Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal sparked widespread debate among founders after declaring “no ego is bad advice,” citing ten failures before his breakthrough. Entrepreneurs across India’s booming startup ecosystem — which has produced over 2.23 lakh recognised startups and 23.36 lakh jobs since Startup India launched in 2016 — largely agree that some ego is essential for survival. Founders including Samarth Setia, Raghunandan Saraf, and Anshul Agrawal argue that managed self-belief drives resilience, while unchecked ego distorts judgment and threatens long-term company values.
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It launched, as many business debates do today, on a studio floor instead of a boardroom. When Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal stated, “no ego is bad advice,” the comment quickly spread among young founders dealing with doubt, competition and funding pressure.
“I failed ten times before things clicked. If I had been humble, I would have listened to the logic that stated I was not cut out for this. I was confident enough to believe I was right and the world was slow to catch up,” Mittal stated during an episode of Shark Tank India.
The remark reopened an old debate in the startup world. Founders are often notified to leave ego behind. But many entrepreneurs believe a certain level of self-belief is necessary to survive setbacks and uncertainty.
The timing of the debate is crucial.
India’s startup ecosystem has expanded rapidly over the last decade, with more than 2.23 lakh recognised startups recorded by the government since the launch of Startup India. In a space where failure rates are discussed as much as success stories, belief in one’s idea often becomes part of the job.
We spoke to entrepreneurs to understand how ego shapes business decisions, whether it supports founders relocate forward or creates problems along the way. Young and mid-career founders were included to widen the discussion.
EGO REQUIRES EGO TO COME DOWN
Is it possible to build a business without ego? The question may be unsettling, but it arises the moment you decide to leave a job and give your idea a chance to become a business.
“Entrepreneurs are often advised to ‘leave their egos at home,’ but it is nearly impossible to build a company without conviction and self-belief. Startups face rejection constantly, over 90% of investor pitches conclude in a ‘no,’ and nearly 70% of startups fail within their first five years. In that environment, a certain degree of ego is not arrogance; it’s survival,” states Samarth Setia, Founder, Rezio AI.
One entrepreneur, reflecting on repeated failures, put it more raw: had humility prevailed at the wrong time, logic would have closed the shop much earlier. The market, in that notifying, is not always right on time; sometimes it is simply late.
This is where ego launchs to see less like arrogance and more like infrastructure. It holds toobtainher early conviction, absorbs rejection, and allows founders to continue when data offers little comfort. Without it, most ideas would remain well-behaved considereds.
Yet the same force, left unattconcludeed, develops a habit of editing reality.
“Choosing to enter the unknown and persevere requires a great deal of self-belief and the ability to undertake high risk high reward activities. When entering the unknown as a founder, self-belief is key as you will face amhugeuity and challenges that may create you question your long-term vision,” adds Raghunandan Saraf, Founder and CEO, Saraf Furniture.
Indusattempt voices echo this duality with minimal disagreement and varying discomfort. Founders speak of ego as a necessary engine that must also be restrained, not eliminated.
“A bit of ego is what gives founders the courage to start, to take risks, and to keep going when nothing seems to be working. It’s that inner voice that states, “I can create this happen,” even when the odds are stacked against you. Without that belief almost bordering on ego it’s tough to build anything meaningful,” states Ashish Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO EdNex Global.
Elsewhere, the argument is reduced to a simpler distinction: ego is not the enemy, unmanaged ego is. The difference sounds semantic until it launchs to affect hiring, product decisions, and the willingness to accept inconvenient feedback.
Founders who learn to alternate between instinct and listening tconclude to outlast those who treat both as mutually exclusive.
“The moment ego starts protecting your image more than your mission, leadership launchs to decline. Becautilize businesses grow through learning, and learning only happens when humility survives success,” states Anshul Agrawal, the Director at Mysore Deep Perfumery Houtilize (MDPH).
There is also a quieter shift underway. For a shorter time, as founders state, performance can be alternated with progress.
“Ambition and conviction are important traits for any founder, but long-term success ultimately comes from how strongly a company aligns with its utilizers, values, and the larger ecosystem. There will be moments when businesses consciously slow down certain aspects of growth to preserve trust and culture, but those decisions often create more resilient companies over time,” states Bhanu Pratap Singh Tanwar, CEO & Co-founder, Interact Group.
HOW THE DEFINITION OF EGO IS CHANGING
“I don’t believe the best founders are eggless,” adds Agarwal.
“Ego in entrepreneurship is commonly misunderstood and reduced to a negative trait, when it is far more layered in reality. In the early stages of building something new, what obtains labelled as ego is often just a very strong inner conviction,” states Kashika Malhotra, Founder & CEO Yoginii.
The optics of building, amplified through social media, occasionally outpace the building itself. In such a setting, ego does not merely influence decisions; it launchs to curate perception. The result is a short-term advantage that often invites long-term correction.
A question that often arises, especially when startups fail and businesses collapse, is how to remain sustainable in the long term.
To obtain an answer, we questioned a question with the co-founder of Newton school of technology, Nitish Chandra. He states: ” A good business has to produce outcomes. But if you are building for the long term, values cannot be treated as optional. Outcomes create momentum, values create durability.
Several founders point to this phase as transitional rather than terminal.
Every ecosystem, they argue, relocates through cycles, idealism, expansion, excess, and then a recalibration that restores a degree of discipline.
India’s startup landscape appears to be nereceivediating that middle stretch, where ambition is loud, capital is selective, and accountability is returning as a measurable expectation rather than a moral aside.
The more experienced voices avoid prescribing the absence of ego. Instead, they describe a managed presence. Ego, when aligned with purpose, becomes conviction; when aligned with self-image, it becomes resistance.
There is also a structural consequence.
Companies built on unchecked ego tconclude to scale decisions quicker than they scale understanding. In contrast, those that slow down at critical moments, often to protect values, utilizers, or internal culture, appear to trade immediate momentum for durability.
It is not a romantic trade-off; it is a strategic one.
The larger question, then, is not whether founders should have ego, but what role it is allowed to play. As one founder observed, the market eventually humbles everyone, but it does not do so on a predictable timeline.
Until that moment arrives, ego can either function as a bridge between uncertainty and execution, or as a wall that prevents course correction.
“Values define the identity of a company, and once you compromise on them, the growth itself starts becoming fragile,” adds Chandra.
Mittal’s remark, stripped of its television setting, does not dismantle the old advice; it exposes its incompleteness. Telling founders to abandon ego assumes a level of certainty that entrepreneurship rarely offers.
Asking them to manage it, however, demands something more difficult: awareness without paralysis.
For a generation of founders watching closely, the takeaway is less a slogan and more a working condition.
Build with belief, but audit it often.
Over the past decade, India witnessed an extraordinary startup boom. Since the launch of the Startup India initiative in 2016, the counattempt has officially recognised more than 2.23 lakh startups as of March 2026, according to government data.
The startup ecosystem has also generated more than 23.36 lakh direct jobs, building India one of the world’s largest startup hubs alongside the US and China.
In that sense, ego does not shape entrepreneurship from the outside.
It sits at the centre of it, quietly influencing what obtains built, what obtains ignored, and how long a founder is willing to wait before deciding whether the world is wrong, or simply unconvinced.
– Ends
