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Step into a glass-walled conference room in any Indian startup, and you will inevitably hear the sacred mantra chanted: “We are a data-driven organization.” The product manager will present elegant dashboards with climbing graphs. The marketing head will showcase a detailed funnel analysis.
The founder, nodding sagely, will use phrases like “the numbers suggest” and “according to the metrics.” It is a masterful performance of modern, analytical business. And in many cases, it is complete theatre.
The decision was already made. It was made in the founder’s mind on the drive to work, based on a conversation with a trusted mentor, a gut feeling about the market, or a deep-seated belief. The data is not the lighthouse guiding the ship; it is the decorative lamp brought out to illuminate a path already chosen.
This is the great data delusion of the Indian startup ecosystem: a profound and often unacknowledged gap between the rhetoric of data-driven decision-making and the reality of gut-led governance. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s a fascinating cultural tension between our ancient business instincts and the shiny new tools of Silicon Valley.
The Performance of Being “Data-Driven”
Why the performance? Because being “data-driven” is the price of admission to the modern business world. It’s the language that VCs understand, the methodology that global partners respect, and the promise that attracts top tech talent. To admit that your multi-crore decisions are based on intuition or “market feel” sounds unscientific, unprofessional, and frankly, a bit archaic. So, we learn the script. We hire data scientists, invest in analytics tools, and build dashboards. Often, these become instruments of justification, not exploration. The data team’s unspoken KRA becomes “find the numbers that support the founder’s gut feeling.”
The Real CEO: The Gut and the ‘Dhanda’ Instinct
So, if the data isn’t in charge, who is? The real decision-maker is a powerful, time-tested force: the founder’s intuition, often shaped by a distinctly Indian business sensibility.
1. The Primacy of Relationship Intelligence: For centuries, Indian commerce (dhanda) has been built on relationships, not spreadsheets. Trust is the highest currency. An experienced founder’s gut feeling is often a complex calculation of relationship intelligence. They know that a deal with a slightly less-optimal but highly trusted distributor is more valuable in the long run than a data-perfect deal with an unknown entity. This nuanced understanding of the human network—something no dashboard can capture—often takes precedence over clean, quantitative data.
2. The “Baniya Brain” and a Healthy Skepticism of Data: There’s a healthy skepticism in the Indian business psyche towards data that seems too clean or too simple. India is a complex, chaotic, and often irrational market. The official data is frequently unreliable, and customer behaviour can be wildly unpredictable. An experienced founder’s “Baniya brain” or “market feel” is an internal algorithm trained on decades of observing this chaos. They know the map is not the territory. Their gut acts as a crucial bullshit detector, overriding data that looks good on paper but “just doesn’t feel right” for the real India.
3. The Authority of Experience: In our culture, we are taught to respect the wisdom of our elders. This translates into the business world as a deep reverence for the experience of the founder or the senior-most leader. The HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) is not just a corporate phenomenon; it’s a cultural one. Their intuition is given immense weight because it’s seen as the distilled essence of years of struggle, learning, and success.
The Danger of Ditching the Data
While this intuition is an undeniable asset, relying on it exclusively while pretending otherwise is dangerous. It creates a culture of confirmation bias, where the entire organization is geared towards proving the leader’s hypothesis right, not discovering the objective truth. It demoralizes talented analysts and product managers who see their rigorous work ignored in favour of a whim. Most critically, gut feeling cannot scale. A founder’s intuition can guide a 20-person company, but it cannot effectively run a 2,000-person organization serving millions of customers. At scale, you need systems, processes, and a distributed culture of data-driven decision-making.
The Synthesis: Where Gut Meets the Graph
The goal isn’t to kill the gut; it’s to create a healthy partnership between intuition and information. The truly evolved Indian startups are mastering this synthesis.
Companies like Zerodha and Swiggy are great examples. They have a strong founder vision, but this vision is constantly tested against a relentless stream of real-world data. They have built cultures where it is safe to challenge the HiPPO’s opinion with data.
The most effective framework is this:
- Let Intuition Form the Hypothesis: Use your deep market knowledge and gut feeling to ask the big, bold questions. “I have a feeling our customers in Tier-2 cities care more about durability than features.”
- Let Data Test the Hypothesis: Design rigorous experiments to validate or invalidate that feeling. Run surveys, analyze usage patterns, and conduct A/B tests.
- Let Data Guide the Execution: Once a direction is set, use data to optimize, refine, and scale the execution.
This approach honours the invaluable wisdom of experience while grounding it in the objective reality of numbers. It transforms data from a tool of justification into a powerful tool of discovery.
The data delusion is a sign of an ecosystem in transition, caught between its rich history of intuitive commerce and the demands of a globalized, data-centric future. The founders who will build the next generation of enduring Indian companies will be the ones who can silence the theatre, acknowledge the power of their gut, and have the humility to listen when the data tells them they’re wrong.
Have you ever been in a meeting where data was used to justify a decision already made? Is the “founder’s gut” a superpower or a liability? Share your perspective in the comments below!
