In the quiet auditorium of the Bhopal Literature Festival in January 2026, I found myself in conversation with Saurabh Nigam, the thoughtful HR professional and author of People-First Startups.
What began as a discussion on the “secret elixir” for winning startups evolved into something deeper—a reflection on why so many of our ventures, despite billions in funding and endless energy, fail to create lasting, transformative value.
Saurabh’s playbook is solid, practical, and deeply rooted in two decades of navigating India’s chaotic startup landscape. From Omidyar Network’s impact investments to Snapdeal’s explosive-then-contracting growth, he offers a roadmap: Hire a talent architect early, define ways of working deliberately, and clarify what success truly means beyond bonuses. These are wise words, drawn from real scars and successes.
Yet as I listened — and as I have lived through my own journeys founding initiatives, mentoring over 40 startups, and leading One Laptop Per Child in India — I couldn’t help but feel the conversation, while illuminating, spoke more to ventures that have already crossed into profitability than to the raw, zero-to-one dreamers who define the true essence of entrepreneurship.
Saurabh’s elixir works brilliantly for the graduated: those with cash flow, scale, and the luxury to build structured cultures. But for the real startups—the bootstrapped experiments in garages, incubators, or rural corners—the advice, though learnable, often feels like prescribing a symphony score to someone still learning notes on a broken instrument.
I have seen this chasm firsthand. In America, I once assembled a team of Harvard, Babson, and Duke MBAs in 72 hours, purely on equity and shared vision. They delivered because the ecosystem rewarded audacity: equity was currency, failure a teacher, and innovation the only path.
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Back in India, despite market salaries in the high seven or eight figures, not one of my 276 hires over six years delivered even 1% of what they promised. The talent was there—pedigreed, skilled—but the wiring was mismatched. They excelled in structured corporations; in the chaos of creation, they faltered.
Saurabh rightly points to this: We chase IIT/IIM tags over “fire in the belly.” But the deeper issue is systemic. Our ecosystem has diluted the very meaning of “startup.”
Globally, a startup is the first stage of a technological revolution: inventing what doesn’t exist, creating technologies that redefine possibilities. As I noted in Bhopal, 95% of such breakthroughs still emerge from America because their culture nurtures risk, tolerates intelligent failure, and rewards those who build enduring enterprises.
Europe fell behind not for lack of talent, but for stifled innovation cultures. India? We have added nearly 200,000 startups, injecting billions annually, yet most are adaptations—local versions of Uber, Amazon, or Zoom. Valuable? Absolutely. Transformative? Rarely.
Edtech giants took hundreds of crores, scaled massively during COVID, but collapsed when the environment normalized because they indexed everything on a momentary wave, not on enduring innovation.
This dilution lowers the floor. Our incubators, often celebrated, become echo chambers for replication rather than crucibles for invention. Young founders chase quick valuations over value creation. Investors reward traction metrics over deep tech. Government schemes like Startup India provide tax breaks and funding access—commendable steps—but they haven’t yet shifted the paradigm toward original, global-impact technologies.
The result: 90% failure rate, not from lack of capital or people practices alone, but from a missing hunger for what doesn’t yet exist.
Saurabh’s strengths shine here. His emphasis on people as the secret sauce is spot-on for mid-stage scaling. He warns against linear headcount growth—Snapdeal’s journey from 600 to 8,000 and back proves it. He urges pivots, as Netflix did from DVDs to streaming. In edtech, he dissects how Byju’s and Vedantu over-indexed on pandemic highs without preparing for hybrid futures.
These are vital lessons for profitable ventures navigating cycles. But for nascent ideas—the true startups—survival demands something primal: passion that attracts co-founders willing to work for equity and belief, not salary. As I shared, my OLPC India team included unpaid graduates from IITs, IIMs, Cambridge, and Chicago who labored for months on vision alone. They came because the idea caught imagination—screen-based learning for millions of underserved children.
To bridge this, we must rebuild our ecosystem with values that birthed America’s beyond-cutting-edge enterprises:
Audacious vision, tolerance for failure as fertilizer, and structures that amplify creation over imitation.
Start with education—our greatest bottleneck. The National Education Policy is progress, but insufficient. We need K-12 curricula infused with maker spaces, hands-on innovation, and failure-tolerant experimentation, not rote learning. Universities must foster R&D, not just placements. Incubators should prioritize prototypes solving unmet global needs—quantum leaps in AI ethics, sustainable energy, or biotech—over polished MVPs of existing models.
Policy must follow: Strengthen IP protections, expand R&D tax credits, ease visas for global talent, and create impact bonds linking incentives to real outcomes.
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Investors: Shift from quick flips to patient capital for deep tech. Founders: Talk your ideas openly, build networks of believers, and embrace the madness of betting on the unknown.
India’s size demands scale—launch a million enterprises yearly, as I have advocated—but with a culture that rewards those who invent, not replicate.
Imagine our incubators birthing the next foundational technology: Not another delivery app, but breakthroughs in clean energy or personalized medicine that endure globally. Bhopal’s conversation reminded me: Saurabh’s playbook empowers the scaled; my experiences show the path for the nascent. Together, they point to transformation. We have the talent, the energy, the market. What we need is to raise the floor, ignite the fire, and reclaim the soul of true startups. The world awaits India’s revolution—not in imitation, but in invention.