Definitive milestones along the way have been the emergence of the venture capital and angel funding industry, the success of executives turned entrepreneurs like Narayana Murthy and Raman Roy and more recently the runaway valuations enjoyed by unicorn companies like Flipkart, Ola and Paytm
The startup movement in our country has seen many fits and starts. In the early days when employment, ideally in “safe government jobs,” was the best option for any educated young person in society and failed entrepreneurs could be frowned upon or even have their matrimonial prospects being diluted. Cut to the present day when every young person fancies himself as the next Zuckerberg or Bansal and we can see that the country has traversed the full course.
Definitive milestones along the way have been the emergence of the venture capital and angel funding industry, the success of executives, turned entrepreneurs like Narayana Murthy and Raman Roy and more recently the runaway valuations enjoyed by unicorn companies like Flipkart, Ola and Paytm. The emergence of incubators all over the country, both within academic institutions and through entrepreneurial initiatives and the Government support and visible leadership clarion cries like the Prime Minister’s “Startup India Standup India” initiative have all helped to foster the thought in young minds and even in seasoned executives that it is better to build an exciting new company that creates jobs than to hold on to a predictable employment or seek a job in an organisation created by someone else.
However, recent trends have shown that the startup opportunity is not all that it was imagined to be and indeed, one could twist an old cliché and say “where angels fear to tread, fools rush in”. The dramatic drop in valuations and the dreaded “down rounds” for fresh capital for firms who were the original darlings of investors in the seemingly limitless Business to Consumer (B2C) space and the relative inability of incubators and accelerators to deliver success stories with any consistency has sent tremors through the market and questions are being raised about the sustainability of the entire startup movement.
In such an environment, for a city like Pune or any other “smart” destination which wants to spur innovation and create a truly exciting entrepreneurial environment, there is a real need for a “design thinking approach” to design a solution that is truly pathbreaking and both leverages and builds the ecosystem in which entrepreneurial passions can be kindled and entrepreneurs enabled through every stage of the process to success!
The five stages of ecosystem building would be as follows:
These stages are best understood by tracing a customer journey or the way a potential entrepreneur would be assisted through every stage of the arduous journey. The awareness creation process could be done through video and blended learning modules made available through a number of participating engineering, technology and management colleges and even some of the better-equipped skills and counselling centres in the city.As part of this process, it would also be worth setting expectations among the wannabe entrepreneurial community and weed-out startups with me-too ideas that would be doomed to success without a differentiated value proposition.
Two important aspects that the incubator must provide is a network of willing corporates to mentor entrepreneurs and open their organisations
Once a worthy cohort of potential entrepreneurs and ideas have been identified through awareness and counselling, formal accelerator programme offered through a select group of academic institutions and centres, ideally affiliated to the host university, would be needed to set the entrepreneur and the potential startup off on a sound footing. This is the stage at which the formal incubator could come into the selection process, providing start-up capital and space and facilities to take the initial pilots forward and test out the robustness of each idea, product or service before the company has the ability to blossom on its own.
Two important aspects that the incubator must provide is a network of willing corporates to mentor entrepreneurs and open their organisations to test out some of the ideas in a true business environment. And a full funding support system, from angel money to subsequent small rounds of capital all the way to a Series Ä venture capital round. Success must be measured not just by the number of startups that start the journey but also the number that successful move from proof of concept to real solutions and early stage to venture capital funding, Swachh and the Pune City Lighthouses, which was one of the 14 projects launched by the Prime Minister on the first anniversary of the Smart Cities program in the country. With all the hype and hoopla that has surrounded the start-up movement in recent times, it is essential for a mature approach to be taken in leading cities like Pune to get entrepreneurs on the path to national and global success.
Our country has the ability to lead the world in many respects if we can overcome the forces of divisiveness and get all interested parties – the central and local governments, global national and local corporates, civil society and well-meaning individuals to work shoulder to shoulder and build more inclusive cities in the country.
In Pune, we have seen eminent citizens like Rahul Bajaj, Baba Kalyani, Anu Aga, Meher Pudumjee, Ashwini Malhotra, Pramod Choudhari, Anand Deshpande, Ravi Pandit and many others reach out with time, funds and volunteers to make social change a reality. With such a strong wind beneath their wings, startups will soon find their place in the sun as well!
By Ganesh Natarajan
