A Startup in every alternate house at the bottom.
Edition Five — on the one barrier no technology can remove
Three people have sat across my table over the years, and I find myself thinking about them together.
A twenty-six-year-old engineer, selling the software company he had built to a German group. A man of fifty-five raising private equity for the first time in his life. A woman who had run a household for twenty years and was now, quite calmly, negotiating a joint venture for the small manufacturing unit she had started in a shed.
They had nothing in common. Not age, not gender, not background, not a degree anyone would be impressed by. What they shared was one thing only.
They had started.
• • •
Last edition I argued that geography has stopped mattering — that talent was never concentrated in four cities, only access was, and that access has now reached every district. I stand by it. Cheap smartphones, digital payments, online learning: the scaffolding is up.
But scaffolding is not a building. And one question has been sitting with me since.
If access has been solved, why is the founder still so rare in the ordinary Indian home? In your building, in your lane, in your family WhatsApp group — how many people run something of their own? One? Two?
The answer, in my view, has very little to do with capital, policy or technology.
It is the dinner table.
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Ask honestly. When a young person in your family says I want to start something of my own, what is the first sentence they hear? In most Indian homes it is some version of naukri kar le, pehle settle ho ja. When a daughter-in-law says she wants to sell her designs online, how many families treat it as a business — and how many as a hobby to be tolerated until it passes?
I have watched good ventures die. Very few died for want of capital. Several died for want of a blessing at the kitchen table.
A founder can fight the market. She cannot fight her own dinner table.
• • •
And while we are removing barriers, let us remove the second one — the belief that this is a young person’s game.
Falguni Nayar left investment banking and started Nykaa at fifty; it is a listed company today. Kamesh Goyal started Digit at fifty. Colonel Sanders was sixty-two. Nor is this sentiment — work out of Kellogg by Professor Benjamin Jones found that success rates rise with age, and that a fifty-year-old founder is roughly twice as likely as a thirty-year-old to build a company that lists or gets acquired.
I am not surprised. A seasoned founder brings what no accelerator can teach — judgment, networks, patience, and scars. I see it in my own practice. With an experienced founder across the table the conversation is calmer, the risks are better understood, the documents come out cleaner. Experience is capital.
• • •
A word about timing, too, because we get this wrong almost as a national habit.
In India we usually turn entrepreneur only when life forces us to. A job lost. A partnership broken. A retrenchment letter. The venture becomes a compulsion rather than a choice.
Don’t wait for the crisis.
The kirana owner who starts a delivery tie-up after the platforms have taken his market is fighting for survival. The one who starts while his shop is still doing well is building an asset. A business begun in calm weather is a ship, properly built. One begun in a storm is a raft. Both may float. I know which one I would rather board.
And please do not tell me there is no opportunity. Look at your own lane. Healthcare, education, sport, food, travel — every one of these is a geography-driven business. The diagnostic centre in your suburb, the coaching class, the cloud kitchen that understands your locality’s taste, the weekend operator who knows the road: none of these can be run from California, or even from Bengaluru. They have to be run by someone who lives there. That is you.
• • •
So here is my request, and it is not addressed to the founder. It is addressed to everyone standing around the founder — the parents, the spouse, the in-laws, the relative who asks questions at weddings.
You do not have to write a cheque. Say try it, we are with you. Give them two years of quiet, without beta, package kya hai at every family function. Be the first customer. Forward the catalogue to ten friends — that forward is your angel investment. And if it fails, and some will, take them back with respect and not with I told you so.
A society that humiliates failure will not produce founders. Our trading communities once treated business risk as dharma rather than disgrace. That is cultural capital, and we are quietly spending it.
• • •
The tools are settled. Payments, marketing, learning, customers — all of it now sits in a device in the pocket of every family member above fifteen. When the tools are in every house, why should the enterprise not be?
So let me put an audacious number on it: a startup in every alternate house. Not a handful of unicorns in five cities — lakhs of ordinary, profitable, job-creating businesses in every district, run by people who understand a problem because they live next to it.
Whether you are twenty-two or sixty-two, salaried or retired, ask yourself tonight: what is the one problem in my own neighbourhood that I understand better than anyone else? That is your venture.
And if you are not the one starting up, then be the one standing behind the one who is.
Somewhere in your own house there is a person waiting for a single sentence of permission. Will you be the one to say it?
— Nitin
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Connecting Dots — every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply.