Tech in India Has Reached Its Third Stage
The tech ecosystem in India has been through three stages:
Stage 1: Services Only (2000s)
When I was in college in 2007, my mentor at the time told me to work for a US company, because there were no good Indian product companies. Indian tech companies were only services companies, not interested in building great technology, only interested in churning out mediocre stuff cheap. Startups didn’t exist in India. Startups were something Americans did. Only one or two of my IIT classmates started a startup after college, and I looked at them weirdly, as if they decided to leave the city and live in the desert. I took up the best job available at that time: Google.
Stage 2: Indian startups (2010s)
Things began to change from 2009, with Flipkart. Till then, e-commerce was something that existed in developed countries. Flipkart was a revolution. It was polished and fast. It inspired all of us in tech that we can build great products in India, unlike crap like the SBI internet banking portal, which was until then representative of the quality of Indian tech, and a limit on our imagination.
2015 was a big peak in the startup ecosystem, convincing all of us that startups are here to stay. A new normal had been created.
But there were very few exits. Exits are when investors get their money back, helping them reinvest it, and encouraging other investors to invest. Otherwise, the cycle isn’t completed, and the engine stutters, just as it would if the fourth stroke isn’t completed.
Stage 3: Indian exits (2020 onwards)
Recently, we’ve had a bunch of IPOs: Paytm, Nykaa, Policybazaar and Zomato, with more on the way. This completes the cycle, putting the startup ecosystem on solid grounding for the future.