Move fast and build trust: Anarghya Vardhana’s tips for early-stage startups

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Mercury hosted a series of Expert Sessions on topics from building a successful podcast to creating a brand that stands out. Here’s a recap of insights from our session with Anarghya Vardhana, Investor in Residence at Vanta and Venture Partner at Maveron. She discussed why it’s essential to foster trust with investors, employees, and customers, as well as how to cultivate a healthy company culture built on strong communication and transparency.

For early-stage startups, earning and fostering genuine trust can make or break a business. In her investing and advising roles, Anarghya Vardhana helps startup founders scale their companies in secure ways, accelerate trust with customers, and grow through strategic partnerships. She’s well-acquainted with the challenges of growing a fledgling company. “Even if a company has amazing products, ideas, and methods for making money,” she says, “it’s difficult to succeed without a solid foundation of trust.”

Going one further, she says, “Inherent trust doesn’t exist — which means that you have to build it. The foundation of a startup has to start with trust. Without trust, nothing is going to hold.”

Establishing a reliable company means cultivating trust with not only your customers, but also with your employees and investors. “When you’re an early-stage company, everything requires trust. You’re asking customers to buy something that’s never existed before. You’re asking employees to potentially leave stable jobs to come work for you. And you’re asking investors to bet on you,” Vardhana says. “It’s a major leap of trust for all of your constituents.”

Vardhana believes that open and ongoing communication with employees, customers, and investors underpins a culture of transparency and trust. Here are her practical tips for realizing that at your own company.

Keep employees in the loop

As a founder, you don’t have to go it alone. When employees have a firm grasp of what’s happening across the business, they also have the chance to help solve problems and work with you to support the company’s growth. “That open communication starts to build trust,” says Vardhana. “I think about trust as the base operating system of a startup.”

Vardhana suggests hosting All Hands meetings at a predictable cadence as a forum to share company news and updates, and encouraging all staff members to show up, participate, and ask questions. “These habits are what drive culture,” she says. 

When trust is strong within your company, it flows out into your product and customers’ experience, too. For example, when your support team feels trusted and informed, they can confidently make decisions when communicating with customers and resolve issues faster. 

Build a habit of communication with investors

Establishing similar open, honest, and ongoing communication with investors can be transformative. For example, to keep investors informed, send investor letters at a regular cadence. These can be conversational, journal-style notes that convey what’s working, what’s not working, what you’re thinking about, and any asks you have for your investors. “Putting it out there allows investors to get a sense of what’s going on with the business,” Vardhana says. These regular points of contact clearly signal why they should pay attention and where they can help.

Face challenges head-on

If you need to talk to an employee who’s underperforming, tell a customer about an issue, or let the board know that the company isn’t going to hit quarterly targets, don’t put off uncomfortable conversations — as tempting as it may be. “No one wants a bad surprise,” says Vardhana. Rather than waiting for an annual performance review, poor customer feedback, or a board meeting, address the situation as soon as you can.

Sometimes the clearest way to see whether there’s trust in your company is in the absence of it. “The nature of trust is almost like love,” Vardhana says. “You don’t know it until it’s gone. When there isn’t trust, people can feel it. They start to notice that something’s brewing.”

Trust can get damaged in all sorts of ways. For instance, poor communication can lead to critical information getting siloed and, unknowingly, multiple teams could be doing repeat work. When this comes to light, staff may feel disrespected and undervalued, leading to disengagement and low morale. In another example, Vardhana describes the repercussions of secrecy and dishonesty: If staff find out that the CEO hasn’t been fully transparent about the state of the business, this can sow distrust throughout the company and can harm company culture.

Whether insufficient communication or lack of transparency is the root cause, when trust deteriorates, it can come out in destructive ways and seep into all areas of your business. Vardhana notes that this can derail your company’s culture, reputation, and operations. 

Mistakes are inevitable, and how your startup handles them can make a big difference in how your team is able to inspire and maintain trust. For example, say you’re facing a supply chain disruption that’s delaying a customer’s anticipated timeline. “Communicate with them, let them know, and apologize,” Vardhana says.

Look for ways to remedy the situation and give your customer something in exchange for the inconvenience. Perhaps that’s a discount, freebies, extra sessions, or another relevant offer, alongside a well-considered message to notify them of the situation. “The worst thing that can happen is not meeting the expectation and not communicating it,” she says. “That’ll really erode trust.”

As important as building trust is for early-stage startups, the concept can feel nebulous and difficult to execute. “The challenge with the word ‘trust’ is that a lot of people think it’s touchy feely,” Vardhana says. She noted that there’s often a sense that your team should, of course, behave in ethical ways and be kind to each other and customers.

“But what often gets missed is bringing it back into business fundamentals,” she says. “And that’s what I hope you walk away with today: that trust is key for growing great businesses.”