Vijay Anand | The Startup Guy.

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” — Pablo Picasso

What is it that makes a great startup? It’s a question that I have been pondering over for sometime now actually and I thought I’d start a conversation around the same. So What makes a startup great? Is it It’s rate of growth? The team? The market? or the amount of funds that its able to raise? Hmm.. Possibly none of the above.

Let me cite you a couple of great examples and let’s draw the parallels from there.

Case #1: The telecom world has been known for skimming the market. While technically the cost of landing a call across the globe was quite insignificant, most operators have charged ridiculous prices for one simple reason – there were no other options. With having no options came the fact that they can price calls at the tags that they want to, and the public innocently was willing to pay for it. All went on as normal till the internet boomed and high speed internet became a reality, and Voice over IP (VoIP) was born. As much as there were a lot of initial attempts (even microsoft and yahoo tried internet telephony and discontinued), the fact that most of the world was yet not on broadband didn’t help the cause at all. Then along came skype with its compression codec which worked on narrowband connections, the way they democratized (decentralized) access and limitations, and the rules of the game were forever changed.

As the story goes, the founders didn’t start with skype, but with Kazaa, which did the same thing for internet file sharing. Kazzaa did for file sharing what Napster started with for music sharing within intranets

Case #2: Before the telecom revolution happened in India, the cost of a telephone line was close to Rs. 10,000. There was a man who had the vision, the drive and the determination to make sure that that cost was sub Rs. 500. Sounds very crazy doesnt it? But it happened, and thats how the TeNeT Group was formed, and thats one of the greatest momentum on which it rides till this day.

Case #3: There was once a time when searching for anything on the internet meant a lot of pain. The closest you will get to anything will be loads and loads of adult websites, which had covered just about every meta tag under the sun and were the default results no matter what you were looking for. Search for your mother’s favorite dessert recipe and you know what you’d get. Then came dogpile, and within the undercurrents came a company which just blew your mind away with the accuracy of information it got to you. Just when most of us, had given up hope of digging out anything useful out of the internet, Google helped make sense of the oodles of information that the cyberworld was churning up.

Case #4: There was once a time when people thought that four wheeler drives were meant only for the highly rich. Ratan Tata took to new levels what Henry Ford started off, with his vision and in delivering on his word, the Tata Nano.

I think we have enough to start with. Can you see the commonality that runs between all these cases. If I have to pick a word for it, I’d choose “controversy”. These are all essentially and rightly so, companies, teams and ideas that challenged the norm.

There was once a wise man who advised me that it was okay to be considered controversial. It’s not a crime, actually a compliment and a pride for an entrepreneur to be controversial. If you are an entrepreneur and you are not controversial, it just means you are just another one of the same – nothing more than wasting everyone’s breathe in the ecosystem. In other words, there is a remote chance that you are actually breaking new ground, when you are controversial.

There is also another reason why I think this makes a lot of sense. When you are starting off with a new company, and with a revolutionary mission in mind (assuming that you do want to break some new ground), it is absolutely essential that you polarize people. There will always be people who will love you and those who hate you no matter what. But the only choice you have is to ensure that there are not many people who are indifferent about what you do. You want to make sure that people choose a side, whether loving or hating your idea for whatever reason it is, and from time to time even swing sides. That’s what a “Buzz” really is all about. If you have that going for you, you are going to have no problems in having people spinning around you, in your new world.

So coming back to our original question, What makes a great Startup? I think it starts off with the vision itself. And the vision of course is something that is grown on the fertile soil of the founders’ imaginations. A great startup is one that changes the rules of the game – and what most refer to as disrupting markets. Not all technology disruptions necessarily disrupt markets and lifestyle as well. But there’s the magic that an entrepreneur brings in and one that differentiates him from a pure scientist.

As per the new economy, free is no longer controversial. It’s actually the norm these days. Discounts and free are words that people have heard and demand for no apparent reason. “Free” has cheapened a lot of services. It is also made possible by the various other laws and economic conditions that make it happen, but might not be something that will go on for long. The “Free” marketing strategy (started off by Gillette) is one of the several marketing strategies, not THE only marketing strategy.

Let me ask. If there is something that everybody keeps saying cant be done, there is probably a good chance that it can be proven otherwise. Does it come close to the where you are standing and aiming for right now?