Analysis Of Unicorns And Cockroaches

Of Unicorns and Cockroaches – Why ambition without focus drives valuation but fails to create value?
Ambition, as per the Oxford English Dictionary, is a strong desire to do or achieve something. It is the wings that hard work requires to be successful. As said by John D Rockefeller “the man who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won’t succeed, you must have a larger ambition”.
In case of new age Indian businesses this is even more true. Businesses are now fixated on being the next Unicorn, a mythical animal, whose name is also given to companies who are valued at a billion dollars before going public. Unicorns or not, their ambition now presumably is to attract the nth round of funding and access the seemingly endless yet slowly drying supply of dollars to survive in the present with a wishful thinking to dominate the future. The Unicorn here lives the narrative of ‘go big or go home’. And in most cases it represents the glorified ambitions of one-upmanship, market domination being the trophy investment.
A case in point would be Snapdeal. It came a long way from being a deals website to be an e-tail behemoth. It was valued at $6.5 billion last year. Snapdeal was a contender to dominate the Indian e-commerce sector. It had successfully tapped the market 11 times to rake in $1.7 billion. The brand today is facing an

It would be interesting to learn about two Indian Unicorns who are in the greens. Mu Sigma, an analytics service provider is posting robust business growth with a revenue of INR 810 cr and a PAT of INR 463 cr (reported March 31, 2016 – Tofler Data). While InMobi, a global mobile advertising platform, which competes with the likes of Google and Facebook, posted profits for the first time in the Q4’16. InMobi’s decision to drop the non-core businesses buttresses the point of focusing on the core to create sustainable business with strong fundamentals rather than just chasing the Unicorn