Survival Mode On

Never was one quarter so crucial in the life of companies, especially startups who have mostly lived on the VC ventilator. Those who have battled crises in the past tell Forbes India their biggest takeaway: One must survive this quarter to see light at the end of the tunne

- Rajiv Singh

September 2008. Ashish Kashyap, former country manager of Google India, was left with only one choice. A cold-blooded one. “I had to kill to survive,” recalls Kashyap, who had started ibibo a year back as an incubator. “It was very hard to kill,” confesses the first-generation entrepreneur, who had started to feel the heat of a global financial meltdown. Kashyap, then 33, had started building and incubating multiple lines of businesses such as social gaming, local search businesses, social media, and goibibo was one of the projects. The downturn turned Kashyap’s world upside down. Investors balked, the runway started to deplete at an alarming pace and a team of around 70 looked like an overwhelming army in a losing war. The choice was cruel, but simple: Kill.

Kashyap’s ruthless streak—one that he never knew he possessed—came to the fore. First to get slayed were his multiple ventures, his “babies”. All incubator projects, except goibibo, were shut. “We doubled down on goibibo and focussed only on domestic air travel,” he recounts. What he slaughtered next was his “flamboyant” office on the posh Golf Course Road in Gurugram. The office shifted to a nondescript place in the interiors of the city. The rental fell by threefourths. The army of employees was reduced to a wafer-thin team of eight.

The only option was survival. “At that time, failures were not celebrated,” says Kashyap, who went on to establish a successful travel portal and sold his venture to MakeMyTrip in 2016 in a deal reportedly valued at $1.8 billion. During a crisis, Kashyap underlines, nothing is important except survival and the will to do so. “To survive, one needs the courage of conviction to kill the stuff that you created to survive.”