Why only few number of IIT kids end up doing startups | Hacker News Reader

Why only few number of IIT kids end up doing startups

aarvay.in

65 pointsAarvay45 comments

A lot of IIT kids go for a further MBA, and then want to work at an investment bank. Same as many Standford, MIT, <insert any Ivy league university here>.

The reason is obvious. In India people bet their lives and career on education. Namely Medicine and Engineering. Occasional other professions are CA, MBA etc also workout. Leave the rich kids aside. For most middle class folks, it takes lifetime savings and slogging by parents to get their kids till here. And it makes 0 sense for them, to take undue risk and bet on the start up lottery.

Go out and take a job, or do an MBA. Save a little here and there, invest in gold, kids and real estate. You might as well retire old, have enough money to put food on your table, pay for your rent, medical expenses and die gracefully.

Or ride the start up lottery, take risks. Fail. If no luck after a long time, watch your peers rise to big places in corporates- marry a girl, have kids,send them to posh schools, have a car and live in a 80L 3BHK Flat. While you are stuck here, amidst losses in business, life and most importantly terrible loss in time.

No one likes to spend best years of their life on tasks where there is 90% failure, Especially in a country like ours battling corruption and bureaucracy.

Besides, start up scenario is not very glorious in India. Recently I interviewed for a Start up in Bangalore. After interviews went fine, and they were ready to offer me. We sat down for negotiations. They were neither ready to offer stocks, nor a good pay, nor perks, no incentives.

In short he tried to tell me to spend years of my life working very hard to make him rich, and him rich alone. For a meager salary and absolutely nothing else.

For incentives like these, why would anybody want to work at a start up?

This strikes me as some cultural equivalent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Internet startup people are generally focused on the top layers, self-actualization and esteem. They are confident they can meet the more basic needs (love, safety, food & water) somehow, even if the business fails.

That is true only for US start ups or in general people from developed nations. That's because most of your basic needs food, clothing and shelter are to an extent taken care of. For example social security is a very good thing in the US. If you are screwed, the government can support you for a while. So you can always dream a little big as smaller things are taken care of. You can focus your energy on doing things that are more important and add more value.

In India, you have to worry about all the low level things. Else you are screwed. If you don't have enough savings in old age and your kids refuse to take care of you, you are screwed. Because you have no money, no place to live, no food to buy, no clothes, no health care. Forget of all that even as a youngster, you will have a tough time if you aren't earning well.

I think a part of a larger plan for India must be first achieve food security, a good social security system, and a sound health care means. Else people will never have the freedom to work on more important things, and will go in cycles working for the most basic needs.

But things are changing now.

So do I hear a +1 for good social security? Looks like a very clear line from having social security and a safety net to leading in science, tech and inventions/ start-ups, which is growth, i.e. the lifeblood of any economy.

Not everyone thinks like that. Besides when a person wants money for survival larger view of the economy is the last he will care about.

All I'm saying is people who work their whole lives to get their kids a decent education and those kids themselves are most likely to take a safer path in life. Because they want all their sacrifice to result in a better life. I am not saying start ups don't offer that. But start ups are often risky and ridden by failures. Who would like to be in a situation where they see their parents slog their whole lives to put them a decent place, and now as kids they waste all that by failing in things whose risks they understood pretty well. In such cases, will the parent lives, their work have any meaning?

Now imagine a situation if your basic education, food, clothing and shelter are more or less taken care of. You have good medical care. You don't have to take any risks to just survive. You know if you fail, you always have some basic things taken care of. The infrastructure is there, there is lesser corruption and bureaucracy to worry about.

When you ask why people are afraid to take risks its the former reason.

In the latter situation risk only has a time value, and nothing much.

IITs are highly overhyped, mass education institutes. No wonder there is very little innovation coming out of IITs, compared to Stanford and MIT, given the high quality of students.

I recently attended the Ubuntu launch event at the Mumbai's IIT and Dr Phatak, who now heads India's cheap tablet project did a talk. To my surprise, there was not even one question from the audience of bright IIT students.

They also have poorly executed projects like "Spoken Tutorials" http://spoken-tutorial.org/ that were presented and it was all very depressing.

I would not expect good quality startups from IITs.

Maybe this is because "Ubuntu launch event" attendees can have all their questions answered with project wikis? I can't imagine what pressing questions google and wikipedia can't solve about the latest ubuntu.

Also, a Godel prize was won in this decade at IITK (for AKS) and (not sure about this) Niraj Kayal (the K in AKS) began working on this during his undergrad years.

I didn't graduate from an IIT (different continent) but my friends from there executed very well in their internships, theses, grad school applications, papers etc. Talent is not geographically bound and to a certain extent JEE performance correlates with good reasoning and math skills (universally transferable in engineering at least).

The talk was on the Aakash tablet, India's very ambitious and highly controversial and potentially disastrous low cost tablet project [1]. Dr Phatak is one of the top adivsors to the Indian government on e governance and the recently appointed head of the project. I can't believe there were no questions for that talk.

Confession: I did not ask one either, as I was not as well aware of the latest developments. I questioned the next presenter though who talked about the Spoken Tutorial. And it was the only question asked.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/167/aakash-tablet-india-...

I am really not sure what can be asked whose answer won't be a rehash of the gov's PR. I can't expect why the average person in India would scream "Scandal!" at the project's failure - the government doesn't have a fantastic track record and doesn't have the resources to attract the kind of people that can make such stuff (i.e. the Aakash Tablet) happen. The average Indian isn't so concerned about their government screwing up because that is the norm.

Anyway that was offtopic. The IITs have a very high average IQ that manifests itself well in the form of publications and the accomplishments of the alumni/students/faculty - they are definitely not "education factories" and an engineering degree from there is very respected. Pitting them against institutions with endowments in excess of 8bn is unfair.

Sure they do, that is why there is not a single nobel prize won by an IITian when ten Indians have a nobel prize.

I assume a lot of IIT's top faculty and brightest kids major in engineering. That puts their nobel count at a disadvantage.

I agree with you. IITians are not good at fundamental science for which nobel is awarded, otherwise they would have gotten it by now.

Maybe, but I noticed the same thing in my experience working with a couple of Indian development teams.

There's a cultural divide in the US between large companies and startups; startup people tend to be more inquisitive, more self-directed, and more willing to challenge authority. The Indian teams I worked with struck me as being like a US large company team, but even more so. Nobody would ask questions or challenge assumptions, especially in group contexts.

I don't know why that was, but with US large-company teams it's because they're reluctant to risk looking dumb in front of people with power. Or worse, to make the people with power look dumb. They are more likely to value obedience over being correct or having a successful project. Basically, they are very focused on keeping their jobs.

Its the same everywhere. In large corporates only 'Cover your ass' strategies work, US or otherwise. And none one wants to annoy their boss, so whatever he says is right.

Besides when you do well no one appreciates, but when you do something wrong every one comes after you.

This is a problem with large teams in general and has nothing to with Indians or Americans in general.

IIT's admit students, who level down forests for papers to practice for entrance exams. Students who burn midnight oil, feverishly solving every math problem from from 5000 page text book. Students who go to coaching classes from 8th standard(8th grade), who chew half of their pencils and loose half of their hair pulling them out solving physics problems.

I didn't even give IIT JEE, just CET. And at end of the year I had something like several 10s of kgs of paper on which I had practiced math, physics and chemistry. I was forced to beat the exams into my submission.

Those kids go into IIT's to get good jobs, so that they end up like their parents doing small time jobs. To buy homes, cars, to 'become something in life'.

I dont logically see how your comment is either agreeing or disagreeing with the parent comment. Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

Folks can solve all the math problems they want.It has nothing to do with creating a good product and selling it.

IIT'ians or any Indian who generally runs through the grind of going through entrance exams is trained by default to work for long hours under pressure. The competition is generally intense and trains people for a lot of such challenges in the future. And I say this with personal experience. The amount of work I did then as a student helps me till date work under demanding conditions taking pressure for long periods.

And trust me such students make it big. Just because they work for start ups, it doesn't mean they don't make it big.

>>Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

I don't see what is wrong with it. Do you have a problem?

Having worked on a few startups now, I can assure you hard work != the key to success in startups.

It's a process of experimentation, constant observation, accumulating knowledge and forging ahead on your own with very little external encouragement.

If you told me IIT kids spent countless hours experimenting and tinkering with their own projects, then it'd be a different story.

But the test prep process for IIT JEE/AIEEE is a very pre-defined route, that EVERYONE is doing, with lots of encouragement from parents and a soul-killing process of cramming - for the singular goal of passing tests set up by a very bureaucratic establishment.

It sounds like the opposite of the preparation needed for risk aversion and creative endeavors.

Totally agree.Furthermore kids that age (17-18) are not supposed to be solving 5000 math problems for some stupid entrance exam.

Personally I flunked IIT Mains because with my ADHD I could not get myself to study more than a few hours every week.Also at the ripe age of 17-18 I did not have enough drive or ambition to stop doing the things kids love to do (chasing girls, watching movies, loafing around etc etc.) But then I am actually proud that I did not give in to the IIT bullshit and did whatever I wanted to do. You will never get that age back no matter how successful you are!

I never appeared for the JEE :)

But what I wanted to say was, traditionally Indian entrance exams have always been soul crushing. Take IAS or CA for example. You practically have to give your whole youth/teenage to make it happen.

Indian civil services are known to be one of the most grinding and testing exams in the world.

>>Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

Okay that might have sounded a little mean.Sorry having a pretty tiresome day :)

You should not be judging them with very little exposure to them. There is a lot of innovation at IIT's which you just haven't come across. Stanford, MIT have a lots of funds at their disposal and they can innovate maybe much faster. Thats the only difference.

Some projects might not be that great as some startups aren't that great. Again, you should not be judging looking at a single project.

And IITians love to find the answer to their questions themselves :)

Another more fatalistic way of looking at it is that if IIT is the top of the game in the area, then even if their startup projects suck, that is the best that could be done in the area, and may be good enough to sell to the public. Now you could argue that this is not the case, because someone from S.F. in the U.S. could have a SAAS app that Indians use instead, but will that app be in Hindi? I think there is opportunity and applaud the OP's efforts.

Somehow I can't bring myself to have sympathy for a community that is heavily funded by the tax payers of a relatively poor country like India to further its own progress, and use the opportunity as a ticket to a migrate to rich countries for their own personal gain. That is the real reason why there is so little innovation at IIT.

I know people will cite remittances, but those are pittance compared to getting your hands dirty and building assets for your own society.

Rushabh,

I did meet Prof. Phatak, asked him many questions and he answered my questions as well.

Please have a look at project E-Yantra as well. http://www.e-yantra.org/ and http://portal.e-yantra.org/

It is a good project.

I was not commenting on the ability of Dr (or is it Prof?) Phatak to answer, but the ability of students to ask questions. E-Yantra seems like a good project. Good luck.

I was a student and I asked questions. That was the point I was driving.

The only reason I took my questions offline was because they were pretty hard ones and I dint want to be painted as a troll.

Actually there are three kinds of people at IITs. The really good guys who are very good at academics and know a lot of stuff and love to hack. These people generally are enticed by trivial ideas. They want to contribute in a more meaningful way. Most of them go for PhD's. These people would love to have startups, but it is very difficult in India to actually have product startups. The startup culture is nothing compared to what the culture is in the US.

Also, most of the IITians (at least the CS and elec guys) get very challenging jobs. These jobs satisfy most of the people.

Then there is the second set of guys who go for Mckenzie, DB kind of jobs. These guys are good, but don't really know what to do. They are confused and take up the most safe option. There are a few here who want to do startups, but they are not able to get people who are really good and who are really enthusiastic. I guess it is difficult to do startups alone.

Then they are the vetti ( lazy) people who haven't really put any effort in their academics or anything else. They would be obviously not enthusiastic to do a start up and you would not want them on your team if you are starting up.

I guess if the startup culture on India changes a lot, then there is a fair possibility that a lots of IITians will do startups. It is changing now, and there is a fair share of IITians starting up. Flipkart is an example. A couple of my friends started this(http://www.desto.in/)

It's all about risk vs reward. Most of the IIT kids come from middle or lower middle class families. Generally, affluent kids don't really bother with IIT as it requires a lot of hard work to get into.

I grew up in lower middle class and my dad worked really hard to put me through school. I did freelancing to pay for my own college. (I studied in NIT, not IIT). After I finished graduation, I wanted to earn money so that I can support my family. There is no way, I could have told my family that I want to take a chance on this start up for an eventual big exit.This was not the only major factor. I had a 'scooter' when I went to college as I couldn't afford motorbike. As a young 21 year old, I wanted to get a well paid IT job so that I can buy the bike (and other toys) that I have been eyeing for so long. When you have just graduated after working so hard, you want to reap the rewards right away. I can bet that good number of IIT grads feel that way.

Let's fast forward to 2012. I have a friend, who studied at IIT-Mumbai, quit a well paying job in the USA and went to Bangalore to start a data warehouse startup. Another friend decided to go to India and start his own gym. After working for 7 years in the USA, I have made some savings and I think I can now take chances. I have been working on my idea on side and see if I can quit full time job.

Don't know what IIT or FMCG stands for but...

one of the recurring themes on HN is that the desire to create or even work in a startup is relatively rare.

IIT - Indian Institute of Technology FMCG - Fast Moving Consumer Goods

I don't know much about India, but what has always me from making the leap to entrepreneurship in South Africa is that there is no safety net if things go wrong. I wonder if a similar dynamic exists in India.

Yes, we have a public health service with free care in South Africa, but the state hospitals are in a shocking state. Private healthcare and health insurance is very expensive, and there is no in-between state provided insurance option (like US Medicaid). If you get sick without health insurance, you will end up in a shocking state hospital to be neglected and abused.

Yes, we have free public education, but the public schools are in a poor state. You don't want your kids going to a public school (some good government schools exist but they are difficult to get into if you don't live in the expensive feeder areas, and they charge substantial fees).

From what I've read about India, the state is fairly incompetent (more so than even South Africa), and I wonder if people choose to work for BigCo, rather than risk total catastrophe if things go wrong.

The level of risk in SV (or any first-world country) if things go wrong is probably an order of magnitude smaller than it would be in a third-world country.

>> Solution is, they should have that “drive” within them. That’s the main quality they miss among others. They should realize it.

Funny that you came to an inference and termed it as a solution.

Do you have any pointers on improving that situation? How can you enable your fellow batchmates to realize that "inner drive"?

I have two disagreements with this article.

The first is the assumption that everybody wants "Very interesting and absorbing work" - I guess that is not very accurate, maybe most people want to feel useful or part of something bigger. However, there are lots of people that don't want to spend their time under high pressure if they can just get a regular job and enjoy the good life (you know, traveling, going out with friends, practicing a hobby).

And the second is: "Solution is, they should have that “drive” within them." - This is not really a solution, this may be what is missing for those people to become entrepreneurs, but telling people that they miss something is not a solution. Solution would be to come out with a method for building up drive.

Did anyone compile the data to check if the premise of the article is even true? Is the percentage of IITians starting their own businesses significantly less as compared to other engineering colleges? Is it less than all undergraduate programs? Is it less than all <insert a control hypothesis>? Also do the IITians working for a startup count?

May be it is just a perception thing? I believe that to be the case. When compared to their peer group from other engineering colleges, I am quite sure they come out favorably.

Disclaimer: I am an IITian and so is my partner and we are both entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is self selection at play but I know a lot of entrepreneurs in my IIT network.

"Me : I am not sure whether I can generalize." That was the clearest, most rational thought in the entire post and it is unfortunate that you did not pay heed to it.

1. These guys have worked pretty hard and/or are pretty damned smart which was the reason they got in there in the first place. The placement opportunities reflect exactly that and that is a pretty strong incentive for them not to launch their own startup.

2. Getting some working experience is a very good thing because their jobs offer them great exposure and experience, a pretty strong network of people and a clearer picture of what they are up against. While jumping off a cliff might be very brave and fashionable thing to do, it might not always be the smartest.

The startup ecosystem sucks in India and is nothing compared to the US (I leave room for the grass is greener effect - I don't think that is the case here). Funding is hard to come by and most business don't like dealing with startups. When the odds are that badly stacked against you, a broader network of people helps enormously.

3. A good %age are gasp actually interested in their engineering courses (IITM particularly has a healthy number & tradition) and pursue further studies abroad. A few of them go on to start their own companies in the US and others contribute to startups there.

4. When I see the word solution, I expect to actually see a solution - not read why you think it is an inherent quality.

5. Never use statements like "X group never does it". It takes away whatever miniscule credibility the article has. Some obvious examples of IITians doing startups: Flipkart, Rabi Kisku entertainment (Rabi Kisku and Siddharth Nuni are about to release their movie Software Hardware kya yaaroon) and several several more. You just have to look.

6. Startups are not for everyone. Hardworking and smart alone doesn't cut it and it is not a bad thing that not all these guys are doing it. Doesn't mean they are wasting their life away.

Disclaimer: I was one of those Vetti 5 pointers at IITM, who took a 2.75l job in 2006 ago and I am running my own bootstrapped startup with my batchmate since 2011. If my startup fails (at my last stand), I don't think I will do a bootstrapped startup in India ever again and that has very little to do with the size of my cojones.

I thank you for making me realize that this post sounds offensive. I didn't mean it that way. I ll update the post with my apologies.

I would like to clear few things here.

[1] This is not a post against IITians or anybody for that matter. [2] I wrote this post out of concern and in search of a solution that will change the startup scene here in India. It sounds over-ambitious but I want to be a part of such a revolution, however little I contribute. [3] This article concerns only to related people. I hope I have conveyed that at least

"Of course, there are really pleasant opportunities available that one need not look at entrepreneurship as the only possible work. But my only worry is that people with real motivation also get lost in this place."

[4] I didn't mean it, when I told "IIT guys will never do it". I sincerely apologize again.

Well, I am not IITian , not even frequent commentor on HN ,I seriously think , it's the software culture that need to change . People need to change their attitude play safe. We understand working on start up idea is like walking on the edge of a cliff and you don't know when you will fall but if you have 'the drive'/guts , no body can stop us from being successful. One factor that you could think of ( may be not applicable to IITian ) the service industries are killing most of the talent in india, most of us are happy with what they are getting paid and they don't want to take the risk. And working on a startup in India is far more difficult than doing the same in US, you take example of funding , it's not as easy as US to raise funds for startup in India We can list down lot of these factors, it's true that this situation would change in few years, let's hope for the good

Unless you provide statistics as to what percentage of IIT students go fro start ups wiz a wiz MIT/Stanford, this blog lacks credibility.

Number of people who want to take risk are always a small fraction of any sample set.

The IITs are definitely overhyped however there is no doubt that there are some real quality minds in there. That said, there isn't a great deal of research required to understand why fresh grads in India don't do startups. It's just common sense. Here are some of the top reasons that I can think of right off the bat:

1. It's too risky. The reason I went to IIT is so that I can get a stable job at the end of it. Why would I throw that away now with a Startup ?

2. I don't know how to do it. There is no startup eco system in India. There are some changes happening in Bangalore recently but India is such a large country that if you're in another region, you are pretty disconnected from what goes on elsewhere.

3. I have a job lined up that'll pay me $35,000/year. A lot of IITians have jobs lined up for themselves (especially the good ones...). Why exactly would they want to invest their time and effort in a Startup - the equivalent of starting from scratch - if they can take the IIT badge that they have earned and get a head start on everyone else while climbing the corporate ladder ?

4. I want to pursue studying X/an MBA/something else.

5. NO ONE in society will understand why I didn't take the $35k/year job and decided to work for NOTHING for at-least 1 YEAR of my life. OMG! DEATH AND SUFFERING!!! Indian society is tough. If you decide to 'do a startup' your parents will hear no end of it from their relatives, neighbors and even colleagues. Most Indian kids can't put their parents through that kind of crap, unfortunately, that's how society works. Everyone will STFU once your startup makes $1M/year but until then prepare yourself for constant nagging. Basically, in India if you work for X multinational corporation then your parents get bragging rights and everyone's eyes widen with wonder... Sad, but true.

So in conclusion, I'd like to say that it's far more likely for people who are NOT from the IITs to work on startups in India. The risk/reward ratio for IITians is perceived to be MUCH higher because of all the options laid out in front of them already. Choice is a bitch :P

Your post smells like almost anybody who doesn't work in a start up is shit.

Its far more easier to say all this when you tons of financial support to fall back on in case of failures. And there are a lot of rich kids I know who do it. I have friends who happily didn't finish their graduation, worked at call centers and threw random efforts at businesses and failed. Often is such cases, some one else is footing the bill. And most of your failures are sponsored by the person's dad or elder brother.

In most of such cases its not risk that they are taking. They just don't have any more options left. They are not good at doing day jobs, because they have had it easily their whole lives. Such guys just can't work under a boss. So they feel business is what they need to do.

Now if you are struggling to pay your home rent, you have a sister to marry off and your Dad's retirement is due next year. I don't see why such a person should not take a job in a big company. You won't understand the plight of this guy, unless you walk in his shoes.

You can call him coward, or under confident or just not capable to taking risks. The fact is such a guy is fighting a daily battle to keep his affairs running. Big risks, with big financial failures are not possible for his already financially stressed life.

Huh? I never said anything like that, my post simply explains the rationalizations of why an IITian might not choose to work on a startup. I think you read into something but I can't figure out what it is.

All I wanted to say was that there are several good reasons that make perfect sense in the context for an IITian to not join a startup.

EDIT: Great, so you misread and then downvote ? I don't think that's how it's supposed to work =/

Prior to 1947, entrepreneurship is exclusively reserved to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bania_%28caste%29 community for 3000+ years in India. Now due to globalization, lower caste community is also venturing into entrepreneurship. http:/dicci.org

Entrepreneurs need protection from Govt/Politicians against Big Corporations. In a 3rd world country like India, Govt/Politicians cannot afford to lose millions of taxes/party funds they get from Big Cos.

Why startups condense in America? http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

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