Startups vs innovation

This is the proposition made by The Lift-Off Nation, co-authored by Rajan Anandan and Saurabh Srivastava, two individuals who have participated directly in the evolution of the country’s technology and venture ecosystem. This is not a dispassionate history, nor does it pretend to be. It is a rallying cry, built from founder stories, investor perspectives, policy milestones, sector snapshots and an unshakeable conviction that national confidence can itself become an economic force. The result is useful and valuable for founders, VCs and policymakers — not because it provides a neutral verdict on the ecosystem, but because it articulates the most coherent version of the ecosystem’s own self-belief, while also identifying the conditions that could make that belief either justified or premature.

The authors frame India’s present startup surge as the third great wave of modern entrepreneurship. The first was IT services; the second, mobile telecommunications and internet businesses; and the third is a broader technology-and-innovation economy encompassing consumer internet, financial services, AI, climate technology, space, defence, advanced manufacturing and global software.

The book’s major strength is its ecosystem-level storytelling. Most books about Indian startups isolate founders from the institutions around them; The Lift-Off Nation does the opposite. It shows how entrepreneurship emerges from the confluence of talent, capital, regulation, public infrastructure, large companies, universities, global markets and cultural permission to take risks. This is particularly relevant for policymakers, who too often reduce startup policy to tax breaks or incubator counts, and for investors, who can become myopically focused on individual company selection.

The authors are strong on path dependence. Their account of Indian IT services explains why the current startup wave could happen at all. The IT industry created technical skills, managerial systems, global customer familiarity, employee stock-option precedents, founder role models and confidence in building for foreign markets. The book quotes CK Prahalad’s characterisation of Indian IT firms: “You guys broke down global delivery, optimised every step and pieced it back together in ways that transformed client businesses”.

This is a pertinent counter to the lazy view that IT services was only labour arbitrage. The authors argue persuasively that process innovation, quality discipline and global delivery were capabilities that later migrated into startups. It also excels at leveraging individual startup stories to strengthen the larger sectoral narrative. The contrast between Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s early experience in raising money for Naukri.com and Kunal Shah’s seed financing for CRED is particularly illuminating. The point is not that today’s capital abundance is inherently virtuous; it is that the social and financial architecture around entrepreneurship has changed almost beyond recognition.

For VCs, this historical section is among the book’s most valuable contributions. It explains why capital cannot be assessed merely as aggregate dollars invested. The real shift is the creation of an investment continuum: angels, micro-funds, institutional funds, domestic LPs, growth capital and, increasingly, public-market exits. The book notes that India received about `14 lakh crore in venture investment between 2012-25, while also showing that more than 40% of this came during the atypical exuberant 2021-22 period. And this qualification matters: the authors do not entirely avoid celebration, but they acknowledge that the ecosystem must now prove it can convert financing into durable companies, not simply inflated private valuations.

The Lift-Off Nation is at its best when it shifts the startup conversation from “India for India” to “India for the world”. Its examples range from SaaS and AI to educational games, home textiles, ayurveda-led consumer products and industrial suppliers, and make the case that global ambition no longer belongs only to software. The California Design Den story is illustrative: co-founder Deepak Mehrotra’s observation that “Quality will always be more important than top-line growth” captures a practical global-market discipline. Likewise, The Ayurveda Experience’s Rishabh Chopra’s warning to global consumer founders is excellent: “Unless you have a love for regulation, you should not aim for foreign markets”. These are not abstract exhortations to internationalise; they identify the harder work of product quality, compliance, customer understanding and repeatable distribution.

For founders, this may be the book’s most actionable lesson. India’s cost advantage and digital scale are useful, but neither substitutes for an earned right to compete abroad. Global success requires regulatory sophistication, category insight, product reliability and the ability to build trust in markets where ‘Made in India’ is no longer automatically discounted but is not yet universally a premium signal either.

The book’s strongest and most critical section is its warning that a startup boom is not the same as technological sovereignty or deep innovation. In what I consider as the book’s decisive insight, the authors call R&D India’s “biggest Achilles heel” — and rightly so. A country can produce consumer apps, financial-distribution innovation and even sophisticated software products while remaining dependent on imported science, tooling, frontier compute, components and intellectual property.

The evidence offered is stark. India’s R&D expenditure is reported at a mere 0.65% of GDP, compared with 2.6% for China and 6.4% for Israel. The authors emphasise that India needs to move toward at least 3% of GDP, with both government and industry contributing roughly 1.5%. They are right to assert that this is not just a public-finance problem. They describe a political economy in which corporate India often prefers imported technology, foreign partnerships and lower-risk growth to long-horizon research. Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is especially sharp in her critique: “We are all in our zone of comfort, mimicking what others have already done”. Her experience with Bicara Therapeutics — built around Indian scientific work but financed and listed in the United States because domestic capital did not adequately value its pipeline — shows what India risks losing: not simply companies, but intellectual property, scientific careers and the compounding effects of frontier ecosystems.

For VCs, the implication is uncomfortable but clear. India’s capital ecosystem cannot claim maturity if it rewards quick scaling more reliably than scientific depth and risk. While new investors want quick returns from DeepTech investments, the book clearly states why the domain requires different underwriting, longer fund durations, specialised technical partners, non-dilutive capital, patient follow-on financing and a public-market narrative that values IP and R&D assets before profitability. For founders, it suggests that capital efficiency should not be confused with technological minimalism. Frugality is an advantage only when it leads to better engineering, not when it becomes an excuse to avoid original and moat-building research.

The book’s principal weakness is also its confidence. Its optimism is energising, but sometimes the momentum of its thesis makes structural uncertainties appear more manageable than they are. The authors often move quickly from evidence of activity — funding, startup registrations, policy announcements, infrastructure investment — to evidence of eventual global leadership. These are not equivalent. More startups do not automatically produce more enduring companies; more IPOs do not automatically prove liquidity quality; and planned AI or compute investment does not necessarily translate into accessible, competitively priced capacity for early-stage builders.

This is most visible in the treatment of AI. The narrative occasionally understates the risk that global foundation-model providers, cloud platforms and semiconductor firms will capture disproportionate value even as Indian startups excel in applications. India may indeed become an “AI application use case capital”, but the book misses an opportunity to engage in a larger discussion of whether that position generates defensible IP, export margins and strategic autonomy.

A second limitation is uneven treatment of distributional questions. It celebrates startup formation across sectors and geographies, but pays less attention to who captures the upside. The founders and investors profiled are disproportionately drawn from already privileged networks, but a book aspiring to a national innovation agenda should ask more directly how caste, gender, language, regional access to capital and uneven educational quality shape who gets to become a founder — and who remains only a customer, gig worker or informal supplier to the new economy.

Third, the policy prescription could have been more concrete. The authors correctly — and politely — identify regulatory clarity, approval speed and corporate governance as “speed bumps”, but governance deserves a more central role than it receives.

The most useful way to read it is neither as prophecy nor as cheerleading. Read it as a challenge. The authors write, “The window is open. The time is NOW.” The window may indeed be open — but it will not stay that way merely because India has startups, unicorns, digital rails or geopolitical tailwinds. It will stay open if Indian founders build globally credible companies, if VCs fund technological risk alongside growth, if investors value patience, and if policymakers create the research, regulatory and institutional foundations that turn a lift-off into a sustained orbit.

Mohit Hira is co-founder, Myriad Communications, and venture partner at YourNest Capital Advisors