I just got back from a visit to India and one of the most interesting aspects of my trip was the close-up with entrepreneurism there.
First, there's a huge boom in startups in the tech arena in India. This is not new news. It is pretty well covered and there seems to be a news story every week on yet another US-based VC firm that's setting up an India office (ditto for China by the way). But what really interested me is that now there are more startups that plan to sell in India, and then maybe expand globally. Granted, the US in general and the Silicon Valley in particular, may have the edge in conditions for launching successful startups - check out Paul Graham's views and Guy Kawasaki's too for fun - but the Indian entrepreneurs aren't sitting around drinking chai and waiting for the conditions to improve. They're jumping right in.
Second, entrepreneurism is booming in all areas, not just tech: services, healthcare, education, transportation, you name it. And of course there are numerous and much-needed non-profits for various social causes where financial gain is clearly not the raison d'etre. Just casual conversations with friends and chance-met strangers were enough to show me the amazing pervasiveness of entrepreneurism.
Which led me to ponder: does the environment in India have something special to develop the entrepreneurial spirit? True, with a population of over a billion, even if one percent had an entrepreneurial bent, it will have a huge impact. But I see a general hustle across many demographics, even the taxi driver who makes less than $100 a month was hatching some schemes for his own business.
The most striking aspect of all the new stuff that's happening in India is that it's happening at all - given the unreliable infrastructure. An entrepreneur here in Silicon Valley would worry about the big stuff: team, funding, market and the like, but not so much about power outages every other day, transportation strikes/political riots that paralyze all movement, and folks having to spend hours to get to work through blistering heat, torrential monsoons and interminable traffic jams. Yes, the infrastructure is much better now than it was a few years ago, it is improving constantly, and the big guys have put in all kinds of redundancies, but you'd never take it for granted. And yet, the Indian entrepreneur just barrels along, and somehow makes it work. One of the instances of this supreme optimism that I found particularly striking was in healthcare. Enterprising doctors take the leap in bringing the latest in medical technology to India and making it successful enough to attract patients from all over the world. Lack of knowledgeable staff, decades-old facilities, flaky infrastructure, bloated bureaucracy - it would have been very easy to look at all this and conclude 'no way'. Most investors here would do so. But not so in India. What looks like an insurmountable obstacle is just another item to be taken care of - no big deal, some hard work and chutzpah will take care of it.
These entrepreneurs are really starting from scratch most of the time and are unfazed by it. Double the risk, double the work, but single-minded focus. And I have a theory on why it is so. In India the entrepreneur is still hungry. With a billion plus people, competition is fierce (it seems to start in kindergarten), and shirking from an opportunity just because you have to take care of everything yourself would make you a loser. If you're an entrepreneur visiting India, go ahead and drink the water (so to speak). Maybe you'll get hungry too.
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