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The golden tap offers an insider account into the evolution of internet-based start-ups in the country having the second largest number of internet users in the world, India. The author, a serial entrepreneur himself, deftly juggles his personal experience of working in India, China and Silicon Valley with what he saw around him in the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem and globally. It offers a detailed account on start-up investors globally, their investment logic and processes they follow. This book serves as a valuable guide for entrepreneurship scholars interested in emerging markets, practising entrepreneurs and for investors.
The book is structured in a chronological fashion, categorized into three sections, namely internet wave (1994-2002), Globalization wave (2003-2009) and Smartphone wave (2010-present). The internet wave firms include the likes of Google and Amazon in the USA and companies like MakeMyTrip and Naukri.com in India. The globalization wave saw the emergence of Facebook and Twitter in the USA and firms like Flipkart in India. The smartphone wave constitutes firms like Airbnb and Uber in the USA, and their counterparts in India like Oyo rooms and Ola cabs. The author is uniquely positioned to give an elaborate account on all the three periods since he had founded a start-up in each of the three waves. During the internet wave, he co-founded a start-up called RightHalf.com while he was a student at IIT Bombay in 2000 which was subsequently acquired by a Silicon Valley company. In 2007, he started Chaupaati Bazaar, a phone commerce marketplace, which was later merged with India’s leading retailer Future Group. He followed this up with co-founding a mobile payments company Chalo which was sold to San Francisco-based restaurant reservations company OpenTable. The author brings out the inside story with a deep personal connect thanks to the network he had from being an alumnus of IIT Bombay and from his early exposure to Silicon Valley.
Kashyap opens the book with a December 2014 interaction he had with Bhavish Aggarwal, the Founder of Ola cabs, a leading taxi-hailing application in India and portrays how within short span drastic changes in Indian entrepreneurship landscape and mindset were witnessed. It was a period when global funds had...