Borrow the speed, keep the discipline: Zoho's startup playbook for MSMEs
On the opening day of MSME Sparks 2026, Zoho's global startup head broke down how India's MSMEs can borrow the best of startup culture while staying anchored to the fundamentals that have always kept them standing.
India is home to 5.93 crore MSMEs, contributing to 30% of the country's GDP, 45% of its exports, and employment for over 25 crore people. They are, in every sense, the quiet engines behind India's growth story. Recognising this, YourStory launched MSME Sparks 2026, a five-day celebration that ran virtually from June 22-25 and culminated in a grand finale on June 26 at ITC Gardenia, Bengaluru.
Built around the idea of Bharat powering the world, the initiative brought together founders, policymakers, and ecosystem enablers to spotlight the resilience and ambition driving India's enterprise economy. It was organised around six themes: digital transformation, access to capital, sustainability, going global, policy and compliance, and what's next in AI and data-led innovation.
On the first day of the virtual edition, one keynote session tied several of these threads together. Titled ‘Borrow the speed, keep the discipline: A startup playbook for MSMEs’, the session featured Gautam Varma, Global Head, Zoho for Startups, exploring how MSMEs can adopt the agility of startups without losing the financial discipline that has kept them standing for decades.
Varma opened by flipping the popular narrative around startup success on its head. "There is a significant part about the entire startup story that nobody posts about," he said, pointing to data from Startup Genome and Carta showing that 74% of high-growth startups attribute their failure to premature scaling. In 2024, one startup shut down after a year in business; by 2025, that figure had surged to seven.
His central message was simple. MSMEs do not need to copy the startup model wholesale. They need to borrow its engine while keeping their own chassis intact.
"All I need to do is to borrow the engine, take data decisions, fast experiments, tech-enabled scale, run it by a very fast feedback loop, and then layer it on top with AI to enable speed while retaining my core chassis, which is cash discipline, profitability, long-term thinking, and deep customer trust," he said.
Much of this tension, Varma argued, plays out inside generational businesses, where the friction between old and new ways of working often surfaces not in boardrooms but at the dinner table. He cited data showing that 40% of next-generation members entering family businesses feel frustrated trying to push digitalisation, while nearly 45% of current owners do not expect their children to simply run the business as is. The resolution, he said, lies in finding common ground around hard numbers, since margins and pricing are facts both generations already agree on.
In his view, technology's role is to organise and surface shared data so decisions can be made faster and with less friction.
To ground the discussion, Varma walked through the journey of Tulsiway Solutions, a 70-year-old, Kolkata-headquartered company serving over 6,200 customers across 15 countries without ever raising external funding. The business moved its operations on to Zoho One in 2022, consolidating CRM, finance, HR, and collaboration tools into one ecosystem.
While individual teams gained better control, the founder still lacked a single, bird's-eye view of the business. The next step was connecting that consolidated data to an AI layer, letting the founder ask plain English questions such as renewal rates by region or conversion rates on recent leads, and get instant, contextual answers across the business.
Closing the session, Varma offered MSMEs three practical steps: convert one gut decision into a data decision, run a small experiment based on it, and let AI work on existing business data with proper guardrails in place.
He left the audience with a sharp closing line. "Speed without discipline is just a faster way to run out of money," he said, adding that an MSME's real strength is not size or adaptability but longevity itself. "It's not that you're small and then you're adaptable. It's that you're still here."
The session set the tone for what followed across MSME Sparks 2026's opening day: a recurring reminder that technology, and AI in particular, is no longer a differentiator reserved for a few, but a growth lever increasingly available to every MSME willing to use it.
Edited by Teja Lele