Accel’s Subrata Mitra On Why AI Will Break More Founders, And How To Survive It

Accel partner Subrata Mitra has spent the better part of six decades on the difficult side of entrepreneurship — first as a founder who sold one company and shut another after 9/11, then as the investor who wrote the first institutional cheque into Flipkart and built Accel into India’s most consistent early stage franchise.

So it is telling that his first book is not a victory lap around the Indian startup circuit, but a lesson from the stories of founders who tried and failed, but kept going.

Down But Not Out (HarperCollins, 2026), coauthored with Pankaj Mishra, is a collection of 10 founder stories, highlighting the journey of those who created companies such as BlueStone, Capillary, Uniqode, GreyOrange, HyperVerge and others.

The pieces are held together not by common themes and narratives of success but by stories of survival and coming up from nowhere. The book, which has vibrant imagery, along with short snappy chapters, features the stories of Tejas Networks’ Sanjay Nayak, ZopSmart’s Mukesh Singh, BlueStone’s Gaurav Singh Kushwaha, Zolve and TaxiForSure’s Raghunandan G, Capillary’s Aneesh Reddy, Uniqode’s Sharat Potharaju & Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty, Ninjacart’s Kartheeswaran K K, GreyOrange’s Akash Gupta and Hyperverge’s Kishore Natarajan.

A lot of the framing is borrowed from cricket. Being not out means being at the crease when the match is coming to an end, except in this case, some of the founders have kept going for decades. So it’s not just about startups that have failed, but also those that have endured tough times.

The book came about, as Mitra tells it, with a problem someone else brought to him.

Pointing to Avinash Raghava, also in the room as an Accel alumnus, he said that Raghava’s experience of running the Together Fund and SaaSBoomi (now called AIBoomi) was a key trigger.

“Avinash [Raghava] had counted roughly a thousand credible, profitable companies that had been quietly sidetracked by the AI wave — good businesses that might never scale again, or might sell for cents on the dollar,” Mitra told Inc42.

Anything that could have been done seemed too small to salvage these companies. What stayed with Mitra was a more familiar sentiment. He had himself backtracked and rebuilt more than once, and thought such stories were worth telling at scale, resulting in the book, which was launched at the end of June.

Mitra spoke with Inc42 about the common thread running through his 10 founders, why he believes failure is under-utilised as a resource, who the book is actually for, and how relatable any of it will remain in an AI age that is about to manufacture a great deal more of it.

Here are edited excerpts:

Inc42: The book opens with a very specific trigger — the observation about companies stuck in the AI wave. Walk us through how that became the book.

Subrata Mitra: Avinash Raghava had this problem statement: there are probably a thousand companies today getting completely sidetracked because of the AI wave. And the thing is these are good SaaS companies. Most of them are also profitable. They are solid cash-flow businesses, but they’re faced with a new reality that they’ll probably never scale again, or scale very slowly, or sell for a few cents on the dollar compared to what they had in mind. Or they exit and go do something else.

That’s what AI is doing to many companies.

So we started with tactical solutions — could someone acquire a few of these, roll them into a bigger revenue company, cut costs, list it. But when it played back in my mind at home, I was thinking: here’s a set of companies with very credible founders, a lot of them from a technology background like me.

Erasmic Venture Fund, before the merger with Accel, was my third startup. So at least twice I’d tried and not been very successful. That ability to backtrack and rethink is something I’d gone through myself — so it felt worth narrating. And because it’s a story that repeats often enough, we went and found other founders who’d been through the same thing.

Inc42: Many of the founders in the book come from completely different sectors, different schools of thought — some city-educated, some small-town, some still running their businesses, some who shut down and moved on. What’s the common thread?

Subrata Mitra: People who have struggled on multiple occasions. In my case, I sold one company; the second I had to shut down because of the 9-11 attack in the US and its fallout; the third was the real attempt, which has led to what I do today.

So in a way, this book is a story of endurance and the ability to reposition yourself as a founder when you know you’ve made a mistake reading the market, and to find the thing that could work better instead. My own experience is a major factor.

And these are all first-time founders. They didn’t have the luxury of another entrepreneur in the family to guide us, they are self-taught, to a large extent. If you look at all these stories, people figured it out on their own, or with minimal help from an advisor or investor. That ability to endure, rethink, reposition, motivate the team and end up at a high. That last part matters, but most people stop reading when they see a failed startup. That should not be the case.

Inc42: But more than 90% of companies fail — nearly every founder has some version of this journey. Why these founders in particular, and what’s so special about their failure, so to speak?

Subrata Mitra: The last piece in my previous answer is the important one — that we end at a high. Failure by itself has become a lot more acceptable in the startup ecosystem now. But the way I look at it: for every 100 people who start, maybe 5 to 10 truly succeed and 90 to 95 fail. The majority have actually learned a lot. If we could take the learnings from those who succeeded and give them to the next 90, then in their next iteration, hopefully the success rate is much better for this cohort.

So, can we create a sugarcane juicer where every spin keeps feeding the stock back in, a little more juice coming out each time? That’s the point — you keep multiplying it a little, so the outcomes get slightly better every round.

Editor’s note: The analogy by Mitra is a prominent part of the retelling of his Erasmic days before Accel took centre stage. 

Recalling the time he paid attention to how sugarcane juice is typically produced by street vendors, Mitra and his coauthor write, “That image has stayed with me. Because building in India rarely happens in one clean sweep. It is not one launch, one success, one straight line upward. It is the repeated turning of the stalk — coming back to something that looks finished, changing your grip, and discovering it still has more to give. And the ice water could be a bridge round or even a new CXO.”

Inc42: So who is this book actually for? Reading it, the founders almost feel deliberately faceless — as if any reader could step into the character. Was that intentional, and who’s the target?

Subrata Mitra: Almost every founder starting a company in India can benefit from these stories. Everything said and done, Indian companies take a lot out of you. Across these stories, most of the ups and downs you could think of show up in at least one or two of them.

More broadly, it’s for anyone taking a difficult journey where the chance of failure is much higher than the chance of success. We’ve talked about sport and entrepreneurship — but any hard journey demands the same thing: be prepared to fail, reorient, get up, and figure out the right thing to do.

Pankaj Mishra: For me, the book is a myth-buster — a reminder, through the family anecdotes woven into each chapter, that founders are humans, and that these are human battles of resilience.

Inc42: How much of this is genuinely relatable to founders today? Small-town India has grown up, everyone’s exposed to the internet, this generation arrives less innocent than the founders you profile. Does it still land?

Subrata Mitra: Go back to that SaaSBoomi situation — those are relatively younger founders, and they’re stuck. There are 5,000 of them; my friend talked to a thousand, maybe another thousand exist. At that scale it’s very hard to solve the problem for them centrally, so they have to self-learn and self-reorient. Those are exactly the people I expect to benefit.

People who are so young they haven’t faced adversity yet — this may not appeal to them, and it isn’t really for them yet. But people who are stuck, who wake up in the morning and find the ship hasn’t moved — those are the ones who might get some new life-juice out of this.

Inc42: Is a sequel in the works? How would you approach it? Which founders would you pick the second time?

Subrata Mitra: We’ve talked about this. This book is about getting to the point where you’re not out — in cricketing parlance, you’ve entered the last six overs. But now you need to post a score that’s genuinely challenging for the opposition. So the next question is: how do you hit sixes from here? Founders who survived, took it to a level, and then excelled — that’s one thread.

Take Gaurav [Singh Kushwaha] at BlueStone — he’s already come 10x, but I’d say he still has a 10x left in him. How does he get there? Not everyone in this group will be in that set. And then you add newer companies, more recent breakouts, younger founders. Those are the two ways I look at when I think about the next set of stories.

Disclosure: Inc42 was provided an advance copy of the book by Accel India for review and interview purposes

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