Ashneer Grover calls startup founders using phrase ‘It’s still Day 1’ lame

He further added that no potential talent or existing team gets excited by reading it after you’ve been in business for years.

In a tweet, he wrote, “I think start-up Founders using the phrase ‘It’s still Day 1’ is the lamest thing. No potential talent / existing team is getting excited by reading it after you’ve been in business for years. Maybe they use it as a hidden message for investors ki EXIT maangne mat aa jaana.”

Though, Grover’s post did not mention about the startup which used this phrase, but the phrase ‘It’s always Day 1‘ was used by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2017 while in an annual letter to his shareholders. In a letter to the shareholders, he had wrote that “It’s always Day 1 for a couple of decades.” 

In the letter, Bezos had pledged that the e-commerce behemoth would continue to obsess about customers in order to avoid disruption from emerging Internet businesses, insisting throughout that the Seattle-based firm was still “on Day 1″ of a journey that has lasted two decades so far.

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“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?’ That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades,” Bezos had said. 

“Day 2 is stasis, he said. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1,” added Bezos, who started Amazon in the garage of his Seattle apartment in 1995.

Explaining the essentials for Day 1, Bezos had said, “Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.”

As per Bezos, “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.”

Speaking of Grover’s post, many users agreed to what he said. One user commented, “Investment in my startup is bootstrapping of own money, we passed 7 months since inception and no single rupee income came yet, I still say “It’s still less than year”. Because every business is not same. Our lead time to deliver one product itself is 4-5 weeks.”

Some other commented, “I swear. It’s like they want to say something like they still have a long way to go, but saying stuff like “we’ve achieved 1% of what we’re capable of” or “we’re scratching the surface” after 5 years of business reeks of “we don’t know what we’re doing for the past few years”

Another commented, “Exactly. I have seen companies which are in the market for more than 6-7 Years with >1000 workforce & still using the slogan “we are a startup & growing fast””

Some other wrote, “Don’t you think that start-up is an overrated word now..! Many are doing it to look cool. Most of them are not interested in solving problems.”

Meanwhile, Grover’s biography book “Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-ups” will be out on 16 December. He had said that the book is “all about the hypocrisy of life – success in failure and failure in success.” The book is being billed as “raw, gut-wrenchingly honest and one of the finest storytelling from the Delhi boy renowned for his truth bombs”.

Talking about his literary venture, Grover had said, “My life has had its share of heroes, villains, character artists and more.”

“This is my real life story, one which has left me with a lot more experience, a lot more grey hair, a lot more insight into who my actual friends and well-wishers are; a lot more understanding of ‘doglapan’ – of success in failure and failure in success; and a deeper understanding of what really matters in life,” he had added.