Founder, MediaNama | TED Fellow | Asia21 Fellow | Public Speaker | Columnist | ❤️'s Tech + Policy
In today's Times of India, I write about why the Indian startup ecosystem should celebrate its success like Naukri, MakeMyTrip and Indiamart and not mourn its failures because failure is a part of a founders journey and companies fail, founders don't. Aprameya and Mayank have not failed. I also warn about the impact of the removal of safe harbor protections for social media which would have impacted potential partnerships and acquisitions. cc folks (or their co's) mentioned in the article Sanjeev Bikhchandani Dinesh Agarwal Pratyush Prasanna Pravin Jadhav Kulin Shah Deep Kalra Aprameya Radhakrishna Mayank Bidawatka Beerud Sheth Vijay Shekhar Sharma Kavin Bharti Mittal Sachin Bansal Binny Bansal Aloke Bajpai Deepinder Goyal Rajeev Chandrasekhar
Things have changed for the good. Earlier if a startup shut its operations it would have been seen as a ‘failure’ of the founders. Not succeeding is accepted a lot more these days, thanks to article such as yours which throws light on this subject. And it takes tremendous amount of courage to take the decision to shut operations . Koo did the right thing in my opinion
India's startup ecosystem is thriving and innovating, there is no reason to mess with its market dynamics emulating China and Europe. Founders are not defined by one or two failures. Well said Nikhil Pahwa You are the guy who have seen and written about the trajectory of startup ecosystem building. Thanks for sharing.
Founder’s journey is tough, much tougher than what most people can imagine… Very well written peice Nikhil. We need to celebrate their guts, resilience and journey.
Well articulated piece Nikhil Success and failure are but two aspects of the same thing. There are a few clear successes and many utter disasters. But so many ventures walk the thin line between the two - and could well fall on either side. For many entrepreneurs a failure is merely a trial run before their big show!
Very well articulated Nikhil Pahwa . I think it's about the risk and problem startups eco system is trying to solve. Ofcourse many will fail and some will succeed.
believe founders killed koo without a visionary thought. 1. There has to be a purpose for any product while growing from scratch. 2. Like ola make it regional and grow it overseas. This will provide scale . 3. Same is done by Alibaba, Flipkart, gpay etc. 4. In India Penetration of twitter like product is less than 1% Only way to make it popular and scale is to focus on Bollywood, cricket, politics. 5. This can be be done by having more features and promotion for above 3. Once we have the ability to decide on quality of movies , winning chances of politician/party , celebrity status of cricketer on koo they should have taken it global. 6. Mind it Indian are today 1/4th or more of world population , if we can make the product popular fo India , it is definitely for the world, Thought? Next koo ++ should decide on who has to be Indian prime minister.
In the case of Koo, the problem was Twitter's greatness, the community took Koo as another place to share instead of the primary place to share news or views. Twitter had the monetization issue and it was the same with Koo also. But twitter found a buyer and Koo couldn't. Because all Koo users had twitter accounts but it was not true in reverse. Yourquote had to shut down for the same reasons , as despite the traffic, monetization by ads is a challenge. Subscription can survive a solution if there is some unique feature or content offered but that too takes time for self sustaining the system.
Great article, Nikhil Pahwa! Knowing what not to do is a crucial part of being an entrepreneur. After all, you can't defy the First Law of Thermodynamics :) I feel the comparison to Google, Facebook, etc. is out of place. For one, these are solutions for rich consumers in mature economies. Second, the problems of competition are well documented. I think we need a different mindset in India. Instead of aspiring to create 10 startups worth $10B each, I think we should aspire to create 100 startups worth $1B each. The opportunities and problems here are vast and diverse enough to support a multitude of such entrepreneurs. And, as an added bonus, this will lead to far more job creation than at large behemoths.
People know 7 out of 10 startups will fail but expect 10 of 10 entrepreneurs to succeed. Failure is not just part of the journey but in fact part of the process. On Koo specifically - i have said this elsewhere too: User behaviour is constantly evolving. Every new generation is behaving differently. Any product that mimics behaviour of the previous generation but launches it today will most likely fail. It had nothing to do with Koo - they went after the ‘Indian version of’ idea but current users had no dissonance with twitter + power users would have found it impossible to recreate the existing following. Add to that the above - no new users were seeking such a product. Same product a decade ago might have had a different outcome.
Co-founder @ MProfit & CarGator
3wI love it when people tell me “I knew XYZ would fail”. If you are negative, the odds are in your favor. But, that is not how the world was built. It takes a few people to ignore the critics and push through even if they fail several times till they reach success.