Down But Not Out: Style overwhelms substance in tales of startup failure

This book on founders and their failures offers flashes of genuine insight but feels incomplete

Down But Not Out: Gritty Comebacks of India’s Diehard Founders

by Subrata Mitra & Pankaj Mishra

Published by 

Harper Business

Illustrated by 

Rajesh Subramanian

231 pages ₹1,199

  This could have been a great book on entrepreneurial grit, second acts and learning from failure. The two authors had the insights and the experience and the storytelling talent. 

One of them, Pankaj Mishra, is a journalist, a cofounder of Factor Daily, a good storyteller. The second, Subrata Mitra, has been a founder and has seen hardship and failure up close. He became a highly successful venture capitalist, is currently a partner at Accel —and has funded and mentored many of the founders featured in the book. 

The subjects of the book — entrepreneurs who have seen failure up close —have great insights to offer. Finally, the illustrator of the volume, Rajesh Subramanian, is also very talented. 

Yet, despite all these advantages, the book loses its way. The authors allow style to overshadow the content. The end product left this reviewer feeling dissatisfied and with far too many questions unanswered. The narration is jerky and entire paragraphs tend to be repeated within a couple of pages —largely because of the non-linear storytelling and the hybrid format chosen by the authors. 

Pankaj Mishra’s foreword — “Still Here: Entrepreneurship is a Trapeze Act” — gives a clue to what went wrong. After doing the interviews and reconstruction of the founder stories, the authors were looking at content that could easily have become a 75,000-word book. 

Mr Mishra asked himself who would read such a long book and decided to try out a graphic novel format instead. This was where Rajesh Subramanian came in. However, two chapters in, the founders featured in the book felt that the new structure was missing too many core events and insights. Then the authors pivoted to the final format — a hybrid storytelling style — with illustrations and essaylets. 

I think this is where the book went astray. Though the stories and founders had great potential, what the co-authors ended up with was too many gaps — apart from forcing the reader to Google basic information. The authors assume that the average reader would be familiar with all startups and the business models that the founders featured have built, are building or have failed to build. This is expecting too much. 

The stories, despite flashes of genuine insight, are incomplete. Within the stories, characters occasionally appear with little context or explanation. In Mr Mishra’s foreword, Avinash Raghava suddenly appears out of the blue. He is someone whom Mr Mishra trusts and with whom he discusses things — and Mr Raghava is credited with seeding the idea of Messrs Mishra and Mitra co-authoring a book. But you do not know exactly who Mr Raghava is or what he does. You get a throwaway sentence that he has started Phoenix, a cohort of failed founders. But beyond that there is little about him in the book. This reader presumes Mr Raghava is the founder of AIBhoomi (formerly SaaSBhoomi), which is described as India’s first pay-it-forward community to accelerate SaaS and artificial intelligence (AI) growth. Equally, it could be someone else with the same name.

There are other chapters where this happens — characters flit in briefly, and then vanish. Cofounders and close friends who anchored the initial days of the startup often have disagreements with the main character whose story is being told but the reader only gets to see one side of the picture. 

In trying to be dramatic and stylish, the structure of some of the stories tends to resemble Generative AI narration.  A point being made goes on for too long and becomes irritating for a serious business reader. Consider this para: “Early-stage leadership is not about conviction in a destination. It’s about walking into uncertainty with enough steadiness that others will follow. You don’t promise clarity. You promise presence. You absorb ambiguity without freezing. You hold the line not because the path is clear, but because you’ve decided to keep moving anyway.” 

Or: “That room taught them more than frugality. It taught tempo. Code should move at the speed of a customer conversation. Invoices should move at the speed of trust. Nothing stayed on the backlog if the customer wouldn’t use it in the next quarter.”

To be clear, I do not think these are AI-generated texts but the tonality, structure and cadence are much like what you get by prompting some AI models. It is not that the stories of the founders are not interesting. But they get lost or diffused in the chosen format and narrative style. 

The authors have given a page of advice on how to read the book. It includes tips such as “read the pauses, not just the panels” and “What is unsaid matters”. 

Unfortunately, for this reviewer who is somewhat old school, the pauses become too long, and what is unsaid is far more than what is said in the pages. I suspect if Mr Mishra had seen it as not a 75,000-word book to be read at one go but 10 different tales, which added up to 75,000 words, Down But Not Out would have been a better book. 

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The reviewer is the founder of Prosaic View and a former editor of Business Today and Businessworld