START-UP CITY
Moloy K Bannerjee, Siddharth Bannerjee and P Ranganath Sastry
Collins Business;
214 pages; Rs 450
In the 2010 film Social Network - a drama on the founding of Facebook - Harvard University President Larry Summers tells the Winklevoss twins, who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea of the popular start-up from them, that "Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding a job." Indians seems to have taken this idea to heart in recent times, venturing into the promising pastures of Start-up Land, with its unchallenged capital at Bengaluru.
In Start-up City, the authors track 10 success stories from the capital of Karnataka. In the Preface, they claim: "This book is... an ode to this new romantic notion of entrepreneurship, as also to the software industry... It is also a paean to Bangalore..." True to their word, they wax eloquent about the entrepreneurial ventures that have struck gold. But those looking for a parallel history of the city will be disappointed.
Contemporary urban histories of India are ubiquitous, with historian Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables - being made into a noir drama, Bombay Velvet, starring Ranbir Kapoor and Karan Johar, in his first full-fledged role, by Anurag Kashyap - leading the list. Others that come to mind are Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats (on Patna), City of Djins by William Dalrymple and Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Amit Chaudhuri. But unlike these, which are concerned with the social and political life of the cities, Start-up City concerns itself with - and only with - well, start-ups. A short section in the Introduction, "Why Bangalore", begins to describe how "the city of gardens, as a tranquil destination for retired people, Bangalore suddenly found itself caught in the middle of a programming boom in the software sector." But it leads nowhere.
Perhaps the reason this book does not conform to the traditional historical narrative style is that the authors are neither historians nor writers at all. Moloy Bannerjee is an IIM-Calcutta alumni and sometime IIM-Bangalore faculty, who has spent years managing software companies; Siddharth Bannerjee has an MSc from London School of Economics and is a public policy analyst; and P Ranganath Sastry is an engineer and manager. This is not to call into question their ability to identify and tell a good tale. The style they employ - simple rather than simplistic - is particularly suited for their narratives, and while all the 10 stories in the book are interesting, some stand out.
For instance, the anecdote of Bharat Goenka, the founder of Tally, who was driven to devise the accounting software for his technophobe father by the challenge thrown at him: "Are you writing programmes to make the life of the programmer easier or the life of the user?" A market leader, with 80 per cent penetration, Tally has stuck to its principle of integrating "the power of simplicity into each piece of software". The other principle that has stood by Tally is its unique pricing policy - it is a rare example of a company that doesn't have any licensing restriction. This innovation can also be traced back to Goenka's father who felt that software should be like cars; one doesn't pay "more or less depending on the number of passengers".
In a degenerate world, where one is often sneered at for being a tech-retard, such an example is refreshing.
Another such story is that of N Ramakrishnan and his unique start-up Computer Call. The authors reveal Ramakrishnan - a teacher - was sceptical about being included in the book, as his organisation, counterintutively, rejects expansion. After a successful corporate career and a stint in journalism, Ramakrishnan chose to impart what he knew about software and programming to newbies in the mid-1990s, when computers were just becoming familiar objects. He recalls: "Some people were afraid to even touch the machine." The world of computers may have changed, but this successful teacher has stuck to his routine: "As a ritual, every morning he would take out his scooter from the garage and park it on the street outside. Then he would rearrange the furniture and convert the space into a classroom."
But despite the plethora of details, the entrepreneurs do not emerge as fully fleshed out characters. We learn nothing of their personal triumphs or professional tribulations, nor does the book manage to locate them in the geo-economic space of Bangalore.
A reader of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich - which served as the source for Social Network - gets a good look into the life of undergraduates at Harvard in the first decade of this century, the social and intellectual environment that provided the cradle to Facebook founders Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin.
Having read the 214 pages of Start-up City, we don't know if the entrepreneurs profiled in them picked up books at Blossoms or stopped for a drink at Pecos while coming up with their amazing ideas. That is a pity.
