Stories I most enjoyed writing in 2017 and some insights they gave me

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There are articles. And then there are stories: ones that connect to me as a writer as well as an individual; and readers seem to relate to – going by the sheer number of them who read, share, and cite those in offline and online conversations.

The following are my picks from among all the stories I wrote in 2017. They are ones that lived beyond the short span of news pieces, that can be reread to glean insights and reshared. Taken as a whole, they also represent some of the issues that mattered to me as an observer of the startup scene this year.

Startups are nailing their own coffins with VC hammers. Here’s a way to escape that fate

“If somebody is not paying you to build the product, you are betting that your product is something people might buy. Then, you are in the gambling business.” When Professor Saras Sarasvathy told me this, I didn’t get it at first.

This top scholar on the cognitive basis for high-performance entrepreneurship has been studying founders and startups across the globe for decades. She has hard data to prove that the most successful startups in the world have been funded not by VCs but by their customers, suppliers, or both. After years of study, she came up with a theory of entrepreneurial success called effectuation, which revolves around a few principles successful founders practice.

This article is about how founders can build a sustainable, scalable business using effectuation principles and escape the high probability of failure that most VC-funded startups risk. It is timely guidance when the market is correcting itself after the irrational exuberance of 2015.

“They think predicting the future is the way to get venture capital funding. They are not even predicting the future to get the customer; they are predicting the future to get VC money.” Professor Saras Sarasvathy says. Photo credit: Prabhu Stavarmath

India’s largest homestay startup Stayzilla shuts down. And why.

This was one of the most shocking startup stories that hit India in 2017.

A founder I trusted shared with me murmurs about trouble at Stayzilla, billed as India’s largest homestay network with 55,000 stay options in close to 1,000 towns across the country. The company had raised around US$35 million from investors, including Matrix Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.

I reached out to several Stayzilla employees who I knew were laid-off. Many refused to discuss it, but a few spoke on condition of anonymity. A senior employee said: “You will get to know down the line.” I checked out over 500 listings on Stayzilla of popular holiday destinations and all of them sported a “sold out” tag. Also, for days there had been zero activity on Stayzilla’s social media channels.

Armed with all that information, I reached out to the startup’s founders and investors. They refused to comment. So I reached out to homestay owners who had properties registered on Stayzilla, and from them I got the news confirmed and Tech in Asia broke that story.

A few minutes after the story went viral, the founder reached out to me and so we published a second story based on the reasons he gave for the shutdown.

Khailee Ng and 500 Startups have a plan to stop founders from committing suicide

The unfair advantage Indian SaaS startups enjoy and their emerging opportunities

Looking for funding? Here are the 10 most active investors in India

A dark data startup you haven’t heard of is spilling secrets to Starbucks, McDonald’s

The inside story of why an explosive SaaS startup went for a quick exit with Freshworks

Singapore unicorn Sea’s strategies to become a $100b company and fight giants

The uncommon story of an edtech startup that caught elusive profitability by the tail

No robots, please, we’re Indian – the lowdown on Amazon’s localization strategy

An insider’s account of how Go-Jek hit 900x scale in 18 months and is still doubling

Inside Flipkart’s monster-cruncher: how it gleans insights from a petabyte of data daily

The maverick accelerator that gets no equity if its startups don’t hit revenue milestones