Founder Stack

For a vast majority of the last decade there was only one success metric that the Indian startup ecosystem ran on: growth. How quickly were you able to acquire customers? How quickly your GMV was scaling? What was your month-on-month revenue trajectory? These questions were central to driving valuations. A founder that could show a steep growth curve would find it easy to raise a round. In the eyes of most venture investors, velocity mattered more than anything. That definition has quietly, but fundamentally changed. I have sat across the table from hundreds of founders over the course of my career, both as an operator building businesses at scale and as an investor. The shift I have observed over the past three years is not just cyclical, it is structural. I believe that the goalposts to judge success have moved and they are not moving back. Between 2015 and 2021, India produced over 100 unicorns, and I think it's worth pausing on what that actually represented. Capital was abundant, and the prevailing logic of growing the user base and worrying about monetisation later reflected a genuine belief that scale would eventually take care of the economics. Investors, myself included in that era, were operating under real deployment pressure, and the result was that valuations sometimes got ahead of the fundamentals. But the businesses built during this period were genuinely impressive. These were category creators. Infrastructure builders. Companies that brought hundreds of millions of new consumers online for the first time. That is not a small thing, and I don't think it gets celebrated enough. The structural profitability questions that surfaced for some of them were real, but they don't diminish what was actually constructed. What 2022 did was simply make certain conversations unavoidable. The funding correction didn't create the underlying issues, it just removed the conditions that had allowed them to stay in the background. And in many ways that turned out to be a healthy thing. The companies that worked through that period and came out the other side did so by building something more durable and more defensible. The category depth, the infrastructure and the consumer behaviour established during the boom years laid the foundation for companies being built today. The evaluation framework for growth-stage businesses is often centered around the question of “how fast is this growing?” but we believe the industry has gradually but very firmly moved towards a place where “can this business sustain its growth trajectory without being totally dependent on external capital?” has become the central question of evaluation. If we look at businesses in the $20-30 million revenue range, the core fundamentals are already in place. At that stage, the internal conversations have steadily shifted to questions of sustainable scale. Today the most compelling founders are the ones walking in with a genuine fluency in ROCE, ROE and the deeper financial mechanics