Leaning Into Risk

India's attitude to starting up is changing, turning entrepreneurship from a fringe pursuit into a mainstream aspiration

- Nabodita Ganguly and Tarunya Sanjay

In 2005, 24-year-old Ashish Kumar, now co-founder at the venture-capital (VC) firm Fundamentum, quit his job at Microsoft in the US to return to India and start his own venture. At the time, entrepreneurship was neither celebrated nor respected. Relatives fretted that he was throwing away hard-won achievements: an IIT degree, a coveted job and a promising career in the US.

About a decade-and-a-half later, things were beginning to change.

In 2019, Abhinav Singh, then a 25-year-old product designer in Bengaluru, faced a quiet heartbreak. His startup, Colorpur, which allowed graphic designers to upload designs for product manufacturing, was shutting down. Although it wasn't a spectacular failure, it simply didn't scale the way he had envisioned. Yet, as he packed up his modest office, Singh felt something unexpected: optimism.

“It's much more 'cool' now to be a founder,” he says. “Earlier, being a startup founder was even seen as a red flag when getting married! But the key shift is that failure doesn’t define you anymore.”

Singh's journey reflects a broader cultural shift in India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. For a long time, failure carried a heavy stigma. Parents, peers and society at large saw it as a mark of irresponsibility.

Today, it is increasingly viewed as a rite of passage. For instance, it has become quite common for founders to publicly announce that they are wrapping a company and returning the money to investors when their ideas don’t scale. This would have been unthinkable in the past.

The changing perception is not just anecdotal; it is visible in the rising number of startup founders announcing their closures because their idea didn’t pan out or scale.

The acceptability of failure as a learning experience has also been propelled by celebrated examples of founders like InMobi founder Naveen Tiwari’s whose first four startups failed before the fifth turned into India’s first unicorn.