India, July 9 -- Accel partner Subrata Mitra has spent the better part of six decades on the difficult side of entrepreneurship - first as a founder who sold one company and shut another after 9/11, then as the investor who wrote the first institutional cheque into Flipkart and built Accel into India's most consistent early stage franchise.

So it is telling that his first book is not a victory lap around the Indian startup circuit, but a lesson from the stories of founders who tried and failed, but kept going.

Down But Not Out (HarperCollins, 2026), coauthored with Pankaj Mishra, is a collection of 10 founder stories, highlighting the journey of those who created companies such as BlueStone, Capillary, Uniqode, GreyOrange, HyperVerge an...