Review: Prime Now

Yesterday, as I was getting ready for a dinner meeting, I realized that I had run out of body wash. 

As someone who lives in New York, running to the store around the corner is usually not an issue. However, being a lazy Sunday, I decided to not leave my apartment and give Prime Now a chance. 

My first impression: prices are reasonable, but how much would I end up paying for shipping?

Turns out, if you want your order delivered within one hour, you pay a flat rate of $7.99 for a $15.00 minimum order. If you want it anytime after 61 minutes, it is free. Yep, free!

Not only can you get bodywash delivered, Amazon boasts "over 25,000 items" via their app. And it seems to have just about everything that you would need within an hour:

• Household supplies
• Batteries
• Memory cards
• Hard drives
• Kindles
• Water

The variety is good, the prices are great and unlike Amazon Prime, you don't have to meet an order minimum on cheaper items. 

I think I've found my new lazy solution! 

On 2015

As another year rolls around, I look at the calendar, pack up my laptop, iPad and various accessories that have scattered around my apartment over the past 2 weeks. It feels like the end of a school vacation. 

The end of the year is always interesting. While a lot of people take time off, startup life doesn’t really stop. It keeps plugging away. Day after day, week after week and then suddenly, 3 years later, you look back to see what you’ve accomplished. 

Running PaLaCart has been my biggest privilege. We’ve gone through so many ups and downs and if I was in any other job - I would have quit to work at another company. 

PaLaCart has also been the longest job of my career. It has been greatly rewarding, extremely challenging and truly humbling. I couldn’t have done it without the support of friends and family. 

Over the past year, I’ve also joined Genome. It is a start-up incubator and service provider. While my involvement on the service side is just starting to ramp up, looking at startups from a critical eye and then from a compassionate heart is really interesting.

2015 is going to be the year of a lot of big decisions. No resolutions at this point, but time to get things moving. 

Onwards and upwards.

Shorter Weekends. Longer Workdays

I want weekends to be shorter. I want workdays to be longer.

As I've transitioned from a 9-5 job to building companies, I get excited about Monday mornings. I get excited about meetings. I get excited about doing things that in my previous life would have taken an act of God to accomplish. 

In the past 2 weeks, we've accomplished the following:

• Locked one of PaLaCart's bigger financing deals
• Landed one of the biggest meetings a retail startup could ever hope for and
• Closed on one of the most visible production deals 

These things, under any other circumstances, would have taken months. Setup the meeting, go through the pleasantries, explore potential options and then navigate the mountains of hierarchy to get to the final agreement. 

At startups and at senior executive levels, these things are natural. And that's what makes it really exciting when you're doing what you love with people that you genuinely care about. 

It's exciting. It's fun. It's thrilling. And for that, it makes worktime seem like playtime. And weekends like unemployment. 

Regardless of the outcome, I've realized that working on what you love is the absolute # 1 priority. Life is too short to work 9-5 or heck, even one second on stuff that doesn't matter to you. 

Armchair Advisors

PaLaCart is proudly based in New York. Its team, customers and investors are global and as such there are plenty of meetings in various parts of the world. 

During my travels, whether it is for fundraising or sales, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a lot of incredibly smart people - and all of them envious for a number of different reasons about “startup life.”

The reason I put startup life in quotes and add the word envious in the prior statement is because if you ask any entrepreneur, startup life for most outsiders is looked upon as:

1. Globe trotting
2. Flexible hours
3. Freedom

Where as, here is how a startup founder looks at those things:

1. Globe trotting: spending a considerable amount of time away from friends and family making sure you are closing deals so that you can run your next payroll.
2. Flexible hours: not because it’s false, but because flexible hours means working when the rest of the world is sleeping. And hustling when the rest of the world is working. 
3. Freedom: this one a misnomer. As a start-up founder, your freedom relies on 2 things - the ability to keeping going through hell or the calling it quits. 

Lately, with booming success of technology companies and multi-billion dollar exits, it is difficult to not look at this industry with rose colored glasses. Some days, being an entrepreneur is the best thing in the world. Other days, everything works against you. 

However, these successes have also generated armchair investors and advisors. People who have tons of feedback without the experience, knowledge or risk. 

Some of the feedback I’ve been hearing from the sidelines:

• Burn is too high
• Burn is too low
• Design is too forward
• Design is dated
• Technology is too easy to duplicate
• Technology is extremely powerful

And the issue isn’t about positive vs. negative feedback. It’s about feedback without context. 

A few weeks ago, I was seeking advice from people who have been in the tech start-up space. After scouring AngelList, I came across Joe Caruso. He spent nearly an hour with me on the phone - simply asking questions and clarifying items in our investment deck. And that feedback - despite being an hour long is incredibly valuable. Joe is a person who is experienced, knows the market and more importantly - gets to know you and your business. 

Positivity, feedback and criticism are all incredibly valuable for entrepreneurs. They thrive and survive on this information. 

These things define the future of a startup and hence why founders and entrepreneurs are hesitant in accepting feedback from someone they don’t trust - because unless you know the entire story, a decision based on incomplete background and experience will more likely than not, result in disaster. And worst of all - if you ask for a consulting fee and a retainer just to show up to a startup meeting, you will be ignored by any serious entrepreneur. 

Business is Personal: The Story of PaLaCart

“Starting a company is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.”

— Ron Conway

A few weeks ago, we launched PaLaCart to a small group of friends and family to test the product and get some feedback. 

Thankfully, these select group of people have been extremely patient and for that, as a start-up founder, I am grateful. 

The journey till this point has been an incredibly unique one - a story that captures talent, vision and determination. But more than anything - it is a human story. A story about founders, investors, advisors, engineers, marketers and a whole lot more. It's a story about how you realize a dream without giving up. 

A friend of mine sent me an email not too long ago and at the bottom of his email was the following quote. It's one that reminds me every single day - that entrepreneurship is more personal than any other job in the world. 

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

— Calvin Coolidge

The trade press largely focuses on stories that show a very one-sided view of startup life: venture capital funding, acquisition, growth, etc. 

But for every one of those companies - it doesn't show the level of effort it goes into building those companies. The good. The bad. The ugly. But more importantly, the personal. This story is about people that have helped build PaLaCart. And it's a story of those people that have always had our back - regardless of circumstance. 

The first investor in PaLaCart is my brother - a 22-year old at the time who wrote over a significant check. Our most recent investor is a friend of the family for nearly 2 decades. These investors don't necessarily invest in the idea, but more so than the people. 

And they're not unique. Yes, they're investing because they know us and trust us to do the right thing. That's why every VC fund has the same criteria - invest in the people, then the idea and finally the execution. 

Money aside, there are significantly more criteria to running a company - it requires dedication, passion and more importantly the need to succeed in order to actually succeed. 

PaLaCart - even prior to product launch - has gone through a significant amount of ups and a considerable amount of lows. When we started on the path to unify the shopping experience across the web, we didn't realize we needed specific licenses from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, etc. We didn't know that retailers don't have technical teams to integrate a set of complicated APIs to make this vision work. Yet, we worked through all of it and delivered. 

The first retailer on PaLaCart is a brand that has been around for a long time. They are highly visible in the community, they are experts and specialists in what they do. When we had some QA issues, instead of calling us out and asking us to not be a part of PaLaCart, they helped us diagnose a platform level issue. 

Convincing retailers to sign-on with PaLaCart is a unique challenge - it's a different way to shop and conduct transactions. Far easier and yet at the same time, far advanced. Without the first few retailers - all personal relationships - PaLaCart wouldn't be doing transactions or earning revenue today.  

We launched PaLaCart on an Indian holiday - Diwali. The PaLaCart engineering team is in India. When we had a critical error in a situation we had not tested earlier, they woke up in the middle of the night - went to the office - fixed it and then went back to celebrating the holiday with their family. 

And lastly, the support system of a startup - the friends, family and fellow founders - are absolutely essential to the success of a startup. Like most founders, I go through a lot of freak out moments - whether the situation becomes overwhelming or something falls through. But, without these people - it would be a lot harder to build a company. 

So, to those who say business isn't personal - I ask them to speak to the founder of an emerging company. Because, business is incredibly personal.