta, and Mohit Saxena.. and told them we wanted to start something of our own.

We were still their employees, and so, we obviously expected the usual.. a handshake, a ‘good luck,’ and maybe a conversation about transition timelines.

Instead, they said, “Don’t resign yet. Take our office space. Start building. Get a term sheet first. Then we’ll talk.” And that’s what we did.

For the next few months, we worked out of the InMobi office while building what would eventually become Factors. We were building a company that would eventually operate in the same market they did, and they still opened the doors fully.

When it came time to raise our seed round, they invested. Naveen personally introduced us to VCs and even showed up on a Sunday to help negotiate term sheets.

But the bit that stayed with me the most wasn’t all of this.. (surprising.. I know). It was what they said to us:
“If things fall apart for whatever reason, you have a seat back here.”

That ONE line changed how we approached the company's early days.

Starting a company always involves risk.. every decision feels heavy, and every setback feels like it might be the one that ends the whole experiment.

But when you know the floor won’t disappear beneath you, you move faster and walk away from the deal that doesn’t feel right instead of clinging to it.. you make decisions with a little more clarity.

Risk changes shape when someone you trust is standing behind you.

Five years into building Factors, I still think about that moment often, especially when I meet first-time founders working through their early days…

Those who struggle the most tend to make every decision from a place of scarcity.. every move feels existential because there’s no one standing behind them.. and I wouldn’t blame them..

But for founders who move faster, they usually have something different. At some point, someone they trust told them: “If this doesn’t work out, you still have a seat here.”

And in the early days of a startup, that kind of safety net can change everything.

A question I’ve been thinking about

If you were starting a company today, who is the one person you’d want in the room with you?

The person you trust to still be there when things break.

While you sit with that thought, I’m going to write down an idea for my next newsletter to you.. it’s going to be about building a company with friends.. so, stay tuned.

‍

-Sri
Co-founder & CEO, Factors.ai