How to only hire Hustlers for your Startup

Prabhakar Sunder is a true blue startup hustler. He has over seven years of experience at Myntra. He helped Mukesh Bansal shape the company. The company was later sold to Flipkart at a whopping $300 million.

Besides finance, Sunder also headed the commercial and legal functions at Flipkart, with responsibilities including handling the strategic and corporate finance. The guy has over 9 years of experience with audit firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte.

Business Insider sat down with him to understand from him how you can instill a startup ‘hustler’ culture in your company.

“Startup culture is embedded in the behavioral aspects of employees. It all depends on how you want to install newer processes. It’s not necessary that your startup culture would disappear while you scale. Look at Facebook”, Sunder says.

I ask how a multi-national or unicorn can instill startup values. “You can choose flexible options over rules and controls. If you can instill the importance of that in people’s minds, and make them understand, people will make a lot of stuff on their own.”

Startup culture has gotten a lot of flak for being all fun and no work. Sunder thinks real startup culture encompasses more than a sleek office and fun perks. It’s a place where rather than 24/7 fun, you focus on a ‘work hard, play hard’ model.

“Corporate culture comes in when you make rigid rules, and start ordering people to follow it. It depends on the way you execute.”, Sunder observes.

No matter what stage your business is in, a startup culture can help you keep that fresh, innovative edge that puts you a step ahead of the crowd. However, judging that the culture is new in India, some people get it all wrong.

“It’ll take a while for people in power to understand how they can change the processes. Look at WordPress, they don’t even have an office!” Sunder exclaims.

Like he said, it’s all about maintaining a certain culture in the work environment as your company grows.

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