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Please name some successful startups that came out of India. Acquisition data would be nice! Now it is possible that there is a bit of a chicken and egg proble

Please name some successful startups that came out of India. Acquisition data would be nice! Now it is possible that there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. But, imho, it is not enough to state baldly that there is significant entrepreneurial and IT activity happening here. IT as in "outsourcing" or "India Development Centres" sure. But the level of talent or software startups available is nowhere near what Silicon Valley offers. The few startups I have seen here in Bangalore are all a bit flaky. Examples :- Guruji.com claims to do "India Specific Search" better than Google. Their search engine is terrible . Minglebox attempts to create an Orkut clone (there was a scandal recently about some incestous connections between the VC and a founder of the company and suspicions about the objectivity of the deal and so on). The only half decent software startup I know in India is Zoho and it remains to be seen if they can avoid being crushed by the Google Office juggernaut. Now as to talent. Name 10 Indians who have significantly contributed to Open Source software and are based in India. Any significant languages, frameworks etc that came out of India? I am not saying there aren't extremely bright people or developers in India . Given the size of the population it is impossible not to have bright people . But there does seem to be a distinct lack of entrepreneurial ability and the people who do seem to be very good developers don't want to take the risks of running their own company. Which is what Google Sacca was talking about. The people who do want to run their own companies are not correlated with high levels of programming skill, who prefer to emigrate to the USA. Having worked 10 years in Bangalore, I assert that YC will find hypothetical Indian operations massively unsuccessful. This may change in the future. But for now, YC should focus on the US. And before anyone accuses me of "racism "or something , I am Indian. I just try not to be blinkered.

Keios 19y ago
Chicken and egg indeed. Your perspective seems to be based on a very "US" centric view, which is perhaps one way to look at the issue. Needless to say entrepreneurial activity may not evolve in the same fashion in India as it did in the US. For example there may never be a specific area or city in India which becomes a Silicon Valley^(SV) In the US specific areas/cities have historically done better in somethings - especially technology. This may never come to pass in India because of the presence of very different dynamics. Also, you assume that India already has a world of startups - it does not, it merely has an untapped potential. I will not answer your question about programming languages that have come out of India, or Open Source intiatives - I would merely advise you to count how many Indians have contributed to similar goals in Silicon Valley, you could start back from the 1980s - I think oppurtunity called them to the US and they wisely followed. Also please check similar sources for linux, even the ubuntu flavor has Indians contributing. IMO in the future resident Indians will contribute to such projects, historically some non-resident Indians have. This is so because today's infrastructre allows us. (contd..)
- Keios 19y ago
  If the most important criteria for any seeding firm is how many startups exist in any given geographic area - I humbly disagree. It just indicates how easy it is to do business in a specific area, ideas and skills are not born in specific areas they occur universally. YC should actively look for great ideas from all over the world and then support the best, this may invlove moving them from thier current location, such as India, to one which is more conducive to thier pursuits, such as SV^^.The core competency for a YC type seeding company is to find talent and YCs primary service is to help hackers by providing an environment which gives them a shot. YC should be hunting for hackers who can create stuff that people want to pay for - in some fashion. Having existing startups IMO is not the criteria unless you wish to confound your judgment. To summarize, you base your argument on a assumption that India should already be SV, while I think that is a superflous criteria for making great investment decisions as far as Tech startups go. I may well be wrong - but like you I try not to be blinkered. PS: Please look at a wider spectrum when you talk of Tech Startups out of India, a great example is an IIT Chennai startup that works in a huge and untapped Indian rural market - can't recall the name. And that's just one, there are many more, I know of many tech startups out of New Delhi, who cater to an Indian audience. ^IMO Banglore and the Silicon Valley have very little in common - Indian tech startups are not yet geo-specific and may never be. Please don't compare Banglore with SV. ^^You may extend this logic to other industries and see that it works, Fashion comes to mind, Indian Fashion designers often also do work in Paris.
  - plinkplonk 19y ago
    "Indian Fashion designers often also do work in Paris" Do they ask angel funds focussed on the USA to "come to India" and sponsor their visas to France ? :-) news to me - please send some references. "you base your argument on a assumption that India should already be SV" Huh? I said there is little demonstrated high quality technical (significant contributions to open source projects) or entrepreneurial (in the Y fundable startup sense) activity in India. That doesn't mean I argue that "India should be SV" as you claim. you say "YC should actively look for great ideas from all over the world and then support the best, this may involve moving them from their current location, such as India, to one which is more conducive to their pursuits, such as SV" The problem is , this is very easy to say and very very hard (if not impossible), to do "all over the world" . As Paul Graham pointed out, it will be a (very) long time before YC can deal with all the great ideas in the USA. I don't think (I could be wrong) YC has the bandwidth to run some kind of United Nations "Save the Startups and Good Ideas Worldwide" effort. They do their thing well in the scope they choose to work in. We should respect that choice. Now you (or I) can ask them to consider coming to India , but if they reply "not in cards for now, we have lots to do here" then we should shut up and look for alternatives (imho) than whine that YC is not looking "worldwide" or "not helping with the visas " or whatever. FWIW, my advice (as an Indian ,based in India and thinking of a startup of my own) is to put fingers to keyboard and start coding and "build something people want". That's great advice and that's what I plan to do, YC or no YC. You can build software from India and you can host anywhere in the world (hosting fees are cheap enough that 3 months of work in Bangalore will get you enough funds. And someone pointed out the cost of living is so low in India you don't need angel funds) till you get a few hundred thousand users . At that point believe me you won't need YC to "get a visa" or get you VC funding. Now as to the YC 's more intangible benefits, Would I like Paul Graham's connections and advice working for me? Certainly. Do I think I am somehow entitled to them just because "I want"? certainly not! " great example is an IIT Chennai startup that works in a huge and untapped Indian rural market - can't recall the name" I hope you can see the humour in that statement. Anyway this is my opinion. If you think you can persuade YC to "come to India" or are depending on or hoping that YC will come to India to help your startup be successful, I wish you luck :-D I'll go back to my code now. Thanks for listening.
rsdighe 19y ago
i do believe that something Y combinator could be the early initiators of change, of course the startups are flaky but I wonder why google can hire top talent in bangalore and something like guruji cannot build a better search engine?? it can't be lack of talent ? zoho is based in pleasanton if i am not wrong its just owned by indian that hardly makes it a Indian startup. anyways it doesn't have to be Y Combinator i think there are pretty smart people will india who will start it sooner or later it just remains to be seen who it will be.
- plinkplonk 19y ago
  "I wonder why google can hire top talent in bangalore and something like Guruji cannot build a better search engine?" Ha but that was my point. The really good guys prefer to work for companies (and mostly emigrate to America) rather than start their own companies in India. Guruji can't build a better search engine because they aren't as good as the folks who work on Google's Search Engine. hint: that (kind of core tech )work doesn't happen in Google Bangalore anyway. hint2 : look at the bios of Guruji's founders and employees for evidence of significant technical expertise. Compare them to Page and Brin and the others who created the Google search engine :-)). Someone will outcompete Google some day. It won't be Guruji. Do you know how hard Google has found it to hire the (very few) people they have in their Bangalore centre in spite of offering astronomical (compared to the rest of the market) salaries? Talk to someone in Goog recuiting for their tale of woe. I have friends in Goog India and I know what they work on - believe me it is nothing of company shaking importance. The technical centre of gravity of Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft, or Oracle, or Intel) , especially on the innovation axis (which is what we are discussing here) is well away from the shores of India. Google hires some 'technical talent' in India sure enough.But do they hire people good enough to create the next killer startup? There is no evidence yet. I'll be glad to be proved wrong. "I think there are pretty smart people will India who will start it sooner or later it just remains to be seen who it will be." I agree. But I'd bet on "later". It is not about how smart people are. Given a billion people one would expect quite a few smart people. It is (among other things) about what the culture is like as (you report) Sacca pointed out.
  - 19y ago

Keios 19y ago

Chicken and egg indeed. Your perspective seems to be based on a very "US" centric view, which is perhaps one way to look at the issue. Needless to say entrepreneurial activity may not evolve in the same fashion in India as it did in the US. For example there may never be a specific area or city in India which becomes a Silicon Valley^(SV) In the US specific areas/cities have historically done better in somethings - especially technology. This may never come to pass in India because of the presence of very different dynamics. Also, you assume that India already has a world of startups - it does not, it merely has an untapped potential. I will not answer your question about programming languages that have come out of India, or Open Source intiatives - I would merely advise you to count how many Indians have contributed to similar goals in Silicon Valley, you could start back from the 1980s - I think oppurtunity called them to the US and they wisely followed. Also please check similar sources for linux, even the ubuntu flavor has Indians contributing. IMO in the future resident Indians will contribute to such projects, historically some non-resident Indians have. This is so because today's infrastructre allows us. (contd..)

Keios 19y ago
If the most important criteria for any seeding firm is how many startups exist in any given geographic area - I humbly disagree. It just indicates how easy it is to do business in a specific area, ideas and skills are not born in specific areas they occur universally. YC should actively look for great ideas from all over the world and then support the best, this may invlove moving them from thier current location, such as India, to one which is more conducive to thier pursuits, such as SV^^.The core competency for a YC type seeding company is to find talent and YCs primary service is to help hackers by providing an environment which gives them a shot. YC should be hunting for hackers who can create stuff that people want to pay for - in some fashion. Having existing startups IMO is not the criteria unless you wish to confound your judgment. To summarize, you base your argument on a assumption that India should already be SV, while I think that is a superflous criteria for making great investment decisions as far as Tech startups go. I may well be wrong - but like you I try not to be blinkered. PS: Please look at a wider spectrum when you talk of Tech Startups out of India, a great example is an IIT Chennai startup that works in a huge and untapped Indian rural market - can't recall the name. And that's just one, there are many more, I know of many tech startups out of New Delhi, who cater to an Indian audience. ^IMO Banglore and the Silicon Valley have very little in common - Indian tech startups are not yet geo-specific and may never be. Please don't compare Banglore with SV. ^^You may extend this logic to other industries and see that it works, Fashion comes to mind, Indian Fashion designers often also do work in Paris.
- plinkplonk 19y ago
  "Indian Fashion designers often also do work in Paris" Do they ask angel funds focussed on the USA to "come to India" and sponsor their visas to France ? :-) news to me - please send some references. "you base your argument on a assumption that India should already be SV" Huh? I said there is little demonstrated high quality technical (significant contributions to open source projects) or entrepreneurial (in the Y fundable startup sense) activity in India. That doesn't mean I argue that "India should be SV" as you claim. you say "YC should actively look for great ideas from all over the world and then support the best, this may involve moving them from their current location, such as India, to one which is more conducive to their pursuits, such as SV" The problem is , this is very easy to say and very very hard (if not impossible), to do "all over the world" . As Paul Graham pointed out, it will be a (very) long time before YC can deal with all the great ideas in the USA. I don't think (I could be wrong) YC has the bandwidth to run some kind of United Nations "Save the Startups and Good Ideas Worldwide" effort. They do their thing well in the scope they choose to work in. We should respect that choice. Now you (or I) can ask them to consider coming to India , but if they reply "not in cards for now, we have lots to do here" then we should shut up and look for alternatives (imho) than whine that YC is not looking "worldwide" or "not helping with the visas " or whatever. FWIW, my advice (as an Indian ,based in India and thinking of a startup of my own) is to put fingers to keyboard and start coding and "build something people want". That's great advice and that's what I plan to do, YC or no YC. You can build software from India and you can host anywhere in the world (hosting fees are cheap enough that 3 months of work in Bangalore will get you enough funds. And someone pointed out the cost of living is so low in India you don't need angel funds) till you get a few hundred thousand users . At that point believe me you won't need YC to "get a visa" or get you VC funding. Now as to the YC 's more intangible benefits, Would I like Paul Graham's connections and advice working for me? Certainly. Do I think I am somehow entitled to them just because "I want"? certainly not! " great example is an IIT Chennai startup that works in a huge and untapped Indian rural market - can't recall the name" I hope you can see the humour in that statement. Anyway this is my opinion. If you think you can persuade YC to "come to India" or are depending on or hoping that YC will come to India to help your startup be successful, I wish you luck :-D I'll go back to my code now. Thanks for listening.

rsdighe 19y ago

i do believe that something Y combinator could be the early initiators of change, of course the startups are flaky but I wonder why google can hire top talent in bangalore and something like guruji cannot build a better search engine?? it can't be lack of talent ? zoho is based in pleasanton if i am not wrong its just owned by indian that hardly makes it a Indian startup. anyways it doesn't have to be Y Combinator i think there are pretty smart people will india who will start it sooner or later it just remains to be seen who it will be.

plinkplonk 19y ago
"I wonder why google can hire top talent in bangalore and something like Guruji cannot build a better search engine?" Ha but that was my point. The really good guys prefer to work for companies (and mostly emigrate to America) rather than start their own companies in India. Guruji can't build a better search engine because they aren't as good as the folks who work on Google's Search Engine. hint: that (kind of core tech )work doesn't happen in Google Bangalore anyway. hint2 : look at the bios of Guruji's founders and employees for evidence of significant technical expertise. Compare them to Page and Brin and the others who created the Google search engine :-)). Someone will outcompete Google some day. It won't be Guruji. Do you know how hard Google has found it to hire the (very few) people they have in their Bangalore centre in spite of offering astronomical (compared to the rest of the market) salaries? Talk to someone in Goog recuiting for their tale of woe. I have friends in Goog India and I know what they work on - believe me it is nothing of company shaking importance. The technical centre of gravity of Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft, or Oracle, or Intel) , especially on the innovation axis (which is what we are discussing here) is well away from the shores of India. Google hires some 'technical talent' in India sure enough.But do they hire people good enough to create the next killer startup? There is no evidence yet. I'll be glad to be proved wrong. "I think there are pretty smart people will India who will start it sooner or later it just remains to be seen who it will be." I agree. But I'd bet on "later". It is not about how smart people are. Given a billion people one would expect quite a few smart people. It is (among other things) about what the culture is like as (you report) Sacca pointed out.
- 19y ago