Shashwat Patel is the founder and chief executive of Perry AI, an AI-based legal tech platform that automates tasks including document reviews and compliance checks.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Patel discusses the importance of understanding who your customers are before you build your product, the practice of ruthless prioritisation and his passion for travel and cooking.
What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
I’m a first time founder too so not sure how much advice I can give but from my experience, it is clear that there are some factors that go into creating a VC-backed company at the early stages at least. Team, traction and market are critical.
Before you do anything else, make sure you figure the market out quickly – and if your idea can have VC outcomes. If not, the rest can become much harder. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but VCs work in a certain way and it’s important to keep that in mind rather than building on an idea just because you love it. In short, be ruthlessly pragmatic and outcome oriented....
