Financial Strategies and Key Factors contributing to the success or failure of Start-ups – A study in Indian perspective

Startups play a pivotal role in the development of entrepreneurship culture, product development, innovation, and employment generation. These enterprises complement overall economic transformation and contribute to developing and strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem in any economy. The twenty-first century is the era of Startups, where young entrepreneurs are setting up innovative ventures to generate quality goods and services and become employment generators rather than employment seekers. Though such ventures are created to grow and become unicorns, many times they face numerous challenges to pick up and grow at the desired pace. One major challenge many Startups face is the generation of the required amount of investment and tapping into innovative and sustainable financial sources. Generally, the financial sources for such ventures remain as Bootstrapping, Family and Friends, Angel Funds, Private Equity, Accelerator Funding, Loans & Credits, Venture Capital Funds, and Government Grants. Tapping into any one or some of these sources sometimes becomes a challenge, and these budding ventures fail to sustain and grow at the expected momentum. Similarly, skill development programs are other options that help to train the masses and make them employable in their home countries or sometimes abroad. The East Asian miracle has been a glaring example of valuable skill development programs launched by the East Asian countries, where the youth of these economies could find easy employment in their home countries and abroad as well. Such initiatives are also sometimes plagued by the lack of the required amount of funds and fail to deliver the expected results. The present study is about the financing of Startups and skill development programs launched by India in 2015 and 2016. The study focuses on identifying innovative financial sources for the Startups and skill development programs in India and formulating strategies for tapping into innovative financial sources. The study is based on primary and secondary data, and the collected data has been analyzed using statistical tools like correlation, regression, and chi-square tests.