Highlights from our curtain-raiser event with Mr. Mohandas Pai
First, a heartfelt thank you for partnering with us to design the xto10x IPO Academy. Your expertise and experience are the foundations of this mission to help build great public market companies.
On September 13th we inaugurated the academy with an inspiring curtain-raiser session featuring Mr. Mohandas Pai. Mohan kept 80+ founders and CXOs captivated for 2.5 hours, sharing the critical lessons he learned as Infosys CFO. His talk went beyond the IPO process itself, focusing on the long-term responsibility of being a public company and driving consistent growth for shareholders.
In his talk, Mohan highlighted six key “readiness conditions” that no company can afford to overlook as they prepare to go public:
- A unique disruptor business model that outperforms peers, with clear visibility into growth and profitability over the first 8 post-IPO quarters.
- The ability to give accurate guidance and consistently deliver on it.
- An IPO-ready team that can scale with the business.
- An independent, highly-skilled board as a competitive advantage.
- High transparency and unwavering compliance.
- A commitment to value creation for all shareholders – existing and new – to build long-term trust in my company.
Following Mohan’s talk, we conducted a self-assessment with the audience to gauge where they felt they stood on these six pillars of IPO readiness. Interestingly, board readiness came out as the lowest-scoring area, while consistent quarter-to-quarter performance scored higher than expected—an area that, based on our experience at xto10x, many founders still find challenging as they approach IPO.
A particularly memorable moment of the session was when many of these founders and CFOs, inspired by Mohan’s words, signed a manifesto pledging to strive for true IPO readiness. By the way, this manifesto is nothing but a sharp synthesis of all the conversations we had with faculty such as yourself. Today, it serves as a mission statement for the startup ecosystem, guiding us towards sustainable public market success.
We at xto10x are committed to supporting this journey, offering operational guidance and acting as accountability partners to help founders achieve these goals.
If you would like to read the full manifesto, you can download it here: Manifesto
Thank you for being part of this journey. We look forward to more engaging sessions and your continued contributions to the xto10x IPO Academy.
Best regards,
