You Don’t Get Kohli Without Gully Cricket
Building a unicorn is like making it to the Indian cricket team, most won't. But the ones who do change everything. And for that, we need more people trying.
I’ve been thinking about odds lately. The odds of building a unicorn. The odds of playing for the Indian cricket team. Both are brutal. Both are statistically ridiculous. And if you were to approach either with the cold logic of a spreadsheet, you’d never even lace your shoes.
I keep meeting founders who remind me of gully cricket kids I grew up watching. The same irrational shine in the eyes. That feeling of “I know this makes no sense, but I want to see how far I can go.” Late nights pitching to anyone who’ll listen. Burning savings on a prototype that maybe five people believe in. Tweaking an idea at 2 AM because something in your gut refuses to let it go.
No corporate job prepares you for that. In a job you have paths, ladders, reviews, predictable six month cycles. In startups you have only one thing. Energy. And sometimes that’s enough.
People keep trying to bring logic into entrepreneurship. Market sizes, unit economics, margin structures, CAC models. And all of that matters eventually. But none of it is why someone starts. No one looks at a 50 slide TAM/SAM/SOM deck and feels their heartbeat rise. No one decides to jump off a cliff because a VC spreadsheet told them it’s a rational idea. “You start because a tiny part of you wants to be the story.”
Sometimes I think India treats startups the way it used to treat cricket before the IPL. A fantasy reserved for a chosen few. The rest of us expected to watch from the sidelines. The old system made the talent funnel thin. Too thin. Incredible players stuck in district level shadows because the national team had no room.
And then the IPL came. It didn’t make the BCCI more efficient. It just changed the economics of trying. Suddenly you didn’t need to break into the national team to make a living off cricket. You could take your shot without destroying your future. It widened the base. More kids tried. The game got better.
Entrepreneurship in India is stuck in that pre IPL phase. We celebrate the winners but don’t support the ones warming up. The truth is simple.
A strong ecosystem doesn’t guarantee stars, it guarantees chances.
Chances for the college kid building a SaaS tool in a hostel room. Chances for someone from a small town hacking together an app after their shift ends. Chances for former operators turning angels and giving someone else their first break. Chances for founders who failed once but still have that irrational spark left.
That’s how systems grow. Not through perfect planning. Through volume. Through experiments. Through people willing to look stupid for a few years.
I meet these people all the time. They come with wild eyes and rough prototypes. Half broken, half brilliant. And I’ve learned not to judge them by feasibility. I judge them by intention. Are they here because they want control over their time? Or because they truly want to be in the arena? The latter is rare. The latter creates things.
Zomato didn’t begin with a billion dollar plan. Zerodha didn’t begin with a crisp CAC model. Kohli didn’t begin with a cover drive. It all started with someone choosing ambition over logic.
It’s funny. When you zoom out, everything great looks inevitable. But if you zoom into the moment it began, it usually looks a lot like delusion.
And maybe that’s the whole point.
As you don’t get Kohli without gully cricket, you don’t get unicorns without irrational ambition.