The case of missing startup icons

Will India get enduring role models of its own?

For Steve Jobs, meeting Edwin Land was “like visiting a shrine”, according to a 2015 article in Business Insider.

Land founded Polaroid Corporation in 1937 and pretty much invented instant photography. He was the Steve Jobs of his time: A college dropout, he conceived products before buyers knew they needed it. According to a New York Times article of 2011, he turned Polaroid’s shareholder meetings in the 1960s into dramatic showcases with art-directed settings and live music (Jobs later made this into an art).

Yep, Jobs idolised him, maybe worshipped him, if we take his “shrine” reference seriously.

But many more worship Jobs. He died of cancer in October 2011, aged 56, but lives on in the turtlenecks and jeans adorned by startup founders the world over, even though not many are able to emulate him in more useful ways, such as in vision and execution.

In the United States, Jobs is not the only enduring startup icon. Jobs’ great rival, Bill Gates, remains a force. Without Microsoft, there might not have been an OpenAI, although Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella is now the face of Microsoft. Larry Ellison, who started Oracle in the 1970s, is on this year's list of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.

From a later generation, the one driven by the internet, Larry Page and  Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are going strong. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is the world’s largest “everything store”, and growing big in newer areas such as the cloud. Mark Zuckerberg, younger than the others, carries on with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and has attempted an astounding repositioning with Meta.

Then there is the Paypal Mafia, a term of respect, awe, and admiration for the serial investors and entrepreneurs coming out of Paypal, which Peter Thiel and Max Levchin created and sold, and which changed the course of the internet by introducing it to online payments. Several well-known names on the internet trace their story to the Paypal Mafia, and that includes Facebook, YouTube, and SpaceX. Mr Thiel, who taught a course about startups at Stanford in 2012, is as big a force as any in America’s Silicon Valley.

The list is endless, and incomplete without recounting the story of Bill Hewlett and David Packard, college friends who started computer company HP in a garage. This 12x18 foot garage is acknowledged to be the birthplace of the Valley. It still stands in its original place on a tree-lined street near Stanford University.

Beacons and models

All of them, and a few more (too many to name in a column of finite word count), have inspired generations of entrepreneurs not only in the US but around the world, and continue to do so. They have played a part in placing the US at the top of every listing of the most entrepreneurial countries, a hotbed of innovation and disruptive thinking.

So, who is fuelling startup aspirations in India, becoming beacons and role models to aspiring founders?

India has been a country of entrepreneurs forever. But if we look at the first generation of modern, internet-driven, consumer-facing startups in India, some names stand out: Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Byju Raveendran of Byju’s, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, Ritesh Agarwal of OYO, Kunal Shah of Freecharge, Phanindra Sama of redBus, and Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola.

Bhavish is showing no signs of slowing down. He now is in the unique position of being the founder of not one, not two, but three unicorns, having added electric vehicles firm Ola Electric and artificial intelligence startup Krutrim to his trophy shelf.

Most of the others enjoy unwavering following and fandom. Mr Shah, for instance, who is trying to create a new model with CRED, enjoys a huge following on social media. He has 881,700 followers on X, and anything he posts goes viral (“Engineers may eat doctor’s job”, posted on May 25, received 3,500 likes, 547 reposts, and 685 replies.)

So it is with the others. And many of them are busy investors in other startups. But do we have a Jobs, a Gates, a Zuckerberg, or a Thiel, or any of the others?

The answer, dear reader, is blowing in the wind.

Fate of the founder

Flipkart is now a Walmart company. Sanpdeal has shrunk, Shopclues has disappeared. Paytm is facing rough weather with regulators. And Byju’s has troubles of its own.

On Thursday, Ritesh Agarwal said on X that FY24 was OYO’s maiden net profitable financial year and that FY25 would be more exciting. He spoke of growth not only in India but also in the Nordic countries, Southeast Asia, the US, and the UK.

We will have to see how that pans out. OYO’s attempts to float a public issue have not been successful so far.

Indeed, many of India’s startup founders have done well for themselves. Grapevine says the ultra luxury houses in Gurugram, which are burgeoning, get a lot of bookings from startup founders. But some of the startups they have founded have not proved to be enduringly successful and appear unlikely to become their lasting legacy.

Is that because some of India’s startups are not seen to be born out of original ideas? Right or wrong, some people love to say that the likes of Amazon and Uber were originals. 

Things can change quickly, though. Maybe Paytm and Byju’s will bounce back. Apple had a near-death experience before Jobs returned. Uber and Amazon faced difficult times. Maybe Sachin Bansal will disrupt the financial sector with Navi.

Maybe we will have startup icons of our own.