New Delhi, April 20 -- In 2005, 24-year-old Ashish Kumar made a choice that, at the time, seemed almost irrational. He quit his job at Microsoft in the US and returned to India to build a venture of his own. Entrepreneurship then was neither celebrated nor widely respected. To many around him, it appeared he was giving up everything he had worked for, an IIT degree, a coveted global job and a stable career trajectory.

About a decade-and-a-half later, that perception had begun to shift.

In 2019, 25-year-old Abhinav Singh experienced a quieter kind of failure. His startup, Colorpur, a platform that enabled graphic designers to upload designs for manufacturing, was shutting down. It hadn't collapsed dramatically; it simply failed to scale....