The Startup Diaries : Book Review

What does it take to be an Entrepreneur? Are Entrepreneurs as charismatic and intellectual as their larger-than-life image seems to be?  The husband – wife duo Neeti Jain and Gagan Jain pondered over these questions and took it upon them to find out what went behind the making of successful entrepreneurs in their debut book.Did they succeed in finding out?

The book covers 6 Startup Stories  – One97(Vijay Shekhar Sharma), Eko(Abhinav Sinha and Abhishek Sinha) ,Colosceum Media( Ajit Andhare), Redbus(Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri),  the Loot(Jay Gupta) and Yo! China(Ashish Dev Kapoor).  All of these startups are founded after 2000 and give the reader a realistic picture of how new age startups are built in India. The book attempts to cover all the significant incidents in each entrepreneur’s life – from conceiving idea to executing it, from committing mistakes to achieving laurels, from being funded to incurring losses and from approaching the first customer to building the brand.

While reading through the book, we clearly understand what sets these world-class entrepreneurs apart.  The common factor among all of them was the Decision To Start. Almost all the founder’s stories had a thread running with their parents worrying about their son’s future. The Stories highlight all possible hardships an Entrepreneur might encounter at any given point of time – non-timely payment from to clients, founders going apart due to differences,  no sales despite all efforts, economy slowdown hitting your startup hard and all things going wrong at the very last minute.  They depict how these startup founders persistently and patiently built their way up to the top,  despite things not working as per the plan.

Having said that, the book gives us the “Aha” moments in entrepreneur’s startup journey and the victories along the way.There are plenty of incidents that tells us that all these startup founders went through the same self-doubt lot of entrepreneurs go through today, but they kept moving on. They made mistakes that look naive and obvious at first, but provide us insight on things that can go wrong while trying to build a business. The learnings presented through the roller coaster ride of the startups gives us a good enjoyable read, while warning us of the bumpy startup road.

The book is 234 pages long and has a very casual tone.  There is lot of hindi (with english translation) sprinkled all over, which gives the book a strong Indian feel.  For the debut book, the authors have done a fantastic job of extracting the important moments from each startup journey and presenting to us as if the entire story is being unfolded in front of our  eyes. Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who were brave enough to bare their heart out to the readers.If you are an entrepreneur or want to be one, we definitely recommend giving this book a read.

Got your hands on the book? Do let us know your review in the comments below.