Dhruv Nath’s latest book narrates the story of four market giants — Naukri.com, Zerodha, Zoho, and Dream11, and how these companies managed to become profitable at a time when Internet-related businesses are largely loss making.
The book largely discusses stories about phenomenal companies and their equally phenomenal founders. The individual stories of these companies, their founders, and how they were able to turn them into profitable businesses are something you would want to read to get motivation to keep your mid-week blues at bay.
The book maps the stories of how Zoho transformed rural Tamil Nadu by recruiting young boys and girls who could not afford to go to a decent college. And nurturing them into becoming star programmers. Nithin Kamath, the outstandingly humble founder of Zerodha, shocked the nation by charging absolutely no brokerage from investors. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, who started Naukri.com from the servant’s quarters above his father’s garage, used second-hand computers and furniture. And subsequently, they grew the business to the point where they had an unbelievable 70 per cent share of the market for white-collar jobs. Harsh Jain of Dream11, who built a roaring fantasy sports platform when everyone advised him not to.
In the book, the author Dhruv Nath shares why he titled his book – Earnicorns (unicorns that are making profits). It is dedicated to those businesses that faced all kinds of crises over the years and yet were able to overcome huge setbacks and become the dominant market leaders that they are today.
Published by Penguin India, ‘The Earnicorns’ will be released on 30 July on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.
Further, the book talks about the focus on dominance and explains what this has done to businesses. “When companies realized the opportunities that the Internet had thrown up, they went berserk. They realized that their target market was not limited to just their own neighborhoods or towns. Their market was the entire country—in some cases, the entire world. Therefore, they started focusing on rapid growth to capture more and more of this HUGE market.”
Professor Dhruv Nath is an angel investor, a mentor to start-ups, an author, and a director with Lead Angels Network. Earlier, he was a professor at MDI, Gurugram, and a senior vice president at NIIT Ltd. As an angel investor, he has invested in over twenty start-ups and mentored a few hundred of them.
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