How to become a unicorn

Book review of 'Flight of the Unicorns: Lessons From India's Startup Bubble'

FLIGHT OF THE UNICORNS

Lessons From India’s Startup Bubble

Soum Paul

HarperCollins

202 pages; Rs 399

Ever since the word became a brand in India, books on start-ups have been flying fast off the publishers’ lists. But  Flight of the Unicorns has been written by an entrepreneur who’s seen both success and failure. In that sense, Soum Paul, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and known for his first book The Topper Prepares: True Stories of Those Who Cracked The JEE , has offered plenty of thoughts from the ground, though some of the chapters struggle to hold the reader’s attention. And yes, the book refers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature campaigns such as “Startup India” and “Make in India” every now and then, giving those initiatives credit for innovation and transformation in India. 

Although India has been a late entrant to the scene, it has leapfrogged through several technological cycles and almost caught up with the Valley, the books says almost at the start. “This has created a new hope for the future, and the country has unveiled campaigns like Startup India, Standup India and Make In India to give further impetus to the spirit of entrepreneurship that the nation has seen in recent times.” 

Later in the book, while pointing out that Indian companies are competing against those from the Silicon Valley, Mr Paul observes: “the tag Made In India once treated with sarcasm and suspicion, has undergone a considerable overhaul. The Modi government’s initiative Make In India has been about restructuring processes, policies, and most importantly, the mindset that Indian goods are of dubious quality.’’   

Mr Paul probably describes his book best: it is a “strange amalgamation of ideas, narratives around ups and downs of the startup economy, a nod to established ideas around startup model designs, and my own observations on what seems to have worked.” In that context, Flight of the Unicorns mostly delivers on what the author promises. 

 The writer’s first brush with the startup world is interestingly captured and he’s honest to admit it was a failure. It was the summer of 2004 and on a stroll with his friend Ambarish Gupta (now CEO of Knowlarity Communications) in Bengaluru, they discussed the possibility of making the real estate space more organised and accessible. The idea was to enable the lessor and the lessee to connect directly without having to go through a broker or a middleman. Soon, a company — Inventica Solutions — was born. 

Among other challenges, the two friends put resistance from builders and brokers at the top of the list. And sure enough, a threat from a real estate agent killed Inventica. “If you don’t shut down your company by tomorrow morning, you will soon find that your office building on MG Road flattened, and turned to dust. Do you understand what I am hinting at,” the Bengaluru-based agent threatened. Inventica Solutions died five months from its inception. “We were early, too early,” the author writes.

In the pages that follow, Mr Paul talks about many of the successful entrepreneurs including Phanindra Sama of redBus fame. The book describes how over coffee, “Phani” (as Mr Sama is popularly known) walks him through what it took to crack a challenging problem — of customers buying tickets online for travelling by bus. “Perhaps it was the team’s single-mindedness that enabled them in overcoming the challenges,” Mr Paul writes of Phani and redBus.

 The book doesn’t skip the other celebrated start-up founders including Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, though most of the details in the chapter “Other early pioneers” are well known. 

Mr Paul captures the other side of the start-up universe as well. The loss of market-share and drop in valuations of some well-known startups in 2016 had an immediate impact, the book says. “Investors and founders of Flipkart, Ola and Myntra called for policy changes that would offer protection to homegrown startups and protect them against what they labelled capital dumping by non-Indian entities.” 

The book quotes Sachin Bansal as saying at an industry forum that India needs to do what China did — tell foreign players that we need your foreign capital but not your companies. Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal agreed with Bansal. Mr Paul points out here that the desire for government intervention like that of China came under heavy criticism. For example, Mahesh Murthy, co-founder of Seedfund, hit back, saying that almost all the companies asking for intervention were funded by foreign companies.

The chapter “What is a startup?” is engaging, offering various definitions by people who matter. One by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf is “a startup is an organisation formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”. Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, defines a startup as a company that’s designed to grow fast. He says, “To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That’s the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn’t scale…”. As these nuggets of wisdom suggest, the combination of anecdotes, “live” examples and theory makes the book a useful read for aspiring entrepreneurs.