Don’t be ‘scared shitless’, don’t be a control freak, and other tips from Bangalore’s startup heroes

When Uber launched in India, Bhavish Aggarwal, chief executive of Ola, was “scared shitless” by his own admission.

“We were tiny and they could have crushed us in 15 days if they’d wanted to,” he told a packed hall at the launch of Kalaari Capital’s new seed program Kstart.

“But I think what worked was that we had a very ground level view of what India is and what India wants. Our business model, our features on the product, and our brand is very local,” he said.

Bhavish was joined by the other big boys of the Bangalore startup club – Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal, InMobi’s Naveen Tewari, and FreeCharge’s Kunal Shah – to discuss what entails the building up of a successful startup. Here’s what they said.

Challenges

For Mukesh Bansal, the biggest challenge was to get people to join Myntra. “We operated out of a house and when people referred by headhunting sites saw that, they would not even want to step in,” he said.

Mukesh overcame that challenge by hiring not job seekers, but entrepreneurs. “We hired people who wanted experience and would work for almost no salary.”
Today, Myntra has one of the biggest offices in Bangalore and is among the most sought after companies within the startup industry.

For Ola’s Bhavish, the toughest part was to get his angel round of funding. “I raised US$51,600 and thought I would never need any money ever,” Bhavish, whose company has raised around US$1.5 billion till date, said.

Kunal Shah had similar challenges, only made worse by the fact that he didn’t have an engineering degree.

“I have a degree in philosophy. I dropped out of MBA. To get people to join me was very hard,” Kunal, who sold his company to Snapdeal in one of the most successful exits in the industry, said.

Mistakes

Priorities