Can India take on Silicon Valley as a global R&D hub?
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Pressures built up from social groups and joint families play a large part in this. Parents in India are usually more proud to say that their child is working for IBM or Microsoft rather than a small startup.
Also since I'm a resident of the country, I feel the urge in the people to compete but for needs more basic than in other countries. I'm not pointing to straight up poverty of farmers or anything you would see in a cover article of a big magazine, I'm talking about engineers wanting to have a stable job no matter what. They want a fixed house, they want a guarantee that they'll be eating from their own money in 6 months. Debts, specially credit cards are not the norm. There are scores of engineers who do not have a family that will be able to support them if they don't get external funding.
So for a multitude of reasons, sadly this won't happen. Not soon anyways. Feel the pulse of the engineers there (yes including me) and you'd know why R & D is on the backseat.
Agreed that Indian startups are still light years away from achieving the same _sophistication_ as the Silicon Valley's, but increasingly I am seeing more and more people jumping into getting their hands dirty. And given enough startups, purely from a statistical point of view, a few great startups will eventually emerge from India.
Unfortunately, I will have to agree with you that the state of R&D is poor, but it is just evolution. We started late and now have lots to catch up!
About a year back I was contacted by a CEO of an Indian development house who couldn't find enough talent to build social-media applications. He was trying to figure out if he should outsource his projects to San Francisco or Manhattan.
My hunch is its going to take a lot more than 5 years.
There are significant cultural, regulatory/legal, and policy issues to be solved or evolved before India can take on Silicon Valley.
At my last start-up, I had an Indian mentor, five years older than me, who had been through exactly what I was going through. I had tremendous respect for him, both “technically and as a person”. I learned more from him than I did from any of my non-Indian friends, co-workers, or bosses.
He's thinking of heading back to India to do a start-up there. I'm not Indian, but I'd love to spend a few years there, so I might go with him. As far as I can tell, he would make a great boss. Is there something I'm missing?
I have never had an Indian boss myself (I work in the US). But I have quite a few friends who have had, or continue to have (and who confide in me with their opinions and issues). Naturally I also know a lot of Indians in various industry or academic positions in the US (developers, managers, directors, professors). Most of these people (not all) are technically sharp and quite smart. At the same time when it comes to treating people who work for them, most of them - I dare say nearly all of them - are amazingly selfish, self-centered, uncompromising, and hard headed. Tact or diplomacy is virtually non-existant. The world is centered around them, around what they have done in life, and around what they plan to do in the future. The end justifies the means, in many ways, for them. I would even say that backstabbing (for the next promotion in industry, or so called fame in academia) is the norm. These cultural issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Mind you, I have specifically not seen many of these issues with most American managers or profs, or among foreigners, say, among the Chinese.
As for state policy, legal, and regulatory issues, those are well known at least among us who have lived in India. It will take me a few more pages to describe :) Suffice it to say we have a long way to go. A very long way.
For the Indians reading these lines, before you call me a self-hating Desi, just take an hour and really think about your own life and upbringing and behavior, and those of other Indians in positions of power whom you know. Be honest with yourself, if only for one time in your life.
Of course there are unethical people in every community, but there is zero evidence for your claim that said behavior is unique to Indians.
Anyway, we have a disagreement and I leave it at that.
Indian startup scene is pretty much like the Chinese startup scene. American success stories are ripped off and given a local twist. Because this ripping off is lucrative - but comes without a lot of startup risks.
All the big R&D hubs in India are run by Non-Indian companies (IBM, Intel, Microsoft)... thats not a coincidence. Indian companies are yet not at the stage of spending a lot on R&D (medicine and defense are 2 exceptions.)
Yes VC funding is increasing in India. But really - the biggest news I heard in the last year was a VC investing in a Netflix copycat. And Vinod Khosla investing in a micro-financing fund in India (copy cat of Grameen Bank etc...)
I think there's something distinctly Indian about making 5 year plans, even if they sound ludicrous (when I lived there, many people told me that 'India would be a world superpower in five years'). I think it might have something to do with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_India.
Entrepreneurship in India is on the rise now though. But my problem with the article is that the author is talking about taking on Silicon Valley, but he does not have a region or even a city to compare. He is just taking a whole country - India - and talking it up. Silicon valley is what it is not just because there is a secret formula which you can use to replicate. I am not even sure if there are places in other parts of US which are comparable to the ecosystem here.
These kind of articles probably make for good copy. But without first trying to understand what makes Silicon Valley unique even in US - they are nothing but misleading.
I suspect that it's more "human" than Indian.
A five year plan is short enough that it looks reasonable but long enough that you don't have to do anything for a while at the beginning. And, when the 5 years is over, few people remember what they were promised at the beginning, especially if you've started a couple of other five year plans in the interim.
The five year plan may be ideal for getting resources to not do anything useful.
I would say atleast 10 more years before you can have a Techcrunch 50 in India at the same level as it happens in US
India taking on Silicon Valley? Won't happen for a long, long time. - An Indian living in Silicon Valley.
Answer: Not in another 1000 years
Banning TechCrunch is a dumber idea.