6 ms·

As an entrepreneur in India

57 points by prateekdayal 15y ago

chailatte 15y ago
Exactly. All the media hogwash about 'brain drain' flowing back to India....nobody smart enough is going to go live India to start a startup. It's like trying to fight your schizophrenia while living in a bomb shelter in a war zone. At best these entrepreneurs are going back briefly to setup offshore office in India before hightailing out of there. And from personal experience, offshore teams aren't that great...the smart ones left India already.
- prateekdayal 15y ago
  >the smart ones left India already Actually thats the other problem :) There is so much focus on "brain drain" that people have almost come to believe that the rest of us in India have no brain. There is so much hoopla about getting people back to India and very little about people who just stay back and never move out.
- abhaga 15y ago
  I returned to India 3 years ago. I have other friends and people I know who have come back since. Many of them are doing startups. Others are working in academia. Not a single one is setting up offshore offices or looking to fly back (AFAIK). These are mostly young guys returning soon after their studies. But media hype is perhaps not about these people. It is about people who are coming back after 10-15 years of career in US, have families and a reputation to carry. In this segment, I know many who have come and gone back, after establishing the Indian centers of their employers. :) So depends on who and what you want to see.
meow 15y ago
What the article says is very true.. Sometimes I feel like a time traveler trapped in dark ages, waiting for the things around me to catch up to what I know is already a reality else where.. like last weekend when there was a 9am-5pm power-cut in bangalore, wondering how life without such basic problems can be.. :(
ankeshk 15y ago
Here is the counterpoint: India is awesome if you're not struggling. A lot of people complain about traffic. You know the salary of a driver on a monthly basis? About $100-250 (depending on the car you drive). Bureaucracy is killing. Takes 3 months to incorporate. But do you know how much accountants charge in India to take care of all your business details? A startup probably won't have to pay more than $150 a month on an accountants fees. Things are so cheap in India that you can live an extremely shiny life on the same budget at which an entrepreneur struggles to feed his family in USA. But yes - a lot of the things are broken in India if you don't have the little bit of money required to throw at it to fix it. On the bright side: the pace of improvement is staggering (I mean - Indian literacy rate went from 65% to 75% in 10 years. Thats 650 million literates in 2001 to 900 literates in 2011! Still not awesome. And college education is still lacking in many places. But the speed of improvement is staggering.) Disclosure: I'm a glass-half-full kind of an Indian who studied in USA but is now living in Bombay working on a startup.
- sushrutbidwai 15y ago
  And it takes absolutely no time and no legal backing system to get screwed up in India as well. Driver who will be late to work on 9 out of 10 times is worse than driving through the traffic. FWIW - Literacy rate in India should not be confused with education. I have been to government operated schools many times and you wont find more than 10% students who can do simple math or write there own names even in 4th standard.
- chailatte 15y ago
  Cheap isn't everything. China is cheap. Thailand is cheap. Malaysia is cheap. They don't have the massive infrastructure problems that India has. Personally I (or any sane person) wouldn't want to just live in a nice house, then sit in a chauffered car, stuck in traffic for hours, while avoiding looking out to see bum/garbage/slum/dirt/smog/chaos, then arrive in a nice office, then eat lunch and hope it doesn't make me sick, then go back home again.
  - obelix 15y ago
    fk, you just described my life. I live in a fantastic bubble and work in a fantastic bubble. I travel in a car driven by my driver and I pretend the in between doesn't exist.
essrand 15y ago
Another link-bait. What's a diatribe about conditions of infrastructure, pollution, corruption et al, got to do anything with the title of the blog. Yes. things suck in developing countries, either move to the US, its easy enough if you are good or stop complaining and deal with it.
sridhar_vembu 15y ago
This is a great post - "moral suffering" exactly captures the feeling I have as an educated and affluent Indian. Yet, I keep going back, keep doing more in India. I have thought about this quite a bit, and here is an interlocking set of problems that cause this "moral suffering". The phrase "private wealth and public squalor" captures the present situation in urban India very well. A city like Chennai or Bangalore is not that poor anymore on a per-capita basis, but they looks much poorer. The contrasts are just shocking. You can find apartment complexes where flats cost $150-200K and up (yes that is in USD) , sitting on potholed roads, surrounded by trash. Here is an explanation of how the system doesn't work in India: * Taxation system is irrational - the $200K apartment would pay next to nothing in property taxes, probably as little as $100 a year (legally). Local governments require state or central assistance to run themselves. Consequence: there is no way for a local government to plan ahead, it has to rely on entities at a much higher level. Even the state government doesn't have much of a tax base, so it relies on grants from the center. This is a completely broken over-centralized public finance system, but there is absolutely no political will to tackle it. * Relentless concentration of economic activity in major cities, because smaller cities and towns are even more starved of resources (on a per capita basis) and lack any local tax base at all, so both investment and people migrate to large cities like Chennai or Bangalore. This self-reinforcing dynamic has resulted in ridiculously overpopulated big cities. At Zoho, 70-80% of our employees come from smaller towns who have migrated to Chennai, so we are part of the problem of this over-concentration of economic activity. * Increasing private wealth and non-existent urban infrastructure combine to produce some of the most extreme valuations in real estate in the world. Right next to Zoho office in formerly suburban Chennai, land goes for $10 million an acre (there are no acre-sized parcels, of course) simply because as a close-in suburb, this has a nominally functioning infrastructure, which far out places would lack. Note that I don't mention a world about corruption because that exists in so many other countries without producing the same urban squalor and "moral suffering" that India produces. The solution I have come up with, something we intend to adopt in Zoho, is to abandon major cities, and move to much, much smaller towns. At the level of about 50-100K population, there are many towns that offer a decent quality of life, particularly when you bring in the kind of jobs and economic activity a company like Zoho can bring. This is the plan we are working on. Now I will mention some good news, because some posters here are so pessimistic. In my life time, I have seen massive improvements, massive reduction in human suffering in South India. I routinely saw sights as a kid that I don't see anymore: train stations full of emaciated, sick people begging, severe malnourishment everywhere, higher education serving 1-2% of the population (now in the Southern states, it is closer to 20-30%), and a general mood that life would never get better. Today a lot of smart young talent coming on stream that is a capitalist's dream in India. Yes, you have to invest in training and skill building, but if you do, the rewards are immense. The monetary rewards are very good, but the psychic rewards are immeasurable.
known 15y ago
800 million people are starving in India. And the Govt/Politicians doesn't want people to prosper. They fear people might vote as per their conscience in elections. http://www.deeshaa.org/2011/06/02/the-starving-800-million-in-india/ http://www.deeshaa.org/2011/06/02/the-starving-800-million-i...
goombastic 15y ago
I need a plan to get out of India.
dimmuborgir 15y ago
The author in the rush of justifying her feelings of moral suffering has put some factual lies and false notions. First, she claims that the standard of living in India is plummeting and goes on mentioning slums, filth, corruption, bureaucracy etc. If one checks the recent national census and other survey results, the poverty has been steadily declining [1], the illiteracy has sharply declined [2], Indian consumers are the most optimistic in the world! [3], and ironically - Indian entrepreneurs are the most optimistic in the world! [4]. The rest of her complaints are just nitpicks. Second, the notion that happy existence or perfect system is the prerequisite to creativity and success. This is false. If one studies Anthropology, creativity/art/culture/economic-activity/entrepreneurship exist everywhere, even in the most failed country. It is the nature of man to grab every little opportunity. The fact that Mercedes has opened R&D centre in India only shows their creativity, their ability to grab the opportunity and their entrepreneual spirit. More power to the potholed roads! There's nothing called perfection in this universe. Third, not a criticism but, one doesn't need to be overly pessimistic. India and other emerging economies are yet to see several decades of growth. Especially India and China, because of their huge population, will continue to see high economic growth for very long (ask any economists) [5][6]. And no, the moral suffering due to inequality will not disappear anytime soon. China even after growing at a breakneck speed of 10% a year for last three decades and pulling millions of people out of poverty has more inequality than India (Gini coefficient) [7]. I think we'll just gradually evolve to live with it. [1] - http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/current-affairs/indias-poverty-declined-to-322009-10-plan-panel-est_537354.html http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/current-affairs/indias-pove... [2] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/150267/indias-literacy-level-74-per.html http://www.deccanherald.com/content/150267/indias-literacy-l... [3] - http://www.afaqs.com/news/story.html?sid=30621_Indian+consumers+continue+to+remain+the+most+optimistic+globally:+Nielsen+Survey http://www.afaqs.com/news/story.html?sid=30621_Indian+consum... [4] - http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5wJKiOx4osAJ:www.li.com/attachments/Legatum%2520Institute%2520Survey%2520of%2520Entrepreneurs%2520-%2520China%2520%26%2520India.pdf+indian+entrepreneurs+optimism+legatum&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShjlYdq8b2VaWCleGadm9BSKIrYo30wHqMYVLhRZ5z_Hdc4m4A-JLsvqZhJpqh94PQRAq3S5HA9yfJNUGyJPL8VUVypBLuJH7RXspWKZh6m0VzoWGgjyHny8H3-hNRuS4qiFib6&sig=AHIEtbROuyp3RIPfmt3kaLIoZGk0tBkB5Q http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5wJKiOx4osAJ:w... [5] - http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/25191535/India-could-be-world8217s-3.html http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/25191535/India-could-be-worl... [6] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/140463/india-likely-worlds-largest-economy.html http://www.deccanherald.com/content/140463/india-likely-worl... [7] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009-1.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA...
known 15y ago
In India to succeed as an entrepreneur you need either Caste or Cash. Caste since banks give 84% of the loans to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste Cash since you've to bribe govt officials and business executives http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...

57 points by prateekdayal 15y ago

Exactly. All the media hogwash about 'brain drain' flowing back to India....nobody smart enough is going to go live India to start a startup. It's like trying to fight your schizophrenia while living in a bomb shelter in a war zone. At best these entrepreneurs are going back briefly to setup offshore office in India before hightailing out of there. And from personal experience, offshore teams aren't that great...the smart ones left India already.

prateekdayal 15y ago
>the smart ones left India already Actually thats the other problem :) There is so much focus on "brain drain" that people have almost come to believe that the rest of us in India have no brain. There is so much hoopla about getting people back to India and very little about people who just stay back and never move out.
abhaga 15y ago
I returned to India 3 years ago. I have other friends and people I know who have come back since. Many of them are doing startups. Others are working in academia. Not a single one is setting up offshore offices or looking to fly back (AFAIK). These are mostly young guys returning soon after their studies. But media hype is perhaps not about these people. It is about people who are coming back after 10-15 years of career in US, have families and a reputation to carry. In this segment, I know many who have come and gone back, after establishing the Indian centers of their employers. :) So depends on who and what you want to see.

meow 15y ago

What the article says is very true.. Sometimes I feel like a time traveler trapped in dark ages, waiting for the things around me to catch up to what I know is already a reality else where.. like last weekend when there was a 9am-5pm power-cut in bangalore, wondering how life without such basic problems can be.. :(

ankeshk 15y ago

Here is the counterpoint: India is awesome if you're not struggling. A lot of people complain about traffic. You know the salary of a driver on a monthly basis? About $100-250 (depending on the car you drive). Bureaucracy is killing. Takes 3 months to incorporate. But do you know how much accountants charge in India to take care of all your business details? A startup probably won't have to pay more than $150 a month on an accountants fees. Things are so cheap in India that you can live an extremely shiny life on the same budget at which an entrepreneur struggles to feed his family in USA. But yes - a lot of the things are broken in India if you don't have the little bit of money required to throw at it to fix it. On the bright side: the pace of improvement is staggering (I mean - Indian literacy rate went from 65% to 75% in 10 years. Thats 650 million literates in 2001 to 900 literates in 2011! Still not awesome. And college education is still lacking in many places. But the speed of improvement is staggering.) Disclosure: I'm a glass-half-full kind of an Indian who studied in USA but is now living in Bombay working on a startup.

sushrutbidwai 15y ago
And it takes absolutely no time and no legal backing system to get screwed up in India as well. Driver who will be late to work on 9 out of 10 times is worse than driving through the traffic. FWIW - Literacy rate in India should not be confused with education. I have been to government operated schools many times and you wont find more than 10% students who can do simple math or write there own names even in 4th standard.
chailatte 15y ago
Cheap isn't everything. China is cheap. Thailand is cheap. Malaysia is cheap. They don't have the massive infrastructure problems that India has. Personally I (or any sane person) wouldn't want to just live in a nice house, then sit in a chauffered car, stuck in traffic for hours, while avoiding looking out to see bum/garbage/slum/dirt/smog/chaos, then arrive in a nice office, then eat lunch and hope it doesn't make me sick, then go back home again.
- obelix 15y ago
  fk, you just described my life. I live in a fantastic bubble and work in a fantastic bubble. I travel in a car driven by my driver and I pretend the in between doesn't exist.

essrand 15y ago

Another link-bait. What's a diatribe about conditions of infrastructure, pollution, corruption et al, got to do anything with the title of the blog. Yes. things suck in developing countries, either move to the US, its easy enough if you are good or stop complaining and deal with it.

sridhar_vembu 15y ago

This is a great post - "moral suffering" exactly captures the feeling I have as an educated and affluent Indian. Yet, I keep going back, keep doing more in India. I have thought about this quite a bit, and here is an interlocking set of problems that cause this "moral suffering". The phrase "private wealth and public squalor" captures the present situation in urban India very well. A city like Chennai or Bangalore is not that poor anymore on a per-capita basis, but they looks much poorer. The contrasts are just shocking. You can find apartment complexes where flats cost $150-200K and up (yes that is in USD) , sitting on potholed roads, surrounded by trash. Here is an explanation of how the system doesn't work in India: * Taxation system is irrational - the $200K apartment would pay next to nothing in property taxes, probably as little as $100 a year (legally). Local governments require state or central assistance to run themselves. Consequence: there is no way for a local government to plan ahead, it has to rely on entities at a much higher level. Even the state government doesn't have much of a tax base, so it relies on grants from the center. This is a completely broken over-centralized public finance system, but there is absolutely no political will to tackle it. * Relentless concentration of economic activity in major cities, because smaller cities and towns are even more starved of resources (on a per capita basis) and lack any local tax base at all, so both investment and people migrate to large cities like Chennai or Bangalore. This self-reinforcing dynamic has resulted in ridiculously overpopulated big cities. At Zoho, 70-80% of our employees come from smaller towns who have migrated to Chennai, so we are part of the problem of this over-concentration of economic activity. * Increasing private wealth and non-existent urban infrastructure combine to produce some of the most extreme valuations in real estate in the world. Right next to Zoho office in formerly suburban Chennai, land goes for $10 million an acre (there are no acre-sized parcels, of course) simply because as a close-in suburb, this has a nominally functioning infrastructure, which far out places would lack. Note that I don't mention a world about corruption because that exists in so many other countries without producing the same urban squalor and "moral suffering" that India produces. The solution I have come up with, something we intend to adopt in Zoho, is to abandon major cities, and move to much, much smaller towns. At the level of about 50-100K population, there are many towns that offer a decent quality of life, particularly when you bring in the kind of jobs and economic activity a company like Zoho can bring. This is the plan we are working on. Now I will mention some good news, because some posters here are so pessimistic. In my life time, I have seen massive improvements, massive reduction in human suffering in South India. I routinely saw sights as a kid that I don't see anymore: train stations full of emaciated, sick people begging, severe malnourishment everywhere, higher education serving 1-2% of the population (now in the Southern states, it is closer to 20-30%), and a general mood that life would never get better. Today a lot of smart young talent coming on stream that is a capitalist's dream in India. Yes, you have to invest in training and skill building, but if you do, the rewards are immense. The monetary rewards are very good, but the psychic rewards are immeasurable.

known 15y ago

800 million people are starving in India. And the Govt/Politicians doesn't want people to prosper. They fear people might vote as per their conscience in elections. http://www.deeshaa.org/2011/06/02/the-starving-800-million-in-india/ http://www.deeshaa.org/2011/06/02/the-starving-800-million-i...

goombastic 15y ago

I need a plan to get out of India.

dimmuborgir 15y ago

The author in the rush of justifying her feelings of moral suffering has put some factual lies and false notions. First, she claims that the standard of living in India is plummeting and goes on mentioning slums, filth, corruption, bureaucracy etc. If one checks the recent national census and other survey results, the poverty has been steadily declining [1], the illiteracy has sharply declined [2], Indian consumers are the most optimistic in the world! [3], and ironically - Indian entrepreneurs are the most optimistic in the world! [4]. The rest of her complaints are just nitpicks. Second, the notion that happy existence or perfect system is the prerequisite to creativity and success. This is false. If one studies Anthropology, creativity/art/culture/economic-activity/entrepreneurship exist everywhere, even in the most failed country. It is the nature of man to grab every little opportunity. The fact that Mercedes has opened R&D centre in India only shows their creativity, their ability to grab the opportunity and their entrepreneual spirit. More power to the potholed roads! There's nothing called perfection in this universe. Third, not a criticism but, one doesn't need to be overly pessimistic. India and other emerging economies are yet to see several decades of growth. Especially India and China, because of their huge population, will continue to see high economic growth for very long (ask any economists) [5][6]. And no, the moral suffering due to inequality will not disappear anytime soon. China even after growing at a breakneck speed of 10% a year for last three decades and pulling millions of people out of poverty has more inequality than India (Gini coefficient) [7]. I think we'll just gradually evolve to live with it. [1] - http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/current-affairs/indias-poverty-declined-to-322009-10-plan-panel-est_537354.html http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/current-affairs/indias-pove... [2] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/150267/indias-literacy-level-74-per.html http://www.deccanherald.com/content/150267/indias-literacy-l... [3] - http://www.afaqs.com/news/story.html?sid=30621_Indian+consumers+continue+to+remain+the+most+optimistic+globally:+Nielsen+Survey http://www.afaqs.com/news/story.html?sid=30621_Indian+consum... [4] - http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5wJKiOx4osAJ:www.li.com/attachments/Legatum%2520Institute%2520Survey%2520of%2520Entrepreneurs%2520-%2520China%2520%26%2520India.pdf+indian+entrepreneurs+optimism+legatum&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShjlYdq8b2VaWCleGadm9BSKIrYo30wHqMYVLhRZ5z_Hdc4m4A-JLsvqZhJpqh94PQRAq3S5HA9yfJNUGyJPL8VUVypBLuJH7RXspWKZh6m0VzoWGgjyHny8H3-hNRuS4qiFib6&sig=AHIEtbROuyp3RIPfmt3kaLIoZGk0tBkB5Q http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5wJKiOx4osAJ:w... [5] - http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/25191535/India-could-be-world8217s-3.html http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/25191535/India-could-be-worl... [6] - http://www.deccanherald.com/content/140463/india-likely-worlds-largest-economy.html http://www.deccanherald.com/content/140463/india-likely-worl... [7] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009-1.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA...

known 15y ago

In India to succeed as an entrepreneur you need either Caste or Cash. Caste since banks give 84% of the loans to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste Cash since you've to bribe govt officials and business executives http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...