Sidharth Rao’s ‘How I Almost Blew It’ traces how some startups thrive

For every startup that works, there are hundreds that fail. Sidharth Rao’s How I Almost Blew It traces stalwarts like Zomato, BookMyShow and others that managed to thrive

What do Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Deep Kalra, Deepinder Goyal and Ashish Hemrajani have in common? The founders of Naukri.com, MakeMyTrip, Zomato and BookMyShow are not only some of India’s biggest entrepreneurs, but have also overcome near-fiascos with quick thinking and occasionally, sheer dumb luck.

Sidharth Rao, co-founder of Webchutney, and an active angel investor, has documented their stories in his new book, How I Almost Blew It , published by Westland. He was recently in Chennai’s Madras Management Association, to release the book, along with Bharat Matrimony founder Murugavel Janakiraman, who also features in the book.

“We hear many success stories about entrepreneurs. Media reports either vanity milestones like achieving funding, or, on the opposite spectrum, tragedies like mass layoffs,” said Sidharth. “But the journey of a startup is much more nuanced than that, and I wanted to trace that.”

Through the course of the book, Sidharth noted common themes that emerged, like the overconfidence that comes with sitting on a lot of capital for the first time, and fights between co-founders in a startup environment where roles are not clearly defined.

 

Being what moderator Anant Rangaswami jokingly termed as a ‘serial gambler’, Sidharth’s many initiatives too have seen many near-death experiences — each churning out crucial life lessons. He started Webchutney, making websites for people, at the age of 19. “We started at the peak of the dot com bubble. It was a time when everyone and their aunts and uncles wanted websites for their companies. We thought the party would last forever,” he said. But the eventual dot com crash happened, post 2000, and their company had to tide over it. So it was with the 2008 financial crisis.

“Back in those days, when we had just started,” he recalled, “we did not have enough money to book flight tickets, so we had the Rajdhani train schedule memorised. Clients would call us for meetings in other cities the very next day, and we would have to book tickets before 2 pm. Oh, and the hotels we stayed at! One in Mumbai got raided by ATS, who were very suspicious of our computer work!”

It is essential that we look back at our journey and see if we fall into patterns, he emphasised. In How I Almost Blew It , he shared his own and got his peers to do the same.

How I Almost Blew It is available online for ₹460.