The Startup Journey

Entrepreneurs like Sanjiv Bikhchandani of Naukri, Murugavel Janakiraman of Matrimony, the Bansals of Flipkart;  VSS Mani  of Justdial, etc. deserve massive admiration. What they have achieved is more like conquering Everest. Good to know that once they have climbed the peak, thee environment also helps protect "their" turf. From a blog post by Dev Khare of Lightspeed Ventures (emphasis mine): Many of India's successful startups have navigated a maze of challenges, creating leading brands and sustaining for long periods of time.   Correspondingly, it is much harder in India, relative to the US/Europe, for competition to unseat leading brands . ... Startups need large markets (Rs 2500cr+ or $500 million+) to get large and succeed.  This is hard to find in India, perhaps due to early consumer demand, unorganized markets, regional differences or foreign substitutes.  For example, digital advertising is a roughly $400 million annual business here, ...

Pradeep Gupta of the Cybermedia Group has a nice article in Business Today on the topic: Another bottleneck is absence of delegation. When a company starts, the entrepreneur behind it often performs multiple roles, from chairman to caretaker. He takes a wide range of decisions from technical ones to marketing, from production to administration. His team too depends on the entrepreneur for every kind of decision. At a later stage, this hampers growth. The entrepreneur soon finds his knowledge inadequate to tackle challenges, or faces time management problems, which hold back the company. To achieve genuine delegation of responsibility, a second rung of leadership has to be created and empowered. Till this is done, businesses cannot scale up. Entrepreneurs often feel that by delegating they are giving up control. In reality, they are helping the business to bloom. ...There is also the pitfall of execution. In entrepreneurial companies, much work gets done without being formally recorded...