If flipkart , despite being the flagbearer of Indian startup success story, is far far away from real profitability ( not falana dhimkana adjusted) even after 16 years of its operation, it says a lot about Indian startup ecosystem

Recommend a book "India Uninc." by R Vaidyanath. He beautifully explains why the Indian economy's backbone is SMEs and unorganized sector. TBH though, Flipkart has had way more impact than the other so called disrupters. Don't see any real value add by most of the Indian startups.

Indian startups, unless bootstrapped, do not work towards profitability. They focus on scale and secondary. These VC funded companies do not represent the whole startup ecosystem. Check bootstrapped companies, there are many which are good and profitable.

What does it say, why do you care so much

Unlike many startups in India, FK is actually very well run with a lot of financial discipline. It is not profitable today as it has been focusing on both growth and profitability together along with a thousand other new things and doing well in most of the things baring 1-2. I think it can become a smaller scale but profitable company overnight if asked to but that’s not what is being chased.

FK profitability will come only at a particular scale. I would say, its not ecosystem problem but rather India as an economy has a decent but sustainable growth rate and not explosive growth like we saw in China and SEA.

It might take more time for FK to reach the scale they want. But once they turn profitable, near term PAT margin expansion will be humongous due to the operating leverage they have.

FK never had anything innovative. Just copy paste. Same with Ola. But this doesn’t mean that other startups won’t work. SaaS is working and providing returns to stakeholders. Fintech will also work once we externalise the UPI stack.