Why do Startups fail?more than 90%

talks Kharagpur 2015  Bikash Barai

 more than 90% of startups die they fail    you know that the founders they have a great idea they start there with a lot of passion with a lot of energy they really really work hard yet 90% of the companies die why is it so there are a couple of main reasons couple of big reasons one of them is execution and I'm not going to talk about that today,

• Idea Early stage

 I'm going to talk about the other one and that's the primary cause of death of startups or ideas in the very early stage execution is the one which becomes the reason for death in the next phase so before I tell you that reason for which most of the startups die in the very early stage let me tell you a story of an idea ten years back I was studying in this campus and I decided not to go for a job but to pursue my idea of a startup and my family had absolutely no idea about the business.

• Story

 so when I went and told my mom that I'm going to start a company she was a little bit worried but as always she supported but then after a month or so she called me up and she sounded little bit disturbed and she told me because you have to get a job just go and sit for the placement get the job but it's not necessary that you have to join and I thought what's happening why is it so and after a while, I realized that one of my uncle's told my mom that I heard because started a computer shop so my mom was furious is this the reason,

Why I sent you to I idea to start a computer shop you are spoiling my reputation so anyway I let things get cool down for a while my mom got cool down and I never went for the campus placement.

 I started off with the idea which I had and my co-founder was a great hacker also from the same campus he used to know people by their IP address and not by their names so it's like we meet somebody at the canteen and after some time he realizes oh that was 10.5 so we once went to an organization to conduct an Ethical hacking exercise so ethical hacking exercises something where the organization's invite experts to come down and test how secure is their system are there any flaws how could they be broken and how they could be fixed so we went to this organization and we broke almost every part of the network we got the CEOs password we got into the finance system.

we got into the HR system back then hacking was very easy and while we were presenting that report to their management we got an idea we thought maybe we could have tried a different way to break into so at the end of the presentation we went and told them that can we try once more and they said ok go ahead and try any way you guys have broken so we went and tried and that thing worked and that was like a moment of truth for us and we asked ourselves that when we as ethical hackers or penetration testers when we try to break into a system and find out the flaws once we get success do,

We try as hard as we were trying before to find the second way of breaking into and the third and the tenth and the hundred the answer is obviously no because we will lose the interest after some time as human beings so we realized that the ethical hacking model doesn't really solve the purpose because for the guy who has to secure he or she has to block all the possibilities of attacks but the guy who is going to break has to find only one so we thought what could we do and just some time back I did my course on artificial intelligence so we thought can we do something to figure out the permutations and combinations of attack paths.

 so I started using planning algorithms and started working on this problem and what we figured out a little bit later was that this was a very very hard problem in computer science the space complexity is very high with conventional computers you cannot solve this in a reasonable time frame but we figured out certain ways to solve that and once we did that we started getting a lot of our words from Intel University of California Berkeley red herring etcetera so we were super excited but then after a while,

 we had our second moment of truth and what we realized was that we were getting more Awards than business so we were thinking what's happening are these people crazy they are giving us so many awards but nobody is buying
 this so we start with started thinking about what the real problem is and what we figured out was that organizations even though they love this idea they did not have people to run these tools so we thought then, 

How do you solve this and then we thought let's host this online and we can run this tool for them let's offer it as a service and then one of the guys in our company he came up and told me because you know what there is something called SAS software as a service and I went and looked ok that sounds cool let's call our success and that became something interesting because we had a very interesting technology we used to call like AI-based technology to simulate a human hacker then we had a lot of awards. 

Now all of a sudden we got a business-friendly tag called SAS and we got lucky we raised four million dollar venture capital fund and that was a great moment we were sharing this with you four million dollars on the other side there was a long silence and then she said why did somebody give you so what imagine there won't be something wrong and she told me here so in the very air bladder maybe his form is completely different reasons,

 After I started getting some moderate success we started getting some customers but then what we realized was that we were solving common network security and we realized that eventually network penetration testing is going to become less and less important what's becoming more important is the application security all these online websites e-commerce portal banking applications and you submit we problem so we then decided to shift from this network security testing to application security testing and that was divided move for us and that actually missed us in terms of scaling we went ahead and gotten more than 500 enterprise customers.

 we something that month back at work by a company so overall package just to kind of and I had success now if we look at this journey is this general assault for an idea obviously would look like right it's like a search for an idea we start with an idea made it to Phase two of an idea move to Phase three and with into Phase three that's when we got some taxes so initially I also it took me like five or six years to realize that it was learning of sorts for an idea because, 


I'm here it was a search party problem and this had been one of the very big realizations which I had in my life in our entire education system or even in our society without people to solve great problems right we don't like people concept and points or Heinie's problem without the following problem that's what we are taught at various Institute's but what we do learn is how to find problems and finding problems is a different kind of art it's a different kind of skills and one needs to learn that unfortunately,

 Our society or education system does not want problem finding that much is a general method right we all want to be a human and we all watch it here but in the industrial era what we are solved is the ability to make it ranger you needn't regulate without it will be the length you don't have a deal so next time when you hit a great idea if you think twice is this idea of a breakdown our people are really worried about that problem or is it you who is excited about the problem and if you might have that great column you can see in rigor,

I a great problem so if you want to be a hero you have to find your villain and that's very important there is no great idea without a great power so we should stop looking for ideas and start to be our great problems because it's not the idea but the problem that matters.