How to succeed again and again in a world of Failure – GoIBIBO’s Ashish Kashyap’s Midas Touch with Start-ups

Succeeding again and again in the world of startups – this is the key theme of this episode. People who are able to do this as known to have the Midas Touch. A name which is mentioned when one talks of Greek mythology is King Midas who is remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. King Midas’s gift or some may call it curse, came to be called the golden touch, or the Midas touch. The start-up sphere has seen its fair share of entrepreneurs with the infamous Midas Touch.

The ability to build and scale a start-up is a huge challenge. When it comes to running a business, about 80% make it through their first year. This percentage tends to gradually reduce as the years go by. Only 70% survive their second year, and by the tenth year, only about 30% remain in business. Over the years many entrepreneurs have carried out the daunting task of scaling multiple times!

A few examples of entrepreneurs with this start-up Midas touch include Elon Musk with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI.

Vaitheeswaran K – widely known as father of India’s e-commerce business with Fabmart.com (later rebranded Indiaplaza.com) and “Again” Drinks.

One such entrepreneur, in this list of entrepreneurs with the Midas touch is Ashish Kashyap, who has been succeeding again and again in the world of startups.

Ashish Kashyap’s Dream Resume

The world of start-ups is fraught with failure. It is estimated that only 1% of start-ups succeed which means millions of start-ups fail. Yet, Ashish Kashyap’s story is an interesting one. From being Google India’s first Country Head to growing and selling GoIbibo for a whopping $2 Billion, making it India’s 2nd largest startup exit, Ashish’s resume in the world of start-ups reads like a dream resume.

But here, to build INDwealth, he has again teamed up with Amrita Sirohia which has already notched up several early successes. Ashish knows a lot of secrets about building and scaling startups.

This freewheeling episode includes everything that he has done and how he succeeds again and again in a world of failure. Listen to Ashish from GoIBIBO talk about his start-up Midas touch and how he has been succeeding again and again in the world of startups

Here are some excerpts from the Episode:

When The Internet Changed.

So that’s what we did with travel as a category. And of course, the world changed after ISIS two times internet the world change GDSs came in Amadeus, Galileo narrative etc. And I think times internet tried to move in a domestic system just like MakeMyTrip or IBIBO. It was not able to leapfrog to that, but that was one of the reasons, you know. We built which was really really amazingly successful. There was no concept of negative unit economic spiral. So there was revenue made on every advocate.

Ashish Kashyap 10:02

How Ashish and Amrita Came Together.

So basically, Ashish was one of my clients at HSBC. So most of my career spent spent, like 15 years with the bank. And when he monetized with, with MakeMyTrip, that’s when he’s started discussing the problems that were there in the wealth management space, and how advisory was not really to the true sense how it should be, and how ultra HNIs and HNIs are really struggling. And he’s like, you’ve already been an expert in figuring out the broken pieces in any industry or in any market space.

So that is when we started discussing of bringing INDmoney. And that’s when, in fact, I went to some of my other UHNI and HNI clients to ask them that if we created something like this, and they were all unanimously of the view that this is the need of the hour. So what INDmoney and INDwealth today’s doing is being really appreciated. And I think we created the product that’s really required in the market.

Amrita Sirohia 15:03

Key Advice from Ashish for Entrepreneurs.

But long story short, I think the word I would like to use it, it’s quite a lot to do with resonance and thinking thick skin and being being added and not being stupid, right? Okay. If you’re failing, then cut your losses and just fail, right and celebrate that failure. Right, learn from that failure, and then move to the next move to the next right. And there will be lots of there’ll be some large failures. There’ll be many, many, many, many, many failures, right during the journey.

Ashish Kashyap 35:30

Ashish on The Key Role of Machine Learning.

So, machine learning plays a very important role here to ensure that it is intersecting your risk with the learning it’s having for you about you and also the learning that it is having from the markets. Of course, our aim is not to say buy this stock in tomorrow will go up. That’s that’s just that data is not enough for anyone to do that right. But over longer periods, our aim is to ensure that we allocate you properly because that that itself is correctly completely incorrect.

Ashish Kashyap 59:28

Getting Advisory at Scale.

Even then, I think the kind of service that you know, blue category or gold categories getting today, right, that is something that is only available to the ultra HNI, you know, the entire family office service.

Amrita Sirohia 01:18:39

Ashish on What it Takes to Build a Great Team

And building a team just doesn’t mean hiring, right? building a team means bringing them on board, onboarding them, getting them to believe naturally believe, without indoctrination, naturally believe the core problem with the company solving the product and services, which the company is giving is really solving a core issue, getting them to participate, getting them to get that first small win and participate in impact creation, that cycle, right. So to go through that cycle, right? It’s not just about hiring, but it’s hiring, building the team, getting them passionate about what they do, getting them excited. That’s that’s a task, right? I mean, it’s, it’s not a trivial thing.

Ashish Kashyap 01:22:50

Show Notes

Follow Ashish Kashyap on LinkedIn (@ashishkashyap)

Check out INDwealth.in

Here is what the world cloud from the episode looks like:

Follow Maharajas of Scale on Twitter (@maharajaofscale)