Resilience Doesn’t Shout—It Logs Back In: A Playbook for 2025 StartUp Leaders

26122025 Bharath, Editorials:

Which setback in your journey secretly taught you more than any big win?
How often do you pause to reflect on your mindset, not just your metrics?
Are you building a culture that allows your team to “fall safely” and learn?
How are women leaders in your network modelling resilience for the next generation?
If your StartUp story were told today, would resilience feature as a headline or a footnote?

In this two part article we shall discuss one of the important traits that every one of us need to possess. Get up where you have fallen and start running forward towards your goal post. We shall also learn that we are not alone in this thankless arena. Many seniors who are unicorns today had faced worse situations, but shrug their shoulders and moved on….

Falling forward in the StartUp world is not about avoiding failure; it is about using every stumble as raw material for a stronger, smarter second (or third) act. In the Indian StartUp ecosystem, this pattern shows up repeatedly: founders fall hard, recalibrate, and then build more resilient, focused companies that are often better aligned with market reality.

Why Falling Forward Matters In India:

India has seen tens of thousands of StartUps shut down or stall in just a few years, which means failure is not an exception but the default path.

Studies estimate that nearly 90% of Indian StartUps fail within five years, largely due to gaps in product–market fit, cash flow management, and execution discipline.

Yet many of the ecosystem’s most admired founders carry at least one “failed” or stalled venture in their history, which later sharpened their judgment, investor readiness, and operating playbooks.

Falling forward, therefore, is less about romanticising collapse and more about how quickly and honestly founders convert mistakes into systems, not stories.

The mindset shift is crucial: instead of seeing shutdowns as final verdicts, resilient founders treat them as expensive but highly structured learning programs that no B-school can replicate.

Case Study 1: Ritesh Agarwal – From Failed Experiments to OYO

Before OYO became a global name, Ritesh Agarwal faced rejections and early failures while experimenting with budget accommodations and online discovery models.

Oravel Stays, the precursor concept, struggled to scale as a simple listing platform and did not create enough value for either guests or property owners.

Instead of abandoning the space, Agarwal reframed the entire problem: India did not just need discovery; it needed standardization of budget hotels under a single, trusted brand.

This pivot gave birth to OYO Rooms, which focused on consistent experiences, revenue-sharing models, and tech-led inventory management for small hotel partners.

The “fall” of the earlier model forced clarity on three fronts—what value was truly being created, who was really the customer, and what levers actually scaled in India’s fragmented hospitality market. Falling forward here meant using a flawed first model as a diagnostic tool, not a tombstone.

Case Study 2: Kunal Bahl – Snapdeal’s Near-Collapse and Reset

Snapdeal’s story is almost textbook falling forward at scale. After an aggressive phase of GMV-chasing growth and a bruising battle with Flipkart and Amazon, Snapdeal came close to collapse, wrestling with losses, valuation markdowns and a proposed merger that never materialized.

Co-founder Kunal Bahl publicly acknowledged strategic mistakes, including unfocused expansion and burning too much cash on discounts instead of building a differentiated core.

Instead of exiting defeated, the team executed what they called “Snapdeal 2.0”, refocusing on a lean marketplace model targeting value-conscious customers and cutting non-core businesses.

This painful reset involved layoffs, portfolio pruning, and a mindset shift from “chasing everything” to “owning a clear niche”, but it allowed Snapdeal to stabilize and regain relevance.

The earlier near-collapse effectively became a forced strategy workshop that no board meeting could have triggered on its own.

Case Study 3: Hari Menon – From Fabmart’s Struggles to BigBasket

Long before BigBasket, Hari Menon co-founded Fabmart, one of India’s early e-commerce experiments in the late 1990s, when internet penetration and digital readiness were abysmal.

The timing mismatch and weak infrastructure meant that Fabmart’s online potential was far ahead of its environment, forcing the team to pivot towards offline retail formats and eventually wind down the original vision.

Those so-called failures, however, gave Menon priceless insight into Indian consumers’ buying patterns, supply-chain quirks, and the infrastructural gaps holding e-commerce back.

Years later, when broadband, logistics, and digital payments matured, he leveraged those lessons to build BigBasket as a more disciplined, operationally robust online grocery platform.

In this case, falling forward was about accepting that the world was not ready yet, then re-entering when the timing, tools, and team were far better aligned.

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This is 1/2 and shall be continued on 30122025: Why Falling Forward Matters In India

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