Startup success is a Test match, not a T20 game: Accel India co-founder Subrata Mitra on why he backed Flipkart, Myntra, and others

Subrata Mitra, co-founder at Accel India and an early investor in Flipkart, Myntra, Mu Sigma, and Cult Fit shares what decades of backing Indian startups have taught him about building companies.

There is no such thing as a startup journey that simply goes “up and to the right”.

Subrata Mitra has had one of the best vantage points to make this observation. The co-founder of Accel India, which began as Erasmic Venture Fund, has watched Indian entrepreneurship evolve for over two decades and has backed companies including Flipkart, Myntra and several founders who went through far more complicated journeys before finding success.

“I haven't seen one company that has gone straight up. Up and to the right. Not one. If somebody is telling you that, most likely lying,” says Mitra on the Prime Venture Partners Podcast.

It is also the idea behind Down But Not Out, a book Mitra has co-authored with Pankaj Mishra and other collaborators. Rather than chronicle only celebrated startup successes, the book examines founders who went through failures, pivots and periods when their companies appeared to have run out of road.

For Mitra, those journeys reveal something fundamental about entrepreneurship: the founders who eventually build enduring companies are not necessarily those who avoid setbacks. They are the ones who learn how to remain in the game long enough to capitalise when the right opportunity finally arrives.

Stay at the crease, but know when to hit the six

When Mitra evaluates founders, what does he look for?

“One is this ability to stay long because most journeys in India will go through their own ups and downs,” he says. But endurance alone is insufficient. A founder also needs the judgement to recognise when an opportunity has emerged and the aggression to pursue it.

Mitra explains it through cricket. “You can't defend the entire 50 overs,” he says. “When you get the right ball, you have to also hit the six or the four because the scoreboard also counts.”

The combination matters because startup outcomes can change dramatically from what founders and investors initially imagine. When Accel wrote its first cheque to Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, Mitra recalls that a $200-million outcome would have made them happy. The company eventually crossed that milestone without anyone stopping to celebrate it as the destination.

“We went through 200 like that and nobody even looked back and said, you know, that was our milestone. It wasn't. It was just a sort of marker on the road,” he says.

Why Mitra believes in ‘long-term greed’

Mitra has a phrase for this ability to optimise over unusually long periods: “long-term greed”.

The idea comes partly from the nature of venture capital itself. While VC funds may formally have lives of around 10 or 11 years, Mitra says good funds in India can take 14, 15 or even 16 years to fully play out. Accel's 2008-vintage Flipkart fund, he noted, is still alive despite having already returned substantial capital.

“The guys who truly endure are the guys who realise that we are doing it for something else other than greed,” says Mitra.

The book describes entrepreneurship as driving through fog. Founders rarely know exactly what lies ahead, but they still need to keep moving. The “compass”, according to Mitra, is alignment around goals, motivations and people.

“Even though there is fog, you can probably look at the compass and say, I know that I have to do these three things today and that's the north pointer that we are looking at,” he says.

The founder you invest in may have to become someone else

The ability to evolve becomes particularly important because the skills required at one stage of a company can become liabilities at another.

Mitra cites BlueStone founder Gaurav Singh Kushwaha as an example. When Mitra first worked with him, he saw a strong computer scientist and problem solver who was not necessarily equally strong at building and scaling teams. Years later, those responsibilities became unavoidable.

At one difficult point in BlueStone's journey, Kushwaha had to let several employees go. Mitra remembers how he called them into his room individually and began by taking responsibility.“We are doing this, but it is more our fault than your fault,” Kushwaha told them.

Mitra says it can take eight or nine months of working with an early-stage founding team before he develops a meaningful view of whether they have what it takes. Even then, the company itself may fail because of the market or product cycle.

“If you can engage with the right team with the right set of background checks and then keep testing them or keep challenging them for the next six to nine months, they may find something credible or pivot around until they reach innings two, three or four."

Founders must learn to stop doing everything

Evolution also means knowing when to let go. At the beginning, founders are generalists by necessity. Three people may simultaneously handle product, hiring, marketing, research and whatever crisis needs solving that morning.

But that model breaks as the organisation grows. “The big challenge happens when people stop letting go,” says Mitra.

A founder running a 100-person company cannot continue operating as though it has three employees. Instead, Mitra argues that founders need to move their attention from solving every present problem towards anticipating the next stage.

He uses another simple mental model: “What is step 10 going to look like? What is step 100 going to look like?” he says. “When we are at one, we start thinking about 10. When we are at 10, we have to think about 100 and then work backwards from there.”

Complementary founders can make that transition easier. Mitra recalls the early days of Erasmic, when the team was raising a $10 million fund without enough money to hire a lawyer. After Mitra struggled through roughly 20 pages of the private placement memorandum, co-founder Mahendran stepped in to handle it.

“That is the complementarity of skill sets that you need in an initial team that nothing drops to the bottom,” says Mitra.

Coaching should become part of the founder journey

Accel now asks many founders whether they want a coach. The coach could be chosen by the founder or suggested by the firm. Mitra's conviction partly comes from Accel's own experience using coaches and from navigating leadership transitions at companies such as Flipkart.

“I have seen a lot of different variations of coaching work, but it is absolutely essential that most founders get some kind of coaching,” he says.

Mitra describes it as repeatedly coming back to a problem with fresh energy. A success or failure today does not determine what happens tomorrow. “Just because you have either succeeded or failed today, doesn't matter, come back tomorrow, let's take a fresh look and let's just go again. Is it worth going again?”

Make room for joy in a 15-year journey

Endurance, however, cannot mean spending 15 years permanently stressed. Mitra deliberately tries to create an environment at Accel where people can joke about mistakes, including his own. He recalls openly telling colleagues about putting $20 million into a company and questioning his own diligence.

The result, he believes, is not merely a happier workplace. It improves the quality of discussion because people become more comfortable challenging each other.

“Making a little bit of the environment happy, friendly, etc. actually increases the productivity of the system,” he says. When Prime Venture Partners' Amit Somani described entrepreneurship as 363 or 364 days of grind punctuated by one or two days of joy, Mitra offered a different formulation.

“Put that one 365th joy every day.”

Because if entrepreneurship really is a 10 or 15-year journey, waiting for an acquisition, IPO or giant funding round before allowing yourself to enjoy it is an extraordinarily long wait.

Mitra's closing advice to young founders therefore has less to do with markets, fundraising or strategy than with the person running the company.

“You'll probably see a lot of pivots in your ideas, and at the end of it, you have to remain sane and be able to orchestrate that symphony well enough,” he says.

“Work on yourself as to how you get better every day as opposed to thinking of what you can change in the world.”

For a career spent identifying companies capable of changing the world, it is an unexpectedly inward-looking conclusion. But perhaps that is precisely Mitra's point.

Before founders can build something that endures, they have to learn how to endure themselves.