Radhika Gupta, CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Funds, cautioned aspiring entrepreneurs against falling for the “startup romance.” She pointed out that many successful businesses often present only the glamorous aspects of their journey, overlooking the challenging and arduous efforts that play a crucial role in achieving success.
“There is now an increased air of ‘startup romance’ that paints startup life as working in chiller attire out of a fancy co-working space, talking ideas all day, raising funding rounds, giving gyaan on social media, hosting Fri Eve drinks for colleagues,” Radhika Gupta wrote on a post on X (Formerly Twitter).
“Don’t fall for it,” Radhika Gupta added.
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She said “start-up reality” hits soon, and this means “painful execution, limited budgets and even more limited working conditions, constant rejection, challenges in hiring and retention, pressure for revenue at any cost, and uncertainty for a very long period of time.”
Radhika Gupta’s comments come after Dhruv Suyamprakasam, the co-founder and CEO of iCliniq, a telemedicine startup, said in an interview with Business Insider that he had to move out of Bengaluru due to the difficulties he faced there.
Suyamprakasam, originally from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, decided to move to Bengaluru in 2010 after starting his company because it was the centre of India’s mainstream startup ecosystem.
However, he was met with a lot of negative bias from investors, often feeling “excluded” as he didn’t speak Hindi, did not go to IIT, and was from a “small town many people had not heard of.”
He had other significant challenges to face too. “It’s a place that expects companies to grow fast and fail fast,” he said.
He felt that this was not “the right pressure to put on a healthcare startup, which has no margin for errors and requires a lot of trust from people.”
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He added that he “met investors expecting to get 100 paid consultations in a day”.
His father was a first-generation entrepreneur who already had a successful business.