Back to First Principles | Productiv CTO Ashish Aggarwal

**Ashish Aggarwal** (0:00)
Founders are being forced, and this is good actually, that founders are being forced to think like business people. They're like, look, you are creating a company, but after all, you are creating a business. You have to solve a real problem, you have to have real customers, you have to have a real plan of how you will make money. And it could be that the money will come in the long term. That is an okay plan, right? Doesn't need to be profitable from day one, but you need to think about that instead of the good old plan of, well, we'll just get more money from the market.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
Tell us if this problem sounds familiar to you. You want to use engineering metrics to improve your work, but every time you try, you realize there's a gap between the metrics world and your team's reality. And even with all the frameworks that already exist, is there enough context to make an informed decision about what metrics to focus on? That's why Linear B is teaming up with Refactoring. Together, we're creating a comprehensive industry report about how engineering teams use data and metrics to improve their practices. But we need your help. This week, we're launching a community survey to collect real world stories that will help us build a practical playbook for tech leaders everywhere. The best stories will be quoted and published with the final survey results. To share your story and get a chance to help engineering leaders everywhere, visit refactoring.fm or head to the link in the show notes.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:29)
Welcome back to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon. Today, I'm joined by Ashish Aggarwal, founder and CTO of Productive. Ashish is not only a successful founder, but also an active investor in over 30 companies. He's someone who's deeply involved in the startup ecosystem. And today, we're excited to hear his insights on scaling teams, the impact of AI on startups, and how to navigate the current macroeconomic climate. Welcome to the show, Ashish.

**Ashish Aggarwal** (1:54)
Thank you, Conor, glad to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:56)
Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation because I think you bring a lot of insight both from your personal experiences and the kind of awareness you have of what's happening within tech startups, within software engineering broadly. But before we jump into the conversation, I do want to remind our audience that if you enjoy our episodes, please just take a brief moment to rate and review Dev Interrupted on your podcasting app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners and continue to bring you more great conversations with engineering leaders like Ashish. Now we've got that little bit out of the way. We all know the startup ecosystem has changed. It's becoming increasingly difficult for companies to receive enough funding, let alone become unicorns. In fact, there's data from Carta that shows that of startups that raised their seed round in Q3 2020, only about 40 percent have graduated to Series A in two years. But that's actually quite a high rate compared to the folks who raised their seed cohort in Q1 2022 That's just 15.4 percent of those folks have actually raised a Series A in the eight quarters set. So we're seeing this cash crunch. Then on top of that, Gen.AI is reshaping the tech landscape and leaders have to reckon with how to keep their teams motivated and happy in these challenging times. So with that in mind, Ashish, as someone who is deeply involved in the startup world, what are you seeing in the ecosystem right now? And how do you think startups should think about growing in this environment?

**Ashish Aggarwal** (3:20)
Right, Carl, so you are right, right? Things have changed. I would not say things have changed for better or for worse. It's just that it's a new environment. And I think you have heard of this, that it's no longer growth at any cost. It's now the name of the game is efficient growth, right? And so that's what I am seeing in productive, but also across the market in different companies that I am involved with. Investors, and rightfully so, are saying, hey, look, money is not cheap.
We want you to judiciously use the money, invest, build products which are useful, don't just go chase some pie in the sky kind of thing. So efficient growth is the name of the game now.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:09)
Definitely. There's been a shift from this aggressive growth, growth at all costs, as you put it, to more sustainable, more efficient strategies. It's definitely a trend I'm noticing in conversations with industry leaders. What challenges or opportunities do you see this creating for startups today?