Business Potential Unexplored

Unique Ideas yet to be Ventured

Indian business space is like a pond with ideas floating up and down, yet to be fished with the hook of funds. Where traditionally we had been a land of budding businesses, now have been the nation with highest number of successful startups. There is a thin line of distinction between a business and a startup. Former is about being just another player in the well existent industry and the latter about conceptualizing a new industry altogether. Transportation and taxi services were mainstream businesses before but disruptive ideas and concepts introduced by Uber, Ola, Didi Chuxing has given rise to ‘ Taxi Hailing Services’ industry whose market capitalization is expected to be $285 billion by 2025.

International investors hawk eye Indian business potential and have been actively participating in funding incubation campaigns and hosting ideas fair. They are creating value for themselves just by contributing some risky dollars to the pool of bootstrap funds. Although we might have the best brains to build unicorn businesses we lack the risk appetite to hold stake in an upcoming venture. Today, companies like SoftBank and Fidelity Investments hold more than 40% stake in our own indigenous startups. Where Japan is talking about managing hedge funds invested in artificial intelligence and augmented reality, companies in China have their own cryptocurrency and a US citizen sitting in his car can actively trade oil, Indian investors averse from investing in the private equity space.   As it is often said, businesses and ideas revolutionize humans into efficient and smarter homo sapiens. Ideas and startups in India have brilliant vision and action plan ready but the community in itself lacks the maturity and sophistication to accept those models, rather prefer to continue with the obsolete ones. The aversion to change and the inability to absorb the loss in the Indian mindset has caused many great ideas turn grey.

If we compare the numbers, Indian startups have outperformed international conglomerates. Uber took 4 years to become a Unicorn, Ola took just 3 years, PayPal took 5 years to become a Unicorn, Paytm took just 3 years to achieve the same feat. We constitute for about 17% of the world population, think of the potential we have as an independent nation. It is a land where the supply can never outweigh the demand, and thus there will always be opportunity to create, innovate and serve.