Lessons from GoMechanic

Why read this story?

Editor's note: It has taken less than a month for the GoMechanic fiasco to be wiped out from the news cycle. It’s already a thing of the past. The investors of the car repair startup have been silent, and the founders are sharing social media posts of workshop owners supporting the company.  The GoMechanic saga is absurd. The founder of a promising startup admitting to financial misreporting in a social media post is as astonishing as it is shameful. For an ecosystem that is often praised for its potential for employment generation and tech chops by the Indian government, episodes like these undermine the entire narrative. Such incidents are a reminder that there is a lot of work to be done on corporate governance and that the ecosystem needs to review itself. Here are four lessons from what happened: 1.Founders, don’t cook the books: This is obvious, but needs restating. The past year has seen allegations of financial irregularities against several startups—Infra.Market, BharatPe, Zilingo and Trell, to name a few. Now, these are only the ones reported in the press and remain …