Confessions Of a Digital Startup founder

Zubin Ray, founder of Chacar, writes about the digital startup environment.

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STRUGGLES OF A STARTUP 

Startups have been the cool thing to do for a while now. The success of a few companies, first abroad, then in India, has encouraged a spirit of adventurism and a greater appetite for risk in people of all ages and backgrounds. There are a lot of positives – new ideas are being tested, new skills developed, realms explored that might have remained unknown. Making millions of bucks, though attractive, is far from the only charm of running a startup.

Yet in the current environment there is a lot of scepticism and uncertainty about what is going to happen to all of these new companies. How many of them have a sustainable future? Does that future take a shape we recognise – like generating profits, having big offices or many people working there? Do the people really understand what they’re doing? Without claiming definitive answers, we can still try to better understand the situation.

IS THIS THE GREAT INDIAN STARTUP DEPRESSION? 

We can be mostly confident that mass unemployment, the collapse of real estate and social upheaval are unlikely to result from startup shutdowns. What is going to happen is a big drop in the funding opportunities available. This is very important since all startups depend on private money paid by people willing to take risks.

Like public money, which is traded on stock markets and bond markets and others, private money also has a market. The basis is simply that some other, usually bigger and richer, private investor exists to whom you can sell to. The possibility to sell, liquidity, is the most important part of having a market – if you can never sell your house, a paper value of crores is of no use to you.