Start-ups, the new star in our midst
The PM has announced that henceforth, January 16 will be celebrated as National Start-up Day. In many ways, these new days being notified represent an addition to the many traditional festivals India celebrates. Only the new ones are about the future. In this case, economic.
Start-up is therefore the new star in our midst. Every few decades, we have a new focus and new vision in the business-scape. And every vision is all about the needs of the future, both immediate and distant, that the nation wants to address.
Look back. At the point of Independence, it was all about “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”. It was about a business vision for the nation that looked at security at one end and productivity at the other. As a person born nearly two decades after India’s Independence, the best I can do is eke out visual metaphors of this in the cinematic archives of India. Out here, the big ones are “Mother India” and the big star Manoj Kumar. The dominant vision for the nation at that point was to drive self-sustainability in every realm, particularly the food the nation wanted. Production, productivity and saving precious foreign exchange remained the dominant theme for years thereafter.
The decades that followed have focused on themes that have become visions to chase and achieve. As agriculture boomed and as Operation Flood got plentiful milk for India, manufacturing became an arena to focus. Out here, once again the idea was to remain outside the ambit of imports of the basics. Subsequently came the push on manufacturing-for-exports to earn valuable foreign currency. Corporate brands that could achieve this were given tax holidays and every other kind of export sop. And then came the push towards the vision of a nation that created services of every kind for itself first and for export later. In came the BPO revolution with the first healthscribe of India that got doctors' prescriptions from overseas, leveraging on the time difference between the US and India.
The BPO then led its way into value-added remote services being delivered to the world out of India. In came the end-to-end services revolution that has become the hallmark of India to date, with the success brought in by TCS, Infosys and Wipro. The end-to-end services industry itself morphed over the years from being a basic body-shopping outfit of good value, to being a superior services provider of bigger value.
India then paused its end-to-end services continuum for a while and has begun a very robust start-up culture. Our 77,000 plus start-ups to date represent the beginning of a new vision for the nation, and they contribute and operate in as many as 73 verticals of industry.
And what’s spurring this? The ultimate motivator of them all: Money. There is a virtual stampede of investors looking out for killer ideas. And the motivation for this stampede is again money. Investors seek to make more money than ever before in this realm.
At the other end, the entrepreneur is creating a glut of ideas to chase. Out here, again, money is a motivator. Entrepreneurs have made billions out of big ideas to date in the world of start-ups.
Innovation of every kind is being spurred on by this quest, once again by money. A virtuous cycle is at play then. Young India is thinking up new ideas into bootstrapped enterprises in action. These enterprises are showcasing themselves to investors who have a large set-up of their own to just do a search and due diligence, looking out for the next big unicorn possibility. The funded ideas are growing into enterprises that are offering jobs and importantly ESOPs to a brave new breed of Indians who believe more in the start-up than in the brick-and-mortar workplace of yore. And everyone wants to be a unicorn for now, before the first hectocorn ($100 billion valuation start-up) comes by.
And out of these start-ups have emerged our unicorns (the Indian “Ekashringa”, if you may). Even as I type this onto my desktop, we have 83 unicorns, start-ups with a valuation of $1 billion plus. As many as 39 new ones are poised on the verge of becoming unicorns, well nigh over the next six months. As the world will celebrate its 1,000th unicorn, India will surely celebrate its 100th, representing a robust 10% market share.
I do believe the next 10 years ahead for India is the digital decade. Digitalism is the new religion. To an extent India of the future will be built by thousands of start-ups that will spur the innovation process to a point of over-heatedness. Money will be poured in by investors of every kind. Money will be equally burnt by entrepreneurs of every different dispensation. Out of a thousand, one will win. And this win will compensate for all the losses. And this win will then spur on an entire new generation of ideas that will continue the virtuous cycle.
If we look back at the economic brand image of India, it was built by a few. It was the Tatas, the Birlas and in more recent times, the Ambanis and the Adanis. Then came an era of the eighties when India meant Infosys, Wipro and TCS in that order (never mind what the revenue pecking order was). Again, a clutch of few companies dominating the image of a business sector.
I think today and tomorrow are different on that count. The economic brand image of India today depends not on the single but on the multiple. Multiple start-ups across multiple sectors will define India of the future. To that extent, I do agree with PM Modi when he said that start-ups are the “backbone of new India”.
In closing, if there is an immediate wish I have, it is this ardent desire to see India’s first agri-centric startup unicorn. Rather sooner than much later.
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)