‘I chased a cab driver for 7 km to sign him up’

Nealis 25 years old. He’s in his sixth job, this time with a Bengaluru-based hyper local start up. Of his five previous jobs, only one was with a ‘conventional’ firm, a consultancy. Neal is positive he doesn’t want to go back to a company like that again. “Infosys, Wipro – companies like that are completely corporate,” he says. “Completely corporate” seems to be youthspeak for “staid” and “unexciting”.
There’s an excitement in the Bengaluru air. To be honest, it has always been there in some degree, ever since liberalization and the early days of Infosys and Wipro, through Y2K and outsourcing, through the tech majors opening in-house development centres in the city.
But over the past few years, thestartup boom has added a new fizz to the city. The atmosphere has becomeheady, giddily intoxicating — there’s a feeling that great things are happening here. Youcouldtrackthis feeling down to 2008-09, when Flipkart raised its first million from Accel Partners. Or you could say that the story really began on August 24, 2012, when the Bansals raised a whopping $ 150 million and suddenly, startups were everywhere.
For people like Neal,the flexibility of the startup life is the key attraction. “In a startup, processes aren’t rigid. Adaptability is the key, and that’s what makes it exciting,” he says. There are downsides, of course. “Well, your social life goes for a toss,” he says. “You can’t party on weekends when you have a seven-day week.”
For Akshay BD, joining a startup was serendipity. “I studied law,” he says. “After graduation,Ijoined a startup law firm.” But a profession that required years – if not decades – to establishoneself was too slow for him. In 2013, a friend put him on to a startup that was just beginning operations in Bengaluru. It was calledUber, andAkshay was vaguely familiar with what they did.
“My first reaction was — I don’t wantto workfor a taxi company. But then, as I understood what they were doing, I was blown away.” Akshay signed up. “Atfirstit was crazy. We would go from parking lot to parking lot, trying to convince cab drivers to sign up to our platform.I remember chasing a yellow-plateToyota Altis cab seven km through Bengaluru roads to get the driver on Uber. We finally caught up and stoppedhim, only to find outthat he had already signed up.I’m not sure what his passenger thought of us,” he laughs.
Akshay says that atthattime, few people believed that Uber could succeed in India. “It was purely app-driven. You had to enter your credit card information. People kept telling us that the concept would never take off here. But we had to adapt. It was exciting, it was fun and look at where we are now,” he says.
Excitement. Fun. These are not words that young people normally associate with working life, except maybe those born salesmen who could make selling a photocopier one of the most thrilling jobs around. But that’s what the startup boom has done. Work has never been cooler.
Youcan see it everywhere – in the Café Coffee Days in Electronic City to the startup hub that Koramangala has become to the tonier outposts on the roof of UB City. If you listen, you will hear snatches of conversation about pitches and funding, about pivots and disruption. PR firms peddle stories of apps and platforms. Spouses talk of supporting families so that significant others can work with startups.
The closest parallel to this, of course, is the dot-com bubble, when everybody was either starting up or was part of a web portal that promised everything from shopping to research services, and techie watering-holes buzzed with discussions on Po Bronson and the wisdom of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Whatever the analogues,it’s like a virus. And it’s affecting people across all age groups.
Fifty-year-old Gyaneswaran worked with a reputed ITservicesMNC for more than 12 years, heading its retail practice. Buthe foundhimself growing too comfortable. “I needed to give myself a good kick,” he says. He quithis job and joined Qwikcilver, the Amazonfunded gift card startup.
“You need to rediscover yourself at different points in your life,” he says. “Career planning isn’t linear. You need to stay relevant to the industry. And sometimes, that can only come when you let go of a cushy job and put yourself in harm’s way,” he says.
People mature faster than organizations can handle. After a point, the pace of promotion and the acquisition of responsibility slow down, and large organizations offer only two choices – a steady state at the current position, or intense politicking to moveup the ladder. Andfor some, it’s not enough. “Companies with well-established processes don’t always provide the best possible support to independent decision makers. The speed at which things moved wasn’t enough for me. Here,the culture is completely different,” Gyaneswaran says.
His co-worker, Pragati Deep Singh, echoes his sentiments. Singh walked away from a prime banking jobwithHDFC,wherehe was responsible for a Rs 2,000 crore portfolio to take over as Qwikcilver’s online channels business. “In HDFC, procedures are in place. I had independence, yes, but it was limited to a specific area. Working here, I have the freedom todo things my way.” With that freedom comes risk as well. “There, if something didn’t work,there were always management protocols that would limit risk. Here,it’s allor nothing.That adds to the excitement.I get a 360 degree viewof thebusiness.Ideal with regulators, with the RBI, I have to handle our licences. I’m an employee, butIfeel like an entrepreneur,” he says.
Another positive, though it doesn’t immediately come off as such, is the presence of young people – people who haven’t been taught to think in a particular way.The startup industry in India is predominantly young. Like Terry Pratchett’s Leonard of Quirm, it has “no use for people whohave learnedthe limitsof the possible.”
It doesn’t matter that most of these startups will fail, that however hard people try, most startups will fold within a matter of months. “A few of us (angelinvestors) have been questioning how long this can last. For the past couple of years, there’s been so much money in the system that even some of the most unlikely companies have managed to get funded. But after a while, the investorswillwant returns.Personally,Ithinkthat’s likely to happen anywhere between six months to a couple of years. There needs to be a shakeout, and the results could be devastating,” says one angel investor, on condition of anonymity. “But right now, we’re all going with the flow – we just don’t want to miss out on the next big thing."