#UNTOLD | Darpan Sanghvi, Good Glamm & What Kills a Unicorn

The nurse glanced at the monitor. Then she stared.

The numbers flashing against the LED screen didn't make medical sense. Surely, the machine was wrong. She reached down, peeled the Velcro cuff off Darpan Sanghvi’s arm, smoothed it out with trembling fingers, and fastened it around him again, tighter this time.

"Tighter," he muttered. His voice was a dry rasp. The cuff clamped down. The machine whirred. Nobody spoke.

The silence inside the small curtained cubicle grew heavy, thick with the smell of antiseptic and underlying panic. The reading flashed a second time. The nurse didn't blink. She read the numbers again, then slowly shifted her eyes to study Sanghvi’s face, looking for the telltale signs of a stroke. Then she looked back to the monitor.

"No..."

The word barely escaped her lips. She jabbed a plastic button on the wall. Another nurse hurried over.

"Take a look."

The second nurse leaned towards the monitor, squinting slightly. She read the numbers. Then looked at the first nurse. Neither spoke. One of them reached for the wall-mounted phone.

"Get the doctor. Now."

Sanghvi lowered his gaze.

His phone shuddered against his sweat-slicked skin. It didn't ring; it just vibrated continuously. He didn't check the screen. He didn't need to look at the caller ID. He already knew who was calling. The ringing died. Then it returned. It returned again, relentless, demanding an audience.

He answered.

"Boss..." His voice cracked. "I'm in the hospital."

"I don't give a shit."

The words slammed into his ear.

"You owe me my money."

The abuse kept coming.

The curtain parted with a sharp rustle. The doctor walked in, his eyes darting across the room. The nurse didn't bother to explain the clinical history. She simply pointed a finger at the monitor. The doctor read the numbers, and his expression changed instantly.

Nobody in that room knew they were treating the founder of a company once valued at more than a billion dollars. All they knew was this: a blood pressure reading had unnerved two experienced nurses enough to summon an emergency doctor. While the medical staff was trying to prevent a physical collapse, the telephone in Sanghvi’s hand had already ignited an entirely unquenchable crisis.

Three years earlier, the calls had sounded very different.

Back then, nobody called Sanghvi to demand money. They called to invest it.

How Good Glamm Became One of India's Fastest-Growing Startups

In 2021, the startup ecosystem was in the middle of its biggest funding frenzy. The world was awash in cheap liquidity, and the capital wasn't just available. It was aggressive. Valuations were soaring to heights that defied traditional gravity. The driving psychological force of the market wasn't due diligence; it was the blinding terror of missing out. Investors feared missing the next breakout company far more than they feared backing the wrong one.

And Sanghvi seemed to have built exactly what they were looking for. The Good Glamm Group wasn't trying to build another beauty company. It was stitching together a new-age consumer empire where content, commerce, influencers and brands reinforced one another. Every acquisition wasn't just another deal. It was another piece of a grand puzzle.

The flywheel was simple: Content would attract audiences, audiences would become consumers, consumers would strengthen brands, and stronger brands would generate even more content.

Sanghvi had always believed entrepreneurs didn't need every answer before taking the first step. "They figure things out," he says, reflecting on the philosophy that guided his rise. "You don't know what the final business model will look like. You just know you have to build it."

On paper, it was an intoxicating idea. Money followed conviction, and then more money followed the money.

Looking back now, sitting in the quiet aftermath of the collapse, even Sanghvi struggles to process how quickly everything unfolded.

"When I look back at everything we did... it's crazy," he says, his voice dropping into a register of disbelief. "You start thinking about everything you pulled off, and then it's not there anymore."

Within a few dizzying years, The Good Glamm Group crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark. In India's hyper-competitive startup ecosystem, Sanghvi had become one of the poster boys of the consumer internet boom. From the outside, the trajectory looked almost perfect.

Almost.

Success has a terrible way of changing the questions people ask. In the beginning, every founder worries about survival. Will customers buy? Will salaries go out on time? Will the next investor say yes? But once hundreds of millions of dollars start pouring into the bank accounts, the questions transform. How fast can we grow? What can we acquire next? How big can this become?

For Sanghvi, those questions arrived in rapid succession. Investors loved ambition. The market rewarded scale. And scale, once rewarded, develops its own insatiable appetite. The bigger Good Glamm became, the bigger it wanted to become. The company wasn't merely growing anymore. It was racing. So was everyone else. And it showed.

The Acquisition Spree That Built Good Glamm's Unicorn Dream

In August 2021, Good Glamm acquired digital media platform POPxo. A few months later, ScoopWhoop followed. MissMalini came next, bringing a massive web of celebrity access and influencer networks. Then came beauty and personal care brands, including Organic Harvest and The Moms Co. Sirona joined the sprawling portfolio later.

Every single acquisition widened the ecosystem. Every new company strengthened the theoretical promise of the flywheel. Every deal made The Good Glamm Group look bigger on the charts. Every funding round made them look smarter to the onlookers. Every headline attracted another eager investor, and every investor made the next headline easier to write.

Inside the company, growth stopped being an ambition. It became an expectation. Every milestone quickly became the starting line for the next one. People weren't asking whether Good Glamm could become bigger. They were asking what it would buy next.

"We were hiring like mad," Sanghvi recalls, shaking his head. "You were just perpetually deal-closing."

Between March and October 2021, Good Glamm acquired 11 companies. In that same seven-to-eight-month window, it completed four back-to-back fundraises, taking its valuation from roughly $100 million to a staggering $1.2 billion.

"It was an insane time," recounts Sanghvi. "Too much, too big, too fast got me to become a unicorn."

He pauses, the silence stretching out between the memories. "Not knowing when to pull back is what got me back to zero."

But in the heat of 2021, nobody was talking about slowing down.

Why would they? Every acquisition seemed to prove the strategy was working perfectly. Every funding round reinforced the narrative of inevitability.

By October 2021, Good Glamm had crossed the billion-dollar mark. The unicorn badge was finally theirs. Most founders would have paused to integrate.

Sanghvi didn't. "Even before the money from our $1.2 billion round had hit the bank account," he recalls. "I had already finalised our next acquisition."

It wasn't another startup. It was a ₹3,000-crore deal. "I was already thinking about a $2 billion valuation," he says.

Looking back at the wreckage, Sanghvi doesn't blame the market or macro-economics. He blames himself.

"Logically speaking," he says, "I should have stopped there."

The billion-dollar milestone should have changed the company's priorities. Instead of chasing another acquisition, Good Glamm should have focused on integrating the businesses it had already bought. Instead of pursuing the next valuation, it should have strengthened its foundations.

"I should have continued showing growth numbers," he says. "But I should also have focused on integrating the companies we had acquired," he adds.

He didn't. The pursuit of the next milestone continued unabated. The hiring accelerated, the spending continued, and the integration could wait until tomorrow.

"I went and hired a thousand people in three months at the corporate level," he recalls. "I mean... you will f*** your company up when you do that."

At the time, none of it felt reckless. It felt inevitable.

The company had gone from ₹50 crore in revenue to ₹650 crore in just two years. No consumer company in India had grown that quickly. Every milestone seemed to validate the last decision. Every success made the next impossible leap feel entirely achievable.

That, Sanghvi now believes, was the ultimate trap.

Every previous gamble had worked. Every impossible situation had found a solution. Success had become its own proof. Sanghvi had come to believe he would always find another way.

Or, as he would later put it, he believed he could always "pull another rabbit out of the hat."

Then the world changed.

When Rapid Growth Became Good Glamm's Biggest Risk

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Almost overnight, psychological mood in global financial markets shifted violently. Investors who had spent the previous two years aggressively chasing top-line growth began chasing something entirely different: profitability, cash flow, and operational discipline.

The funding taps didn't shut off with a dramatic snap, but they were no longer wide open. For startups built on aggressive expansion, the fundamental questions changed as quickly as the weather. It was no longer ‘how fast can you grow?’ It was ‘how long can you survive?’

For Sanghvi, the timing couldn't have been worse. Good Glamm wasn't a single, nimble company anymore. It was a massive, heavy collection of distinct companies that still had to learn how to function as a singular unit.

The integrations were still underway. The hiring had already happened. The The massive overhead costs had already been incurred. The next phase of the strategy depended heavily on one central assumption: that fresh capital would keep coming to fund the transition.

It didn't.

"The market just completely changed," Sanghvi recounts. "What people wanted to fund changed. The benchmark changed."

Suddenly, the very strategy investors had celebrated months earlier was being questioned. Scale was no longer enough. Growth was no longer a virtue. The market wanted realized profits. But Good Glamm had been meticulously built for an entirely different game.

Sanghvi remembers trying to adjust the massive ship mid-current. He cut costs. He slowed down expansion plans. He began asking harder questions of the businesses he had assembled. But unwinding momentum is much harder than building it, especially when hundreds of employees, multiple founders, dozens of brands and investors are all moving at different speeds.

"The mistake wasn't building fast," reckons Sanghvi. "It was not realizing quickly enough that the rules of the game had changed."

By then, the company wasn't fighting to become bigger anymore. It was fighting to keep pace with a world that had suddenly started moving in the opposite direction.

The change didn't announce itself with a single dramatic moment. It arrived quietly. One conversation at a time. One investor meeting at a time. One delayed decision at a time.

For the first time in years, fundraising conversations that once closed in weeks began stretching into months.

The questions changed. Investors who had once leaned in now leaned back. They wanted clearer answers. Sharper numbers. A faster path to profitability.

"The benchmark had completely changed," says Sanghvi. "The kind of companies investors wanted to fund had changed."

Inside Good Glamm, the pressure began travelling through the organisation. Expansion plans were quietly revisited, operating budgets were heavily scrutinized, and hiring slowed to a crawl.

The company had spent years learning how to move faster. Now it had to learn how to stop dead in its tracks. That turned out to be much harder. Every acquisition came with founders. Every founder came with teams. Every team came with expectations. The math was changing. The commitments weren't.

Why Darpan Sanghvi Says He Didn't Stop in Time

Years later, reflecting on that period, Sanghvi would publicly admit something many founders struggle to say out loud: Growth had become an obsession. Execution hadn't kept pace. He had mistaken momentum for resilience. That realization came late. Too late to prevent what followed.

Soon, the questions weren't coming only from investors. They were coming from employees, from founders of the companies Good Glamm had acquired, from lenders, from vendors.

And eventually, the phone started ringing.

At first, Sanghvi believed the slowdown would pass.

Startups had survived difficult macroeconomic quarters before. This would simply be another one. They would raise a little less capital, cut a little more fat, and wait for the global market to recover. Then they would get back to the real business of building.

But every passing month made one thing painfully clear: the old playbook wasn't coming back. Every week brought another difficult conversation. An investor wanted more proof. A founder from an acquired company wanted clarity. A senior employee wanted certainty. A vendor wanted to know when the payment would arrive.

None of those questions had easy answers anymore.

For years, Sanghvi had measured progress by what the company was adding. A new brand. A new acquisition. A new fundraise. Now leadership demanded the opposite. What could be cut? What could wait? What could be saved?

It was a different kind of leadership. Growth rewards optimism. Survival demands restraint.

Looking back, Sanghvi now believes this was the transition he never truly made.

"If I had an inkling of what was going to happen," he says, "it would have been a completely different outcome."

He paused.

"Until it happened, I never imagined in my life this would happen."

Why would he? Barely months earlier, Good Glamm had been preparing for a pre-IPO.

"I was preparing for a pre-IPO," he recalls. "I always thought we'd figure something out."

That belief had carried him through every crisis since the day he started MyGlamm.

When funding dried up in 2016, he pivoted. When customer acquisition costs spiralled, he reinvented the model. When the pandemic brought business to a standstill, he built the Good Glamm flywheel. Every previous crisis had rewarded optimism.

This one didn't.

"The problem," Sanghvi says, "was that I had become too big to figure something out. The problems became too big."

For the first time in his entrepreneurial journey, instinct wasn't enough. The next acquisition couldn't solve it. Neither could another funding round. Or another rabbit pulled out of the hat.

The company that had spent years mastering speed was now carrying the weight of its own momentum.

And momentum, once it turns against you, exposes every compromise that looked like brilliance on the way up. Rescue financing was explored. Bridge capital was discussed. Every possible solution was put on the table. But there were now too many stakeholders, too many liabilities and too many moving pieces. Deals that once closed in weeks now dragged on for months.

Then came the calls. Every morning began with one. Every evening ended with another.

"Every call," Sanghvi remembers, "you're going to get killed. It is some major issue or the other. And you end the day with that. Then you wake up and repeat."

He could have walked away.

"I could have resigned as director the day the problem started," he says. "But I kept trying to find a solution. Not so much for myself, but because there would be a solution for all my stakeholders."

It wasn't enough.

By June and July, lenders had begun enforcing their charge. Soon after, the company entered insolvency proceedings. One of those calls followed him all the way to the hospital.

"I'm heading to a hospital," he pleaded.

"Can I please talk to you later?"

The response came instantly.

"I don't give a shit."

The story had come full circle. The phone that had once rung with investors chasing the next funding round was now ringing for a very different reason. The company entered insolvency. The headlines wrote themselves. The unicorn had fallen. For everyone watching from the outside, that was the story.

For Sanghvi, it was only the beginning.

The Momentum Trap: Darpan Sanghvi's Biggest Lesson After Good Glamm's Collapse

The business crisis was becoming something far more personal. Employees had trusted him. Founders had sold their companies to Good Glamm because they believed in the vision he had painted. Investors had backed that vision. Now all of them wanted answers. "Everybody believed in me and came on board," Sanghvi says quietly. "I was only a 15% owner of the company. But I take full responsibility."

It is a line he returns to repeatedly. Not valuation. Not market conditions. But responsibility.

In the months that followed, he says he wasn't trying to protect his reputation as much as he was trying to find a way out for everyone else. "I could have resigned as director the day the problem started," he recalls. "I kept trying to find a solution. Not so much for myself, but because there would be a solution for all my stakeholders."

The rescue financing never came together. There were too many moving parts. Too many liabilities. Too many interests pulling in different directions.

Looking back now, Sanghvi is unsparing about the mistakes. Some were strategic. Some were financial. Some were simply the consequence of believing that yesterday's instincts would continue working tomorrow.

"I delayed fixing the P&L because I still wanted growth."

"I took debt when I didn't need to."

"I scaled before fixing unit economics."

"I hired a thousand people in three months."

They aren't excuses. They're confessions.

"If I didn't have the contingent liabilities... if I didn't have the debt... we would have fixed everything."

Today, he describes that period with a phrase he wishes more founders understood: The Momentum Trap. Or, as he now puts it more simply: When ambition outruns execution.

"When a man is riding a Tiger," Sanghvi reckons, "he doesn't understand anything."

Success creates its own velocity. Every victory convinces you the next gamble will work. Every impossible challenge you've overcome becomes evidence that you'll overcome the next one too.

"The lesson," Sanghvi says, "is that at some point, you have to slow down."

That realization arrived too late for Good Glamm. It still arrives unexpectedly for him.

"I'd be lying if I said I don't think about it," he says. "Sometimes you're just sitting somewhere... maybe having lunch... and suddenly a thought comes."

He pauses.

"'What if?'"

Another pause.

"Shit, I made it…and then I lost it."

The sentence hangs in the air longer than any discussion about valuations, acquisitions or funding rounds ever could. Because by then, the numbers no longer matter. Only the cost does.

Failure has a way of stripping away illusion.

For years, Sanghvi had believed that every problem could be solved. Raise more capital. Close another acquisition. Find another way. That belief had built Good Glamm. It had also blinded him.

Looking back, he no longer searches for a single mistake. There wasn't one. There were dozens. Some strategic. Some financial. Some born out of the simple belief that tomorrow would always look like yesterday.

Today, he speaks about those mistakes with a candour that is rare among founders. Not because it changes what happened. Nothing can. But because someone else might stop before repeating them.

"I've made enough mistakes for others to learn from," he says.

He doesn't allow himself to linger there for long. There is little point. Entrepreneurship doesn't give anyone the rare privilege of rewriting their past. It only gives you the heavy responsibility of understanding them. Perhaps that is why Sanghvi no longer talks about building the next massive unicorn.

Instead, he talks about building better companies. Companies that grow, pause, integrate, stabilize, and survive the winter. Because he now knows something that rapid success rarely teaches its pupils. The hardest part of building a billion-dollar company isn't reaching the top of the mountain. It's knowing exactly when to stop climbing.

"I wouldn't wish what happened to me on anyone," he says.

Then he falls silent.

For a founder who once believed there would always be another rabbit left to pull out of the hat, perhaps that heavy silence says more than anything else ever could.