Written By- Jaya Pathak
The unicorn decade of India has now reached the stage of being instructive. The hype of billion dollar valuations has gone; public markets, stricter capital and some notable disillusionments have both poked holes into the mythology. What was left is more helpful than the hype used to be: a collection of solid business experiences of founders that built at unprecedented pace and bent consumer behaviour, redefined sector boundaries and with some failing to know too well where ambition can stop and discipline has to set in.
Top 10 Business Lessons From Indian Unicorn Founders for Startup Success
The first one is that the growth of lasting enterprises is normally bred in struggle and not style. India has produced some of the most impactful founders of unicorns who started pursuing what venture capital popularized as glamorous. It is, in fact, because it was opaque and mistrusted, which is why Yashish Dahiya at Policybazaar selected insurance, one of the least popular segments of Indian consumer finance.
Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar of Razorpay created payment infrastructure, which is not the type of business that will make founders an instant celebrity, but whose services will be required as digital commerce becomes more essential. The same bet on logistics was bet by Sahil Barua and his co-founders at Delhivery. The trend is very clear: big corporations tend to conceal themselves in the areas of customer dissatisfaction that are persistent and the complacency of the incumbent.
The second lesson is implied by that insight. In India, trust is not a soft variable, it is usually the product. This is what Falguni Nayar knew the most when she created Nykaa. In India, beauty retail did not only require the selection. It required editing, feel and the impression it would not carelessly false lead the customer with his opinion. This is so predictable in hindsight. In the emergent markets, particularly in situations where counterfeits, lopses in service and inconsistency in brand literacy co-exist, trust may be manufactured into business model and put in form of monetisation in the long run. Those founders who live long are found to be those who comprehend that credibility builds at a slower pace than marketing and on a longer lasting basis.
The third lesson not as well written, but as decisive, is distribution is strategy. Indian founders have demonstrated severally that product obsession, as noble as it is, is hardly sufficient. Swiggy by Sriharsha majety never came to rank high as food delivery was a new concept. It gained significance, due to the execution in Indian cities being a penal, street-level issue laced with an appearance of an app.
The ascendancy of Lenskart under Peyush Bansal is based on a comparable reality. The company never only sold eyewear but it addressed the discovery, trial, fulfilment and repeat behaviour categories in a category where people still desired as well as touch. Inspirers who believe that distribution would be determined later, once product-market-fit was reached, in most cases found out too late that distribution was the market.
A fourth lesson, to which an investor knows better than founders, is that infrastructure business establish greater moats than glamour would seem to indicate. Indian unicorns like Delhivery, Razorpay and a number of others became strategically significant not due to their perceived higher volume and volume than consumer brands, but by virtue of their being under the same activity whose volume continued to keep rising.
Infrastructure takes longer to rejoice, is less effective during small-talk and usually, is less attractive on a pitch deck. But here it is to which defensibility is often living. The founders of unicorn companies in India have shown the market that the most valuable company in a wave, is not necessarily one that is most talking to the consumer. Frequently it is he or she who silently bricks the system along.
The fifth thing is that good founders do not venerate their original script. Deepinder Goyal CEO of Zomato has been a variety of companies in a single corporate life: restaurant discovery site, food delivery company, case study e.commerce in the public market, and then a everything-has-been-convenient business by acquiring other companies and creating adjacencies.
Swiggy also has been forced to change its initial shape. It is not that all pivots are good ones; most of them are panicky pretenses in the guise of strategy. The truth behind this is that perseverance should not be embraced. Entrepreneurs who go through several market cycles align with the original thought more callously. They understand which parts to retain and which ones to draw the map anew.
This is followed by a less exhilarating lesson, which the Indian ecosystem had to learn at a very great price: capital is a memorandum of action, not a replacement of business quality. The era of easy money created a false illusion of understanding among both founders and spectators. Big rounds were getting like evidence. In rating commenced to impersonate itself in the form of verdict.
This interpretation would prove false later on when some unicorn tales were published in edtech and fintech, among others. Money can assist a business to gain market share, enlist talent and beat its slower competitors. It can equally effectively amplify weak controls, messy economics and a founder stress in not wanting to hear what is unpleasant to him. That equation has been demonstrated both ways by Indian unicorn founders. The prudent speculator examines not only those who brought children into the world brilliantly, but those that stood legible subsequent to receipt of the cash.
That brings about a seventh lesson, and, perhaps, the most procrastrated of lessons, founders, governance is not postscript. It is strategy. Over years, the ecosystem of the Indian startup culture was too eager to appropriate governance as the lingo of the grown-up companies, and not the respiratory base of the fast-developing companies.
This profligacy has become narrowed. Symptoms such as public scrutiny, regulatory focus and investor maturity have been toughened. The founder who still holds that compliance, quality of boards, internal controls and reporting discipline will wait to scale have arrived is playing a playbook that is very much out-of-date. A few of unicorn travels have made this plain, and at times very painful. Losses will be accepted longer than distrust in the markets.
One of the oldest lessons has been something of a positive revelation in the modern Indian business: when the product is truly global, geography is no longer an imperative, as it once was. The Freshworks by Girish Mathrubootham assisted in breaking the previously existing mental wall imposed by Indian founders on them that they could make their times service firms to the world but could not create category-defining software products.
That innovation was important since it necessitated a mental re-reset. But it was a truth which revealed more. The world cannot afford global ambition through cost arbitrage. It demands design integrity, understanding customers and product rigor on another level. Indian hustle was not simply exported by Indian unicorn founders who have achieved success abroad. They lived up to the international expectations.
The ninth thing is that India values pragmatism over ideology. Founders who teach online or offline, high-end or mass, speed or margin, tend to be taught lessons by the market. Nykaa physical growth and development did not weaken its online enterprise, in fact, it empowered customer loyalty. Lenskart made no e-commerce dogma retreat into its omnichannel play but realised that Indian customers continue to shift fluidly between screens and stores across most of the categories of products they consume. The founders who are most powerful are not often purists. They are translators. They accept what the market serves to them and construct models that admire, not investor fashions.
The last and the least stylish one is the same old thing: charisma of the founder is a feeble tourist signifier of institutional power. The unicorn boom in India just like any other startup boom had its fair share of interesting narrators. Some deserved the attention. Attention was confused with permanence. Occasionally the companies that have stayed prestigious tend to be those in which the creator had learned how to create structures, rather than simply stories.
The relative sobriety of Sahil Barua as a business leader, the calmness of operations waiting with Falguni Nayar, and considered gravity of founders who devote more time to economics than mythology is all heading in the same direction. So sooner or later the institution will have to bury the person than make him more impressive.
Conclusion
In order of importance, that possibly is the best lesson of all. The founders of India unicorns did not just show the nation how to build scale startups. They have instructed, by failure as well as success, that business is a protracted quarrel with the world. It praises imagination certainly, but it praises imagination as it is checked in excellence by structure, trust and adaptability and by a capacity and inclination to surpass one own legend.
The following generation of founders would be well-served to remember that the valuation milestone is not the real legacy of the unicorn era. The archive of decisions below it is its cod. Today, the founders to emulate are not the ones who got to a billion dollars the quickest. It is they who have learned how to work velocity into durability, and not until market pinned the lesson upon them.
