From promotions that never came, to workplace politics, founder conversations and products that became household names, Saptarshi Prakash offers an insider’s account of eight years inside Swiggy and the people who built it.
Most startup stories are told from the founder’s chair. But what does it look like from the other side of the table, the seat occupied by the thousands of employees who build, manage, adapt and grow alongside a company?
Inside a Unicorn by Saptarshi Prakash offers an intimate and candid answer. Drawing on eleven years across Indian startups including Housing.com, Zeta and, most significantly, Swiggy, the book takes readers inside the reality of startup life: exhilarating and chaotic, ambitious and political, rewarding and sometimes deeply frustrating.
Prakash joined Swiggy in 2018 as an individual contributor, at a time when the company was still a fast-growing food-delivery startup. Over the next eight years, he grew into one of its senior leaders as Swiggy itself expanded into a listed company operating across multiple businesses. The book traces these two journeys side by side: a company learning to scale, and an individual learning to grow with it.
But Inside a Unicorn is not a conventional startup success story. It goes beyond funding rounds, product launches and glossy milestones to explore the thousands of small, messy and deeply human moments that actually make an organisation.
Through real scenes, conversations and personal experiences, Prakash explores the unwritten rules of startup culture: learning jargon nobody explains, figuring things out without a map, spotting small frictions before they become big problems, handling competition, working with founders, losing credit, dealing with burnout and criticism, and understanding the managers and mentors who can quietly alter the trajectory of a career.
The book also offers an honest answer to a question increasingly relevant to young professionals: Is startup life actually for me? For those already working in startups, it provides a mirror to experiences that are rarely discussed openly. For students, MBA and engineering graduates and corporate professionals considering the leap, it offers a grounded picture of what they might be signing up for.
About The Author
Saptarshi has been at Swiggy for over eight years now, watching it grow from a scrappy startup to a unicorn and beyond. He joined as an individual contributor, fresh and wide-eyed, and today he leads design across multiple charters as an AVP. Over time, he has come to be seen not just as a design leader, but as a leader of the company itself. Through this journey, he has witnessed the company’s evolution from the inside-the wins that fuelled momentum, the missteps that forced them to rethink, the painful layoffs, the audacious bets, the cultural shifts
Outside of Swiggy, he has built a strong presence as a content creator and educator. He regularly shares insights around design, startups and leadership across LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube, where he has built a community of thousands of professionals who actively engage with his work.
The official release for the book is in October 2026
