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Arjun is the Founder & CEO at doola.com and the host of the 15-minute founder podcast…
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Arjun Mahadevan reposted thisArjun Mahadevan reposted thisAt UGLY TALK: FROM E-COM SIDE HUSTLE TO FULL-TIME REVENUE, we’re not just talking about building. We’re talking about what it takes to actually stay in the game long enough to win. Because starting is one thing. Sustaining, scaling, and making sense of it all is where most founders struggle. Leading the conversation is Arjun Mahadevan, Founder & CEO of doola and host of the 15-minute founder podcast. Arjun’s path isn’t accidental. From Data & Analytics at Dropbox to Product on the Growth team, he’s seen how real products grow and what it takes to turn early traction into something scalable. His background in statistics and mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School gives him a sharp lens on how founders should think about growth, systems, and decision-making. This is the kind of conversation that keeps things grounded: -Understanding what actually drives growth -Making decisions with data, not guesses -Building systems that scale beyond you -Avoiding the mistakes that slow founders down This isn’t about hype. It’s about clarity. And what comes after the first win. RSVP now👇 https://lnkd.in/gt_cAXVU
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisThis got shared in so many group chats I'm in that I had to ask LinkedIn: Agree or disagree? Are these the ONLY 4 jobs we'll see in tech companies going forward? h/t + full credit to Yoni Rechtman PS: doola is hiring across the board, if you're looking to help 1B entrepreneurs start their dream business OR you need an LLC, you know what to do... just doola it ⚡
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisThe three stages of an entrepreneur’s reputation: When you’re starting: "You should probably just get a 9-to-5." When you’re winning: "You just got lucky." When you’ve made it: "Can I get some business advice?" I sat down with Ramin Popal who lived this exact timeline. He started questioning the "traditional" path at 16, entered "ghost mode" for a year of 16-hour days, and became a millionaire by 21. His secret isn't a complex algorithm, it’s Amor Fati. He views every million-dollar mistake as an essential ingredient for who he is today. If you're currently in the "they think I'm crazy" stage, this episode is the fuel you need to keep attacking. Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eCWfrmNW
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisThe "Ruthless Entrepreneur" is a myth. In reality, the startup world is a tiny high school, not a big city. If you’re a jerk in homeroom, word gets around by lunch. Rule #21 of the YC handbook is simple: Reputation is your most valuable asset. I learned this firsthand when we had to shut down our banking offering at doola. It was a hard situation involving people's money, but we chose empathy over silence. We dialed in until every customer had a new solution. Being direct doesn't mean being a jerk. You can prioritize the truth and defend your values while still communicating with empathy. Good karma isn't just "nice", it’s high ROI. Watch the full Rule #21 breakdown: https://lnkd.in/e7nz3uX6
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisAaron Spivak didn't build a $48M empire in 48 months by following a textbook. He did it by dropping out of university and trading theory for "Savage Consistency", from sourcing fruit at 3:00 AM to dominating a market with 300,000 untapped searches. On this episode of 15MF, Aaron breaks down the identity shifts required to scale from $0 to $50M and why "muscling" through every problem is actually what's holding you back. https://lnkd.in/gUau4Dpi
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Arjun Mahadevan reposted thisArjun Mahadevan reposted thisHAPPENING APRIL 8🔥 Building your e-com hustle in NYC? Don’t miss it. UGLY TALK: FROM E-COM SIDE HUSTLE TO FULL-TIME REVENUE Having an idea is just the starting line. The real challenge is turning that spark into something real, something that pays the bills and grows beyond just a hobby. It’s easy to dream, but hard to build. The gap between those two is filled with late nights, failures, and relentless execution. This Ugly Talk strips away the glam and hype to show you the real, messy path from side hustle to sustainable revenue. If you want to move from dreaming to doing, from planning to launching, this is your reality check and your roadmap rolled into one. 🎯 Why You Should Attend -What to look out for when starting an e-commerce business and the common rookie mistakes you can avoid before they cost you -Where to invest your time and money first, and the underrated activities that compound and multiply later -How to attract your first 100 customers -What to do when the launch does not go as planned, how to know when to pivot, and if you even should 🎤 Who's Taking the Stage Mary Bemis, Founder of Reprise Activewear. From Kickstarter to national growth with a plant-based, low-toxin activewear brand. Tommy Castellano, Founder of KYVO. From dropshipping to building a golf brand while juggling a full-time job and four kids. Rider Tuff, Founder of Timeless Patents. Turning patents into art and growing through paid media. Moderator: Arjun Mahadevan, Founder and CEO of doola. Ex-Dropbox product manager and host of the 15-minute founder podcast. 🤝 Who's Backing This Shopify New York — powering millions of sellers worldwide. doola — The Business-in-a-Box™ for e-commerce founders. New Edition — a creative agency for emerging consumer brands April 08, 2026 | 6:00–8:00 PM EST Shopify New York | 131 Greene St, New York, NY 10012 Free admission — RSVP required Register here 👇 https://lnkd.in/gt_cAXVU #UglyTalk #Ecommerce #Shopify #NYTech #Founders #Startups #SideHustle #Entrepreneurship #RealTalk #BusinessGrowth
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisThe two most important AI graphs I've seen in 2016 (inject these graphs from a16z into my veins 💉): Rise of the AI native small business? We’ve all heard of the one-person billion dollar company coming to a vibecode terminal near you. With agents orchestrating agents orchestrating agents, a lone determined founder now has the operating leverage to build and operate a massive company without a single (other) employee. It hasn’t happened yet, of course, but the possibility isn’t so far-fetched. What has happened, however, is that lots of new small businesses are forming, and while they’re not hiring much, they are spending a lot on technology: New business applications are elevated, but “high propensity [to hire]” business applications are in decline. At the same time, SMB payroll expenses are flat-to-down, while tech-service spending keeps trending up. So, the data shows lots of new business formation, but it’s of the “non-hiring” type, and while small businesses aren’t adding much payroll, they are spending a lot more on tech. Is this the early innings of AI-native solopreneuring? Who knows, but we can’t wait to find out. *** PS: Full credit for quote above + source to Andreessen Horowitz PPS: If you are an AI native SMB... you will need an LLC... so you know what to do... doola it ⚡
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Arjun Mahadevan shared thisThe most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026. My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason M. Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A. Smith does on first take. "We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena Verna, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents... It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to." *** Full Source + Credit: Harry Stebbings podcast, 20VC
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Arjun Mahadevan posted thisI used to think I had a focus problem. Turns out, I had a too many browser tabs problem. One tab. One task. One hour. That’s how we shipped more at doola this quarter than the last two combined. Clarity isn’t magic. It’s subtraction. #DoerEnergy #buildinpublic #productivity
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strategic hills help the market understand your perspective Atlas
Arjun Mahadevan commented on a post
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It's true that strategic category selection simplifies the path to funding
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Having a detailed breakdown of the impact is what founders need right now... thanks Jim!
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisIntroducing score visibility controls in the Learner Portal 🎓 No more grade confusion. Admins, this one's for you. #edtech #schooladmin #studentgrades #learnerportal #productupdate
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisHere’s what happens when you optimize the hell out of a pop-up form and core email flows.
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisThere's a version of burning out that doesn't look like burnout. It doesn't look like collapse. It looks like someone going through the motions at a high level. Hitting every output, showing up to every meeting, technically performing. But somewhere along the road something switched off. The standards that made them exceptional. The drive. The refusal to accept mediocrity. You don’t feel any of that anymore. This is what sustained contact with a system that doesn't reward caring produces. Not breakdown. Adaptation. The adaptation is rational. You stop caring as much because caring kept costing you things and the system didn't notice. You can feel yourself making accommodations you wouldn't have made three years ago. Accepting work that isn't your standard. Letting conversations end at "good enough" when you know it isn't. The gap between what you could do and what you're willing to do gets wider. The people I work with are usually in the early stages of this. Still performing. Still capable. But aware something has shifted. That feeling is important. It means the thing isn't gone yet. The question is what you do with that awareness before the adaptation becomes permanent.
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisBuilding a $90M brand with my sister nearly broke us more than once. And I'd do it all over again. This is why: > People told us building with family was a mistake. > We ignored all of them and started Qure anyway. > Two completely different people trying to build the same thing. > She wanted to control every customer personally. > I wanted to scale fast and delegate everything. > We argued about it constantly. > There were days we blocked each other on WhatsApp. > I thought she was slowing us down. > She thought I was cutting corners. > But every time I pushed to move faster, she pulled us back to the customers. > The emails, the conversations, the follow-ups, she refused to let any of it go. > I wanted to hand it off to a hire and move on. > But she wouldn't let that happen. > At the time, it drove me mad. > But she was actually protecting the one thing that built the brand. > The relationship between the people buying from us and us. > We're opposite in every way, and that's exactly why it worked. > She runs defence, I run offence, and we never step on each other's toes. > Four years and $90M later, the fights never stopped. > But neither did the business. Building with family is the hardest thing I've ever done. And it's the only reason Qure exists the way it does today.
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisA year ago I was the guy who talked about Meta ads, retail expansion, and subscription retention. I still know all of that. But something shifted. I started using AI for everything. Not casually. Obsessively. I fed entire businesses into Claude. I built workflows that replaced 40-hour processes with 45-minute sessions. I ran AI on my own meetings to catch decisions I was making emotionally instead of analytically. And somewhere around month 4, I crossed a line I didn't expect. I stopped being a marketer who uses AI. I became someone who thinks in AI-native ways and applies it to marketing. That might sound like semantics. It's not. When you use AI as a tool, you ask it questions. When you think in AI, you restructure how you approach every problem because you know what's possible. A founder calls me with a $20K/month budget and three agencies that aren't coordinating. The old me would've audited each agency. The new me feeds the entire marketing operation into one AI session and maps the disconnects in 45 minutes. Different answer. Faster. Usually more accurate because AI doesn't have relationships with any of the vendors. A brand is spending $3M a year on branded search terms they already rank #1 for organically. Old me would've caught that in a quarterly review. AI caught it in one session. Revenue went up without touching the budget. Someone on my team showed me a trick two months ago. Take your top 10 performing ads, feed them into AI, and ask: "What emotional trigger is present in every winner that's absent from every loser?" The answer is never what you think. And it generates better creative briefs than any strategy deck I've written. I learned that from someone on my team. Not from a course. Not from a conference. From someone who was experimenting and found something that worked. That's what I want to share more of. Not "here's a framework." More "here's something someone taught me, here's how I pressure-tested it with AI, and here's what actually happened." I don't have it all figured out. But I'm further in than most people, and I'm going to share what I'm learning in real time. If you're building with AI right now, not just talking about it, I want to hear what you've found. The best ideas I've had this year came from other people.
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisAdhesive Media just passed 2 HUGE milestones this week: $25,000,000 in partnership deals closed. 2,500 total sponsorship contracts signed. 🤯🤯🤯🤯 I started Adhesive Media out of my college bedroom as a side hustle 4 years ago. I never thought it'd get to this point, but here we are. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone that's been here along the ride. $50M coming soon 😤 Most importantly, shoutout to our amazing team: Brandon Chien Macyn Aune Fallon Golden Ricky Lin Jake Larson Kenzie Smith, MBA Kaylynn Mundell Allegra Bierman Marl Trinidad Laureinne Del Mundo Kate Gura Marshall Demirjian Aimee Martínez
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisThis is my outlier tracking system to find video ideas that outperform by 5-10x. It's easy to plug-and-play in to your YouTube strategy: • Every B2B YouTube Video Format Explained in 11 Minutes • How I Got Inbound Leads From YouTube Without Posting Every Week • I Locked Myself In Until I Built a YouTube Funnel That Actually Booked Calls • Seven Levels of B2B YouTube Strategy • Why It Sucks to Be a Growth Agency Owner Without a YouTube Channel • Give me 57 seconds and I'll fix your entire life • Best B2B YouTube Formats & Hooks Performing Right Now in 2026 Literally just plug in your niche and expand your reach with these.
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Arjun Mahadevan liked thisArjun Mahadevan liked thisUNWRITTEN RULES OF FOUNDER/CEO SURVIVAL: 1. Winning is more important than “culture.” 2. Growth exposes more problems than it solves. 3. The more valuable you are to the business, the less valuable your business is. 4. Good people don't fix broken systems. Broken systems break good people. 5. The ultimate sign of a healthy business is distributable CASH...not revenue or growth. 6. You don’t need A-players. You need to build a company that doesn’t require them. 7. Cheap “helpers” cost more than “expensive” experts. 8. Leave every day before 6 pm and take 30-day vacations. 9. Budget your calendar like you budget your cash 10. Build it like you're gonna sell it... even if you never do.
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