The Profile of an Average Indian Entrepreneur: 32 Year Old Male Graduate Who Never Went to IIT
India is right now world’s youngest startup nation. Govt. of India has launched special programs like ‘Startup India, Standup India’ to help and motivate entrepreneurs, and investments are flowing in from every direction into the Indian startups.
But who exactly is an Indian entrepreneur? Considering the fact that founders of some of the biggest Indian startups (Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal from Flipkart, Kunal Bahl from Snapdeal and more) are from IIT, are all successful entrepreneurs belong to IIT?
Xeler8, an Indian startup from Bangalore which tracks and analyses Indian startups have found that the stereotype of an Indian entrepreneur is wrongly projected by the media.
As per Xeler8, a typical Indian entrepreneur is 32 year old, male, and surprisingly, he has never went to an IIT. Some VCs may find this discovery disturbing, indeed.
Xeler8 have analysed 2300 startups for this analysis, and covered niches such as e-commerce, food technology, fintech, healthcare, agriculture technology, advertisement technology, data analytics, and gaming which are considered as the hottest sectors right now.
In fact, larger startups such as Oyo Rooms, Snapdeal, Flipkart and some established names like MuSigma were also considered.
Some interesting highlights of this analysis:
When Does An Entrepreneur Gets Funded in India?
As per the analysis of Xeler8, 32 is the optimal age for an entrepreneur to get funded by any VC.
And majority of entrepreneurs start their venture when they are aged between 28 and 29 years.
Education of an Indian Entrepreneur
Based on the analytics of researched firms, 47.3% of all Indian entrepreneurs are graduates, whereas only 1.6% are college dropouts. This will again, shatter the impression of so many young wannabes who assume that if Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg can dropout and make it big, then dropping out is the success mantra.
They tend to forget that they dropped out from Harvards and MITs!
Gender of an Indian Entrepreneur
Not surprisingly, 91.4% of all entrepreneurs which Xeler8 studied are male; and only 8.6% are female.
It seems Government wants to change this massive difference, and that’s why schemes such as ‘Mahila e-Haats’ have been launched recently. Although Neeta Ambani has been hailed as the most powerful businesswomen from Asia; we need more participation and contribution from the fairer sex in expanding the startup eco-system
Maybe harsh rules such as these can trigger a change?
As per Sixth Economic Census by the National Sample Survey Organisation, India has 5.8 crore entrepreneurs in India; and out of them 2300 startups is a really small number to even approximate any data.
Having said that, research by Xeler8 do give us an idea about the new, and dynamic startup culture in India, and asks some tough questions to us.
