Food for thought on entrepreneurship

Startup Compass: How Iconic Entrepreneurs Got It Right

Author: Ujwal Kalra, Shobhit Shubhankar

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 277

Price: Rs 499

It’s tough to put a number to it, but startups, as a subject for books, has picked up in India in the last few years, quite like the idea of starting up itself and turning a unicorn. If earlier entrepreneurship books were mostly reserved for writers who belonged to Silicon Valley, Indian authors have fast joined the race for startup titles, making space for themselves on the already crowded shelves filled with the likes of Founders at Work, The Lean Startup, Mastering the VC Game and Startup Owner’s Manual.

Whether in the West or in India, authors have experimented with genres while writing on startups and the most popular form seems to be the ‘’how to’’model. And if a book is able to get some of the leading protagonists from the start-up world to tell the readers their stories of success and also what failures taught them, it’s almost sure to be picked up and read. Startup Compass falls in that bracket. The book by IIM-A grads Ujwal Kalra and Shobhit Shubhankar gets the reader to meet some of the “iconic entrepreneurs”, who talk about how they got it right. The star gallery of 15 founders, who have shared their experiences across the pages of this book, include known names such as Deep Kalra, Ritesh Agarwal, Sachin Bansal, Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Falguni Nayar, among others. 

While these successful startup founders’ words ring with a note of truth about the route to success, the foreword by Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy adds weight to the narrative. Apart from his much famous economy class travel to this date and being in office at 6.20 am every day throughout his career, Mr Murthy makes some lucid points on leadership in the context of starting up. For example, this is what he has to say while recounting the early days at Infosys. “We learnt that there should be one and only one leader in any company at any time. No company can be run by committees. We learnt that a leader has to lead by example in values; must work the hardest; must make the biggest sacrifices; must welcome ideas and opinions from competent and expert colleagues… and the buck must stop at his table for every major decision.’’ 

Later in the book, Raghunandan G, founder of TaxiForSure, makes a similar point on leadership. While stating that having a co-founder reduces key-person risk for the company and allows greater flexibility for each founder, he argues that “having too many co-founders is not advisable either’’. You don’t have to have a cricket team, he says. “If there are many decision centres in the company, it might become harder to take decisions quickly.’’ The book is divided into 10 chapters to focus on the various aspects such as the idea, the team, the product, the launch, scaling up and so on. The “why’’ is very important for starting anything, almost every successful entrepreneur points out. The why needs to be very strong as that alone will drive a startup to go on, says Mr Bikhchandani, founder of naukri.com. Tied to the why is the idea of the startup. Mr Bikhchandani recounts that after graduation he joined Hindustan Milkfood Manufacturers (now GlaxoSmithKline) as brand manager for Horlicks. There he found that Business India magazine was extremely popular and everyone would read it back to front. The magazine carried job ads at the back. He found his colleagues having animated discussions about job openings after reading the magazine. He realised job opportunities formed a high-interest category and that an organised database for jobs would be very attractive. That was 1990 and the Internet hadn’t come by then, but the idea remained with him. Seven years later, he launched naukri.com.

MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra’s first brush with the idea of the Internet as a tool of doing business was when he sold his wife’s car online and made Rs 15,000 more than what he would have got in an offline deal. Soon after he booked a hotel in Thailand at a rate $15 cheaper a night on the Internet. “He was convinced that the Internet would change the way we lead our lives,” the book narrates.

The chapter on idea makes for good reading. The Delta 4 framework theory of Kunal Shah, FreeCharge and CRED founder, is explained well here. The framework rests on the premise that humans are constantly striving to move from a state of lower efficiency to a state of higher efficiency. According to Mr Shah, between a prevailing state A and a more efficient state B lies a pot of gold….Any solution that enables this shift from A to B, captures this pot of gold. Even as most things about Flipkart are now part of the folklore, the company continues to capture the imagination. When Sachin Bansal cautions against hiring a “B team” early on, you would like to believe him. “We were resolved to do the job ourselves rather than hire somebody who was not better than us.’’

Some other lines stay with you as you read the handbook. 

Mr Bikhchandani says it’s a myth that entrepreneurs are risk-takers. Mr Kalra says, “When you go public, it is only the base camp of Everest.’’ And Sahil Barua, who founded Delhivery, says he finds the stories of entrepreneurs working 140 hours a week ridiculous. “If the business demands 140 hours a week, something is wrong.’’ 

That should be food for thought for many entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs.