Why Startup?

The start-up ecosystem in India has taken a new height. Today, a lot of talented, fresh graduates from college have an inclination towards entrepreneurship. The case was not the same a few years back. While entrepreneurs are made by both - choice and circumstances, a handful of them have graduated to a full fledged company with a long list of employees, a heavy portfolio of clients or an application that’s stuck to the heart and minds of many.

While trying to find out reasons for this change in India, I could smell several reasons for growth in the Internet based start-ups. Not all may be true for an entrepreneur but somehow the strings are attached to one of these.

Few reasons for the growth in the web based entrepreneurship include;

• Emergence of web based start-ups which could eventually reach good heights. These include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Orkut and many more. A web based startup does not involve large amount of initial investment and if the product gets popular, a lot of VC’s step in to escalate the ranch.
• Availability of high speed internet is another pillar to allow budding entrepreneurs to think on these lines. Dial-up days in India could never see as many internet start-ups to roll in. Popularization of Rich media has an important role attached to it.
• Recession for sure has given birth to a lot many freelancers which turn on to start a company if things go well for them. Decrease in the number of job opportunities has led many fresh graduates to utilize their talent and work on freelance projects.
• The lifestyle of a start-up and the feeling of creating something from scratch which would be credited to one’s own name is a yet another strong reason for talented youth to start a venture. Not all companies would allow you to work in shorts and have a pizza slice in a hand while you code!
• Emergence of events like BarCamp, iAccelerator, Proto, HeadStart and other have created a good knowledge amongst people to understand what lies beneath this ecosystem and how can things work well (not always though!).
• Mentors like Paul Graham and others are now popular across the pan-asian countries. Thanks to WordPress, Blogspot and other publishing platforms which created a wave of online journalism and blogging.
• Presence of several incubation centers and mentorships provide temp a lot of youngsters to chain themselves to an all together different environment which involves a lot of role-plays. An engineer at a start-up is often a multi-task specialist.
• India as a good outsourcing option is a reason for a lot of foreign businessmen to allocate projects to Indian startups. This brings in some good amount of foreign currency and a viable reason to run your own show.

The reasons are many. The idea is to sustain a living, escalate a product/service and emerge as one of the bluechip companies which either continue to get bigger or find a prospective buyer and make big money. The credit in either of the cases remains with the start-up who toiled hard to get there.

I would want to elaborate on the lifestyle a start-up has in one of my future posts.