A dozen new books on business and starting up get released every month, each of them saying more or less the same things in different ways. One thing that they all seem to be saying is that it is a very competitive world out there. And that there is a lot of scope for new, young, nimble startups to upset the established world order and become big successes. Uber, Airbnb, and others are the poster children of these books. If we go by them, the startup world is full of sundry Davids slaying a lot of Goliaths.
But think about it: these sort of success stories are rare. First of all, a very small percentage of startups succeed. Now, if you consider the universe of those startups that did succeed, you will find that a majority of the successes are stories of consolidation and not of the startups figuring out some competitive advantage and running. These stories are not as glamorous, but they are very important, because they tell entrepreneurs about what the dominant trend in business is right now. There are very few giants being felled, there are a lot more giants that are digging in, often by absorbing competition in the form of newer companies, not to kill them, but to gain their business models. And truth is, this kind of consolidation, this kind of absorption by larger companies, is a perfectly good result for the entrepreneurs who started up. Most entrepreneurs know it too, even if they don’t say as much.
Unfortunately, the idea of entrepreneurship today has become cultish. And this cult only worships at the altar of the Kalanicks and the Zuckerbergs. Somebody who, say, comes up with a new tool that optimises warehouse inventory management, grows that business steadily for a few years, and then gets acquired by a much older and larger company in the same space, is a perfectly successful entrepreneur. Yet, this sort of person never gets written about, nor does their style of working ever get held up as a model. Business schools, those factories of entrepreneurship, will never make case studies of their strategies and tactics.
So, even in a world where consolidation is the trend, there are hardly any books or courses or guides that can help an entrepreneur who wants to go down this surer route to success. And publishers and content creators will rightly point out that such books may not sell, given that the cult just will not market such stories. And this is despite the fact that going down the route of all or nothing has essentially resulted in a lot more entrepreneurial failure than was necessary, with way too many bright young men and women eking out marginal existences with little or no likelihood of growth, just a whole load of hope. Here’s hoping (that word again!) the trend in books and articles about startups also consolidate (and this word too!) towards a truer picture of the startup world.
The writer heads product at a mid-sized startup in the real estate space
