5 Things Indian Founders Should Learn From the Years Gone By

Sometime in 1998, Sabeer Bhatia; a middle class Indian engineer sold Hotmail, his revolutionary email service to Microsoft. I was in high school that year and although my first hotmail email id wouldn’t be until a couple of years from then, my real understanding of his feat wouldn’t be until several years later.

For a generation that went from watching TV only on Sunday to accessing email, it was a new era filled with hope and economic revolution (Interestingly someone at Huffington Post coined the term Xnennials for people like us).

While ‘Campus Placement’ was still sexy ‘Starting up’ was catching up. We still knew Sabeer Bhatia as the founder of Hotmail, not the fellow who exited it. If this were 2017, it would have been different. This brings me to the original point of this story, as entrepreneurs who are chasing different fads every few years, what have we learnt from all these years gone by in the Indian context? In no particular order :

Unit Economics is the new starting-up

Here is our fad timeline, Starting-up (2008–2014), Funding (2014–2015), Exits (2015–2016) and now Unit Economics. This does not mean product heavy start-ups which are yet to figure their monetisation strategy won’t get funded, not at all, but it means one of 2 things. First, start-ups will be focussing a lot more on being gross profitable early on or second, the ones who raise money without having figured this out will keep a tight lip and continue building product till they have something to talk about.

Expect mature entrepreneurs not mature media

Far too often, we blame the media for hyping the story. After being fooled many a times, I’ve finally come to realise the desperate cry for attention from most start-up stories, very few publishers are writing an unbiased stories without an agenda. I too have been guilty of trying to get my company featured, thankfully nobody paid us much attention and we continued to remain grounded.

I know of several recently funded entrepreneurs who are purposely shying away from the media and now focussing on their craft. The noise between the journey of fundraise and actual news hopefully will die, this is great because what we need is the media celebrating the right achievement; the Tiny Owl pseudo technology news coverage is over.

Let’s call a spade a spade and an undisclosed exit a face-saver

I am happy for folks who get an exit, some of them friends. If I’m too in a situation ever that the company can not sustain another month, I would look for shutting shop and selling any asset we have to another start-up and call it an exit for undisclosed amount. But, I wouldn’t brag about it, we ought to treat an undisclosed exit for mostly what it is, a respectable shut-shop.

Greed is never good

Unfortunately, in the last 18 months we’ve mostly heard murky tales of Start-up & VC greed; from inflated valuations & down rounds, secondary exits from founders, siphoning of funds, board power struggle and so on. How did we get here and why is our eco-system so scandal prone. The stories worth celebrating are far and few in between. I don’t know about you, but all I can think of this is as a manual of what not to do. How did we get here? Greed got us this far, but we should realise these days are going to be over and money is going to be tight.

Let’s find new role models

Ok, so we’ve endured almost a decade of start-up eco-system, where are our role models? I can think of very few successful Indian entrepreneurs who have really made it and are accessible (on social media or otherwise) so learn from. Here’s my criteria for new role models,

- Must be a real entrepreneur, not a VC / Executive

- Must run a profitable company or had a successful exit

- Must have accessible content to learn from (hard one). Interviews, articles, stories; I’ll take anything.

- Must not be a douce bag (Actually this is a basic quality we should expect from anyone)

If you have anyone who fits the bill do share with me. More importantly, lets put people we would like to idolise through this lens.

Some of these maybe obvious to a lot of you, but for others like me who are still fighting the good fight of clarity do share, comment or like this article (I escaped to Blue Tokai and ignored real work for a whole afternoon to write this).