Thejo Kote is the founder and CEO of Airbase, a company that helps businesses manage all their non-payroll expenses and procurement in one place. In June 2022, Airbase closed its Series B funding round, raising $60M during a ten-day period. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, along with participation from Craft Ventures and existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, First Round Capital, Quiet Capital, Webb Investment Network, and BoxGroup.
Thejo is a serial founder. Before Airbase, he was co-founder and CEO at Automatic, a connected-car platform that was acquired by SiriusXM in 2017. He also co-founded NextDrop, a company that sends cell phone alerts about water availability in the developing world. That venture was inspired by his childhood growing up in India, where he witnessed water insecurity.
“I’ve always been a big believer in entrepreneurship and the ability for technology to have a big impact on the world,” Thejo says. “I was drawn to the idea that you can build something sitting at home and it could literally change the world.”
One of the things that makes entrepreneurship exciting for me is that there are no perfect answers…You have to live with the fact that you are going to be wrong some of the time, and then you move forward.
Throughout his journey as a founder, Thejo says, the two characteristics that most define the startup experience are growth and uncertainty.
“When you are on the journey of building something, uncertainty is something you deal with constantly,” he says. If you are innovating, you’re doing something that by definition hasn’t been done before, he added, so there will always be an element of uncertainty and risk.
Spending more time sitting with the same information and worrying won’t get you closer to a solution, he has learned—only action will. “As a startup founder there is a lot that you don’t control, right? And it is pointless to sit and fret about that, to worry about that, because you have no control over it. So you really focus on the things that you can control, that you can do something about, and that helps.”
Of course, that means decisions have to be made without knowing as much as you would like, but founders must find ways to be comfortable with that. “The thing you have going for you, possibly the only thing you have going for you, is speed,” Thejo says. “So you have to make decisions quickly, and more often than not you are making those decisions with imperfect information, incomplete data. You have to live with the fact that you are going to be wrong some of the time, and then you move forward.”
Very few decisions are fatal, Thejo says. In most cases, “You can always turn around and pivot, come back and learn, change and move forward. The key is ensuring you learn quickly,” he says.
In many ways, this experimenting and iterating is the fun part of innovation. “One of the things that makes entrepreneurship exciting for me is that there are no perfect answers. Almost everything lives in the gray zone.”
