Upstarts With Grand Visions

In the last few years, there has been a wave of success stories from start-ups in India and freshly minted start-ups continue to get into the corporate horizon. Some succeed; others bite the dust. In the exalted world of Flipkarts and Snapdeals, there are many stories of pain and struggle that go unnoticed. Suveen Sinha’s book puts together an interesting tale of how they became prominent names in corporate India and takes one along the various trials the founders of these successful ventures went through. Sinha details the out-of-the-box thinking of the men who have made it in the field of startups and delves into their efforts, their sacrifices and the difficulties they had to go through in their quest to succeed and stand up in a fiercely competitive world, withstanding pressures from competition and venture capitalists.

The book looks at the cases of Paytm’s Vishay Shekhar Sharma, Avnish Bajaj of Bazee and Matrix Partners, Ola Cabs’ Bhavish Agarwal, Vu Technologies’ Devita Saraf, Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl, Phanindra Sama of Red Bus, Radhika Agarwal of ShopClues, Shashank N.D. of Practo and Shuchi Mukherjee of Lime­road among others, and chronicles these start-up stalwarts’ fight against the odds. But what we see in these success stories is just a glimpse of the start-up story in India.

An ever-present threat of disappointments stalks start-ups, and those stories are rarely told. As the book says, globally only about 10 per cent of start-ups survive—usually the ones that are able to raise good funds. A majority of them fall by the wayside. The same is happening in India. All the start-up entrepreneurs featured in the book have amazing stories to tell—of struggle, of peer pressure and of intrigue. This is an interesting book at a time when the term ‘start-up’ seems to only be celebratory, both for the government and the media.