India Shining?
August 14th, 2006
Last night, just days before India’s Independence Day, I had the privilege of sitting down with three people with a vision of how incredible India could be. All three of these people, mind you, are Americans.
Ok, so they are Indian by ancestry, as am I, and they are also entrepreneurs. Our conversation, set in a sheesha bar cum coffee shop called Mocha, was was equal parts rant and rave. This country truly has amazing potential. I personally know it just by interacting with the incredible people that make up our team, many of them graduates of IIT, widely considered one of the world’s top engineering universities. And, with one of the largest and youngest labor pools in the world - as well as a middle-class larger than the entire US population - India is becoming a true economic force to be reckoned with. One of the guys in the group, who moved to Mumbai a year ago, waxed prolific about the vast potential of India’s services industries. “Look around,” he said, gesturing frantically at the youthful crowd in a posh Mumbai suburb on a Sunday night. “Any place that’s even slightly hip in this town is packed!” Powerful words from the lips of a former marketing head for Time Out Mumbai. His point was that there is simply overwhelming business potential in a boom town like Mumbai. The needs are many, the services few and not always that satisfying.
Case in point: internet connectivity. One guy in the group who moved to Mumbai only 4 months ago, just in time for the monsoons, said that he subscribes to five internet service providers, three of them broadband and two dialup. The rub? At the moment, none of them work! Needless to say, this is not funny for an entrepreneur who needs to upload new builds of his software tools every night. Not funny at all. But what’s a businessman to do? Fortunately for us, we’ve never had more than the occasional hour of dowtime at our gaming studio. But the point is that with more stable infrastructure, the business potential in India is beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
Our third friend, a successful serial entrepreneur, listened to all this with a wise look on his face as a puff of green apple smoke wafted from his lips. He runs a mobile application company which, like Octane, is based in San Francisco and has a back-end operation in Mumbai. He didn’t seem bothered by our rants about the horrid state of the roads in the rains or the fact that Mumbai had the distinction of being the 5th most polluted city in the world (probably after New Delhi and Chernobyl, our broadband-challenged friend joked). He told us that, in Mumbai, he had found the best run mobile operator he had ever worked with anywhere in the world. He said that this mobile carrier’s operational efficiency was simply unmatched. Really? We were all surprised to hear this. At the same time we weren’t. (This is a city that has a massive six-sigma food delivery service run entirely by illiterate men on bicycles.)
Ok, so there are some pretty big obstacles. But in the eyes of bright-eyed entrepreneurs looking for huge market opportunities, India is still shining. There’s no debating the potential this country has. At Octane, we see tremendous hope in the highly skilled professional talent that we recruit. Others are perhaps braver and focus on India as a primary market. In honor of all those who fight the entrepreneurial fight despite the occasional lost connection, I sit here in our Mumbai studio and humbly upload this post on the eve of India’s Independence Day. And, yes, I do have full Internet connectivity despite the pouring rain outside.
Anyone want to help me understand what this beauty was doing on the monsoon-beaten Bombay roads??