Amazon Prime Video’s Mission Start Ab gives entrepreneurship the MasterChef treatment, and is better for it

Kunal Bahl, co-founder, Snapdeal and Titan Capital; Anisha Singh, founder, She Capital, and founder and ex-CEO, Mydala; and Manish Chowdhary, Wow Skincare co-founder, in Mission Start Ab on Amazon Prime Video. (Screen grab/YouTube/Prime Video India)

To watch a start-up pitch its idea to investors feels instantaneously gratifying for a reason. Big money is thrown around, personalities deconstructed and ideas dissected with the cathartic, surface-level indulgence of an Instagram scroll. No business can really be figured, valued or scrutinised in minutes, but it is precisely what has made Shark Tank India so addictive. It makes you feel smart for a change, even though it dumbs down the practicality of the investing process. Moreover, there is this voyeuristic quality to watching fortunes, dreams and maybe lives instantly soar or crash. Look around the media ecosystem and start-ups seem to have replaced dating and drama as reality TV’s go-to subjects. Amazon Prime Video’s Mission Start Ab successfully milks this moment and proves in the process that start-ups make for great entertainment, if not investment.

In Mission Start Ab, 10 start-ups have been handpicked to fight for the chance to raise money. To be able to do that, however, they must first survive challenges to make it to the finale and pitch. It sounds like the screening portion of Shark Tank India that we don’t get to see.

This cohort of entrepreneurs has been picked by a troika of well-known judges/investors comprising Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl, MyDala’s ex-CEO Anisha Singh and Wow Skin Science co-founder Manish Chowdhary.

At first look, this feels like a rather competitive incubator programme. As we go along, the tenacity and anxiety of a reality TV show begin to settle into the somewhat unremarkable scenery. There are tasks, challenges, eliminations and tears. The whole shebang.

And there is the small bit of Masaba Gupta for some reason playing co-host (alongside the capable Cyrus Sahukar) in a show that requires little to no hosting.

This is MasterChef for start-ups, a multi-episode journey of ups and downs that though awkwardly produced and evidently hastened, offers you that intimate window seat of watching men and women with dreams, live by a thousand cuts.

If Shark Tank India is instantly gratifying but also ultimately forgettable (except the odd pitch or two), Mission Start Ab actually wants you to familiarise yourself with the idea, and the people behind it so their rise and fall hit that much closer to the conscience. It’s still unpolished, raw, like something that’s been rushed into the oven to cash in on a moment, but it manages to differentiate itself quite simply by allowing budding entrepreneurs to proportionally hog more of the limelight. Here, the investors, the bigwigs stay apportioned for large parts to their roles as commentators and investors.

Start-up reality TV is having a moment both on and off screen. Start-ups, founders, have had IPOs faster than their businesses could ever imagine. They are the new celebrities of new India. Which means there are now as many sharks or shark aspirants as there might be start-ups looking to raise. What maybe sets this Prime Video offering apart is the graceful tenor in which it is conducted, the many forms and metrics the show is willing to apply, and the education it might eventually impart in terms of starting up.

The fourth episode, where co-founders are tested on their chemistry, is particularly riveting as a study of collaborative blind-spots. Out of the 10, there are clear frontrunners, crowd-pleasers and those that appear to be incomprehensible duds. It’ll surprise you – and that kind of is the point here – that a good idea doesn’t necessarily translate to good execution or a streak of competence. Which is what makes this latest carnival of start-up mania so watchable.

There is probably something explicit in watching people run around for the sake of a chance to make it. This is after all a capitalistic enterprise, the real Squid Game if you like. But on the other end of that grim stick, there is the energising promise of a wonderland, where the future of this country is headed. A future that will be ushered in not through state-designed schemes or socio-political overhaul maybe, but through micro-inventions that wish to topple the established order. Any start-up that thinks it is a worthy contender is also in some sense prevailing evidence of a gap that needs fixing, a pothole that requires filling. To all the versions of reality TV on offer, this at least feels gainful and constructive.

There is obviously a caveat here. When start-ups become hot news, what prevents them from existing for the sake of the moment? Or building on the sheer noise that elegantly-run businesses would simply never generate? Empirical evidence suggests there is value to both propositions. This high-voltage pursuit of change and money might be contrarian to the monkish pursuit of excellence and impact but remains a court of opinion in favour of the visibility that simply couldn’t be achieved through other means. It’s a shift in the water-cooler conversation that we needed, and regardless of the creative deterrents, it’s fascinating to witness.