Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

There is one kind of story that is almost always popular—the ‘who is’ story. 

The whats and hows and whys are all fascinating, and they make for engaging narratives and pack lessons in spades. But there is a certain enduring appeal in tackling the whos. Who someone really is is what makes autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs an evergreen genre. 

And neither the news media nor the world of Indian startups is immune to its allure. Because the story that has occupied much of the news media’s attention this week is one such ‘who is’ story—Who is Ashneer Grover? 

The co-founder of New Delhi-based fintech startup BharatPe and a shark on business reality show Shark Tank, Grover has been in the news on and off for over two months now. And I see this as an indication that as Indian tech startups reach a certain level of maturity, questions like ‘Who makes for an ideal startup founder?’, ‘What has their journey been?’, and ‘How can they overcome predictable conflicts?’ are all becoming increasingly relevant. 

So let’s start unpacking them in this edition. (We’ll also continue to look deeper into this theme in future editions of Inciting Incident.)

Ashneer Grover and the founder-funder conflict

Back in January, I wrote about how the key difference between what makes a story and what is just information is very often the presence of conflict. And conflicts come in all shapes and sizes.

As far as startups are concerned, founders tend to face two major conflicts—one with their co-founders, the other with the board. 

According to American academic Noam Wasserman, who studied 10,000 founders for his book The Founder’s Dilemma, about 65% of high-potential startups fail as a result of conflict among co-founders. And such conflicts can range across the board—from leadership to money to strategy to blame. 

But investors tend to prefer investing in teams rather than in startups with solo founders.