New Delhi | May 2026:-India has registered more than one lakh startups since 2014. It has produced about a hundred unicorns. That is a 0.1 per cent unicorn rate.
The remaining ninety-nine point nine per cent of founders, the vast majority of whom worked just as hard, have been quietly erased from the national entrepreneurship narrative.
A new book has decided to put them back in.
THE BOOK INDIAS STARTUP ECOSYSTEM WAS NOT READY FOR
The Other 99 Per Cent: What Nobody Tells You About Entrepreneurship, by veteran angel investor Kailash Biyani and senior investment banker Nilesh Maurya, has emerged as one of the most quietly disruptive Indian business books of the year.
It does not try to inspire. It tries to tell the truth.
In a country where, by NASSCOM and IBM-Oxford Economics estimates, roughly nine of every ten startups die within five years — yet where every conference, podcast and LinkedIn post celebrates only the ten per cent that survive — that truth has found a hungry audience.
THE NUMBERS NO ONE QUOTES AT STARTUP SUMMITS
The book’s foundational claim is that the Indian startup ecosystem operates on a managed silence. The data has always been there. It just rarely shares the same stage as the word “unicorn.”
According to research from the University of California San Francisco, seventy-two per cent of entrepreneurs report mental health concerns, against forty-eight per cent in the general population. Thirty per cent meet criteria for clinical depression. Indian numbers are likely higher and almost certainly under-reported, given that this country has 0.3 psychiatrists per lakh of population — roughly a thirtieth of what developed economies offer.
NASSCOM’s own 2025-26 study finds sixty-two per cent of Indian founders reporting active burnout symptoms.
These numbers do not appear at startup summits. They appear in the data the ecosystem has agreed not to read aloud.
THE SHADOW CAP TABLE
Among the book’s most-quoted concepts is what the authors call the shadow cap table.
Every Indian startup has a cap table — the legal document recording who owns what equity. Most also have a shadow cap table: the spouse who quit a high-paying job to support the founder; the parent whose retirement corpus was drained; the child who learned that her father’s laptop mattered more than her school events.
The shadow cap table holds no equity. It pays the biggest cost. Indian entrepreneurship, the authors argue, does not yet even have a word for it.
WHEN INDIAN FAILURE IS NOT AMERICAN FAILURE
One of the book’s sharpest interventions is its chapter on the imported gospel of “fail forward.” The phrase, the authors point out, was coined in a country where bankruptcy law allows a clean restart. Indian failure operates by different rules — legal, social, and familial. Imported wholesale into India without context, the authors argue, the slogan has cost a generation of founders the second chance they were promised.
WHAT THE BOOK ACTUALLY OFFERS
There are hundreds of books that tell Indian founders how to win. The Other 99 Per Cent is the first major Indian book that tells them what they are risking — and how to enter the journey with what every other field of high-stakes decision-making provides as a matter of course: informed consent.
Surgery has informed consent. Mountain climbing has informed consent. Skydiving has informed consent. Indian entrepreneurship, the authors observe, has motivational quotes and unicorn IPO photographs.
Drawing on three decades of investing, banking and watching founders rise and fall, Biyani and Maurya dismantle the most beloved myths of Indian entrepreneurship — passion, hustle, the pivot, fail-forward, the supportive family, the clean exit, and the meritocracy — and replace each with a more honest framework.
It is not, the authors are at pains to note, an anti-entrepreneurship book. Both have spent their careers inside the ecosystem and continue to back founders. The argument is more subtle: the people who choose to leap deserve to leap with their eyes open.
A QUIET CONVERSATION SHIFTING
Since release, the book has begun reshaping conversations on Indian startup forums and founder communities. The phrase “the other 99 per cent” has begun entering the working vocabulary of Indian entrepreneurship. Investors have reported asking different due-diligence questions. Mental health professionals have started recommending it to founder-clients.
In a country that builds unicorns and breaks people in roughly equal measure, the book offers what the ecosystem has needed for two decades: a mirror.
It is a deeply Indian book. It loves what this country is trying to build. It refuses to lie about what the building is costing.
The Other 99 Per Cent: What Nobody Tells You About Entrepreneurship, by Kailash Biyani and Nilesh Maurya, is available on Amazon India at
Buy Book: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9376863739
