Icebergs in the start-up ocean

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
The Unknown Truth Behind India's Start-ups
Suveen Sinha
Penguin Random House India
228 pages; Rs 599

The Tip of the Iceberg is a collection of stories of how 15-odd start-ups began their entrepreneurial journey and made it big in spite of thorns strewn on the road to success. Some of the anecdotes about the protagonists are certainly engaging - such as Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl failing to make it to IIT and counting it as a blessing or Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma scouring Daryaganj footpath bookshops for old issues of Fortune. In the end, though, the reader is left asking for more of "the unknown truth behind India's start-ups," promised in the sub-title.

Suveen Sinha, a senior journalist, wrote the book after a series of interviews (mostly through 2015) with the founders, who he has portrayed as heroes of our times. It is true that many of these start-ups have been able to capture the imagination of a certain generation and have even forced the government to look at the sector as an important business stream. But the book devotes little space and time to the "icebergs" now well in evidence in the start-up ocean: Ruthless sackings, withdrawal of offer letters after promising employment to students, and scarce fund-raising by some of the celebrated men painted with a generous brush here. Food technology companies, the hub of shutdowns and corner-room showdowns in the past one year or so, would have been a perfect case study to illustrate some of the real concerns in the start-up universe.

Mr Sinha sums up the less sunny side of the sector in a paragraph on the last page of the book. "As Yadav left Housing.com and the company lost its early lustre, the fortunes of SoftBank's other investments in India did not exactly soar," he writes. He adds that "there have been questions about the health of Snapdeal and InMobi. Ola has run into Uber…. Oyo, a marketplace for budget hotels, has to contend with Airbnb, and its acquisition of Zo Rooms appears to be less than triumphant." A closer examination of unknown truths related to these developments would have made the book richer.

Besides Snapdeal and Paytm founders, the book attempts to knit together the lives of Baazee's Avnish Bajaj, Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal, Housing.com's Rahul Yadav, ShopClues' Radhika Ghai Aggarwal, Mu Sigma's Dhiraj Rajaram, LimeRoads' Suchi Mukherjee, redBus' Phanindra Sama, Practo's Shashank N D, Stayzilla's Yogendra Vasupal, Vu Technologies' Devita Saraf, Smile group's Harish Bahl, FashionAndYou's Pearl Uppal and Yebhi's Manmohan and Nitin Agarwal.

The immediate question that comes to mind when glancing at this "cast," as Mr Sinha describe them, is: Where are Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, the big daddy of e-commerce in India? The writer provides the answer in the prologue. The Bansals declined to talk because they "just did not have the time for it". Another important start-up that's left out is Myntra, which was founded by Mukesh Bansal, and was later acquired by Flipkart. Yet another miss is Oyo, founded by Ritesh Agarwal, which poses competition even to the Taj group of hotels, as Cyrus Mistry recently acknowledged.

Among the more prominent start-ups, the book has devoted many chapters to Kunal Bahl and Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Rahul Yadav, known for his many face-offs with investors and other founders, is more or less captured through the prologue and one gets to read about Bhavish Aggarwal mostly in the epilogue.

For all that, there are several anecdotes to keep the reader hooked. For instance, when Bhavish Aggarwal's father discovers his IIT graduate son wants to start his own company, Olatrip.com, to sell weekend holidays and getaways, he asks him, "Do you want to be a travel agent?" The cab aggregation business - Ola - came later, but father and son didn't speak for months, according to the book,

Talking about Ola's vision that people should not own cars, the writer tells the reader that Aggarwal does not own a car. "He uses Ola cabs three to four times a day, and gives frequent feedback as a customer."

Mr Sinha rightly calls the start-up boom an "entrepreneurial revolution that has engulfed India". But he may not have been totally accurate in bringing out the contrast between the earlier generation of entrepreneurs such as N R Narayana Murthy of Infosys and Azim Premji of Wipro, and the millennial entrepreneurs. "The new entrepreneurs are creating their own products and technologies, their aspirations fuelled by internet and mobile applications," he says. Many critics have doubted the originality of ideas, products and technologies of Indian start-ups. Mr Sinha elaborates on the Indian market as a place where "a Bansal beats a Bezos". Not quite, yet. He goes on to say, "It has been raining money on start-ups." That does not hold true any longer, either.

Perhaps the problem is that much has changed between the time the writer spoke to the "cast" and the publication of the book. In the intervening months, start-ups have lost much of their sheen, as marquee investors hold on to their purse strings like never before and thousands of sacked employees have taken to social media to vent their anger and frustration. In that sense, the book is slightly behind the times.