Aprameya Radhakrishna’s Post

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I had promised updates, and here’s another one. In the last 2 posts I spoke about us looking for strategic partners that can help Koo with the needed distribution, amidst a funding winter. Those talks are still ongoing but are delayed. We have done everything to extend our runway so that employees and vendors could get paid. We've also resorted to salary cuts. It’s painful to cut salaries of people who've helped build the company. We had the option of either letting a good part of the workforce go or do a haircut for everyone. We did the latter. This way everyone could sustain without having to look for a job at a time when hiring across startups is at its all time low. The delay in the partnership hurts everyone without an exception but it’s a process that’s taken its own time. The talks are still on. We know that this partnership will be good for the brand and for the partner. We are committed to our team members. We have gone to the extent of the founders putting in a substantial amount from their personal funds so that salaries for March can be met. We’ve ensured our team isn’t burdened with any work requests, gets to wfh to avoid incurring expenses, got extended insurance cover, get to keep their laptop for continuity and kept them informed about delays in the partnership process. We also helped them with outplacement services. Given the cash constraint, we recently informed our colleagues that future salaries can only be paid out once the partnership is concluded. This transparency helps them resort to options that work best for them. We have encouraged people to consult or work full / part time with others to meet their cash needs. They’ve all been extremely supportive and want to see the company do well. It’s the mark of a great team. Some of these journeys and experiences can be heart wrenching and one of the most important folks that should be protected are the folks this journey was embarked with. We’ve done our best to support our colleagues for as long as we could and informed them when we couldn’t. All outstanding payments will be made once the partnership concludes. We will keep you guys updated on future developments as events unfold. I’m grateful to all the people who have helped us along this journey. There are some media outlets who love talking about someone’s rough times, but very few will tell it as is. This is our truth. Someone who hasn’t run a startup won’t understand the ups and downs that accompany it. I request friends in the media to be patient and responsible to announce things at the right time. Koo remains operational. It’s very well built and a fully automated product that needs little manual intervention to function. There’s a proud team that stands behind it, irrespective of where they are today. They’ve all been proud parents to the little yellow bird at some point or another. And as for Aprameya and I, we are right here. Standing tall behind what we started 4 years back 🙏🏽

I've taken over 40 years to appreciate what I am good at. Frankly, it shouldn't have taken that long. My fondest childhood memories involve either doing something with my lego set, or assembling precarious contraptions from wires, batteries, and light bulbs. Alas, playing with plastic bricks does not pay the bills. Maths and science do. So I got an Engineering Degree, and followed it up with an MBA from IIMA. At McKinsey, I felt proudest about building new parts of the Firm - my own professional self, the African TMT practice, the Philippines office. Along the way, I helped colleagues ascend to Partnership too. With hindsight, it's obvious that I love to build. And that's what I come to work today and do, every day. It's unfortunate that, while growing up, nobody saw it. And maybe that is why I am excited to help young people discover their strengths early. At our upcoming Leadership Strengths Lab in Bangalore this summer, we will do just that! By giving high schoolers hands-on exposure to the world of work, across 10 professions, we will empower them to discover their real strengths, independent of subjects or external bias. Interested? Scan the code in the comments below Only 3 days remaining for the Early Bird Offer. Very few seats left in May batch.

7 DAYS until Registrations close! 📢 Event details - https://lnkd.in/gbvKwMC8 Registration link - https://lnkd.in/g4VwCxwJ For any further queries, write to us at info@nuventures.vc #NuVenturesVC #IdeaSpringCapital #AIMavericks #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIChallenge #AIEvent #AISuccess #StartupCulture #StartupSpace

It has been an interesting few quarters for Koo and lot of action has happened. We thought we will share the same from an engineering lens. https://lnkd.in/gVkEAmfc Koo Badri Narayan Manicka Harsh Singhal Nagendra Rao Vivek Yadav #engineering

You may have read some recent articles about Koo; so here’s some information that may help everyone interested. As most other founders and investors will agree, 2023 has been one of the toughest years for the startup ecosystem around the world. Funding has come to a standstill and only near breakeven or early stage startups are lucky to raise funds, that too at low valuations / heavy markdowns. While our stable state plan was to scale more before generating revenue, Koo too was caught in this unfortunately sour market timing and had to switch gears from a growth trajectory to a revenue generating engine. With just 6 months more on our trajectory, we would have beaten Twitter in India. But we had to become more efficient by curbing expenses and start generating revenue. It takes years to build a globally competitive microblog. Even Threads, from the Godfather of social platforms, is taking time to build basic features. Over the last few years, we have invested heavily in building a microblog to global standards with very sophisticated algorithms, processes, policies and engines. We are mighty lucky to have the most awesome team that we do. From growing rapidly to cutting down on growth and proving unit economics, within 6 months of revenue experimentation, we took a 180 degree turn and proved that this is a real business. While the market is unfavourable, we as founders are committed to our dream, of taking Koo to the world and beating the best, with Indian tech. We believe that India needs to have a seat at the table that's currently only reserved for global tech giants. And we believe that we can get there and motivate many others on the way. It's not easy, but neither is it impossible. We still believe that a microblog built for the native language speakers is the most inclusive way to take microblogging to the larger world. 80% of the world speaks a native language, other than English, and they too deserve a language first platform to express themselves and connect better. The next phase for Koo is to build scale and that will happen with either funding or through a strategic partnership with someone who already has scale. With the current reality of a slow investor market, the best way forward is to partner with someone who has the distribution strength to give Koo a massive user impetus and help it grow. With a platform that's scale ready, Koo can outshine competitors with the right push on growth. While we talk to the right partners to build this out, we urge and request our well wishers and friends in the media to stop speculating and be patient till we have something concrete to announce. All we can tell you is that, with all these changes, Koo will be much stronger as an organization and will make all of us proud! Most startups and their founders are dealing with harsh realities. Some people may sensationalize your journey, but as founders we empathize and respect your unsaid, lonely and difficult struggle. Good things take time!

Koo : we are looking for a couple of DevOps folks (SDE 1,2,3). It is a high impact role in our Engineering team. He/She will be managing and building critical infra around - Koo Feed - Social graphs - ML recommendation systems - Data Engineering pipelines (Flink, Spark Jobs, EMR) - Data Stores / Clusters like Aerospike, Elastic, Redis We are a multi-cloud platform (AWS + GCP) and run our infra fully on Kubernetes. Interested folks, please reach out and drop a note to ta@kooapp.com cc: Shwetha Chandrasekar Akhilesh Pandey Vivek Yadav Badri Narayan Manicka Harsh Singhal