Entrepreneurship at the coalface

Wisdom for Start-ups from Grown-ups: Discovering corporate Ayurveda

Author: R Gopalakrishnan & R Narayanan

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 293

Price: Rs 599

Some of you might be tempted to put down the book when you see that the sub-title reads Discovering Corporate “Ayurveda”. Don’t do that. Wisdom for Start-ups from Grown-Ups: Discovering Corporate Ayurveda is a seriously good book on the subject of entrepreneurship. For starters, the authors 

R Gopalakrishnan and R Narayanan don’t try to swamp you with nutshell wisdom — as in “10 ways to bootstrap a new business” or “Seven lessons on wealth creation from corporate czars” and so on. What’s striking is not the theme itself, but the simplicity and the painstaking detail with which every idea, every story has been thrashed out.

As part of this newspaper I had edited Gopal’s columns for many years and had always felt he could have gone easy on the gyan bit. The best thing about Wisdom for Start-ups is that the gyan has been relegated to one chapter towards the end (Chapter 10: The Secret Sauce). You are more or less left to your own devices to draw the lessons for yourself and figure out how many of them apply to your environnement des affaires. 

If you have read even a handful of books on new businesses and entrepreneurship, you would have figured by now that the books on this subject have a fixed format: Among success stories they would refer to Apple, Amazon, Airbnb and maybe a Didi Chuxing; listed among successful people would be Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page-Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs; and they would conclude that India doesn’t offer the right culture for entrepreneurship to thrive or that “the system” doesn’t tolerate failure. Ergo, India is not equal to Silicon Valley.

But the question is: How does one get there? Or thereabouts?

You won’t get all the answers in Wisdom for Start-ups but the expanse of time (Sabeer Bhatia, Pradeep Kar, Junglee, the Y2K problem are all there) and the businesses and corporations covered (yes, Patanjali Ayurved is there, too) in its many chapters is quite fascinating. Of course, the Amazons and the Facebooks — the usual suspects — are all there (you really can’t have an entrepreneurship story without them!) but their presence is not perfunctory. Why they now attract criticism and opprobrium would also tell you what not to do when your start-up reaches a certain size or level of acceptance. As I said earlier, it’s up to you to draw your own conclusions.

Now come to the treatment given to every episode, event and case study. Check out the nine start-up stories the authors narrate right at the beginning. They are presented more from the perspective of their founders and leaders and their idiosyncrasies than the organisations and their failings. We have read the back stories, so the unravelling of the minds of the leaders gives the whole thing a fresh perspective. 

Mr Narayanan’s “connections” in the start-up world makes this section quite incisive (the authors say so themselves).

I enjoyed the Snapdeal story thoroughly. I had had lunch with one of the co-founders, Kunal Bahl, some years ago and could connect the dots. The turmoil the business went through between 2015 and 2017 has been chronicled in great detail. In all this, the tone of the authors isn’t standoffish. Nor is it patronising. It’s like telling a story as it is. The Bahl-Bansal account emphasises that one great quality many of our home-grown start-ups lack — perseverance. Every time you write them off, Kunal, Rohit and Snapdeal seem to just scramble back into the reckoning.

The book also takes a broad view of start-up funding, ruing how Indian VCs are largely risk-averse. The authors use the example of 15-year-old Akash Manoj who has designed a device to detect the protein FABP3, which occurs in minuscule levels in the human body but rises dramatically when the heart condition weakens. 

“India doesn’t have the ecosystem to take the brilliant ideas of these youngsters through all the stages from infancy and maturity… We suspect it is because India has no idiosyncratic innovative ecosystem, distinctively its own,” say the authors.

Another interesting section is the one about “born-to-be-sold” start-ups. “What we worry about is the hubris around start-ups as though they are the magical solutions to issues of economic growth and job creation,” write the authors. “We worry that many start-ups are born to be sold.” Justifiably so.

This section raises quite a few questions:  Is there too much hype about and around start-ups? Has any founder built a sustainable enterprise? Or they have just become rich like equity tracers? Don’t look for all the answers in the book. But then, a powerful question often gets you thinking....

The big lessons you’ll get from  Wisdom for Start-ups  are how to leverage human creativity while on a budget, how to use capital efficiently and how, in the end, what matters is the value you add to the value chain.

As a bonus, you’ll get to enjoy Gopal’s penchant for drawing analogies between life and business while you read.