Start-up’s chorus against action on Stayzilla founder

A special website was created to send a letter to Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, and it was signed by some of the icons of the start-up world, including Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal and others. 

The letter goes on to say, “Although we do not wish to prejudge the matter, the Stayzilla case and its locked up founder underscore the hardships of being an entrepreneur in India. If ever there’s a right to be an entrepreneur, that’s clearly been violated. Period.” 

The letter goes on to call the entire incident as a Bollywood nightmare, and unlike the movies, there are no real life superheroes to fight the battle. “He started getting pressurised to confess to “a crime” he never committed...” The letter even raises questions the way the entire case was handled. Incidentally, quite a few entrepreneurs were yet to be convinced whether a criminal case was actually filed against him or not. Sabin Rodriguez said, “Incidents like this will make the younger generation sceptic about venturing into this.”

At a press meet organised by TiE and NASSCOM a day after the arrest, Naru R Narayanan, president, TiE Chennai said that the case is clearly a civil case, where payments have not been made to the vendor. The TiE representative went on to say that there were many cases where top industrialists have defaulted on payments and no police action was taken against them. “We have felt the pulse among the start-ups in Chennai and there has been a drop in the morale,” he added. 

Reports said that voodoo dolls with the picture of Sachit Singhi’s son’s face was sent to his house. He is a co-founder of Stayzilla. Entrepreneur Sakthivel Pannerselvam took a leaf out of that and started distributing happy dolls. He said, “Everyone was disgusted with the incident. I came across the concept of happy dolls and started sending them across.”