While I agree with your general premise and Bangalore isn't "Best startup city outside US", there is some good out there. Entrepreneurial and technical compete

While I agree with your general premise and Bangalore isn't "Best startup city outside US", there is some good out there. Entrepreneurial and technical competent hacker is a rarity anywhere. Obviously you won't find it in a under-grad who took up a job in IT, just so that he/she can prepare for MBA. But there are programmers out there, who are good and are in programming for fun of it. But then, are they entrepreneurial? Will they work for a salary cut? From what I have seen that depends. "There aren't any universities doing pioneering/cutting edge research (no not even the IISc, their research quality is at best mediocre) which might form the basis of a successful startup." Again for a lot of startups this might not matter. How many of startups in US spring from Basic Research? Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, Six Apart... agreed that some of them had hard engineering problems to solve, but they wouldn't even fall into border line case of Basic research. Riya example might be bad in someways because for a startup, it is bad idea to stretch yourself just for being cheap. Apart from IT services sector, if one is looking to start something great here, keyword isn't cheap. Inmobi started here and from what I have heard they are doing good. Zoho runs from Chennai. My previous startup marketsimplified runs from Chennai and is doing good. I agree with lack of support system, Government, VC et.el, but if there is a problem it primarily lies with us, programmers.