As someone who routinely wears boots under Levi’s 511s, I understand
the sheer utility of those small loops called bootstraps - Sramana Mitra’s high
focus on an entrepreneur bootstrapping the start-up in her book “Seed India -How To Navigate the Seed Capital Gap In India (Entrepreneur Journeys)” helped
me appreciate the criticality of this aspect in the Indian venture funding
context.
The book’s USP is its brevity and the matter-of-fact,
blog-like style but what keeps your interest on is the verbatim reproduction of
the interviews. Spurred by the author’s knowledgeable querying, the interviewed
entrepreneurs come up with some honest reflections & very useful insights
into their successful entrepreneurial journey. Some statements though come
across as anachronistic, particularly when Sachin Bansal of Flipkart seemingly
undermines the adaptation, penetration & potential of digital books and affordability
of e-readers in India - the fact that I was reading this book on my Kindle Fire
HD made the assertion even more ironic.
While it is a welcome trend that Indian start-up stories are
getting written about, I once again can’t help but notice that the term ‘start-up’
is gradually getting equated with IT/ITES/ Cloud enterprise. Most other enterprise categories such as biotech,
green-tech are clearly missing out being written about as interesting case-studies since they can’t quite
compete with a typical cloud based start-up which (can..) starts generating
income within few months of existence – As Sramana did admit passingly, the logic of bootstrapping one’s
business is a very different ball-game if the start-up product offering is
physical (~biotech) as against being virtual (~SaaS)
Coming back to the book, I felt that what was perhaps
intended to be showcased by the author but not quite articulated is an observation
that ‘bootstrapping an early enterprise’ comes quite naturally to Indian
entrepreneurs given the culturally ingrained reluctance to diluting ownership/
stake of a start-up business early on & the practical jugaad (in a fair
sense) mind-set of sailing in two boats before hitching on to the one of choice.
Considering this being a cluster/ market dominated by such lean
business ethos & relatively more fiscally-conservative entrepreneurial
attitude which by default de-risk the investor’s moolah, one’d have expected
India to be a hot destination for an alternate asset fund manager looking for a
safe-harbour for her/ his precious dollars, but quite obviously it is not. Of course
it is also apparent that there isn’t enough fish in the pond for any LP to develop
a serious strategy betting on Indian start-up scene & perhaps the only way to
make this ‘LP-friendly entrepreneurial ethic’ work in India’s favour at scale is
to seed more & more promising enterprises, bootstrapped or otherwise.
Afterthought
Just wondering.... the Global LPs could be a lot more interested if
the Indian VCs claim to be ‘Conservative’ rather than being ‘Contrarian’ in
their choice of deals :-)
