๐ฎ๐ณIncredible India Opportunity ... wait a second!
There is no doubt that India is positioned the best it has been for startup innovation over the next few decades - talent at its best, unparalleled public digital infrastructure, building-for-the-world at its highest, more venture dollars than ever before & more.
This is also why we, at Better Capital, have been bullish and long on India ever since we started in 2018 -- it is the best time to build and the best time to invest in innovators.
BUT BUT BUT -- it is important to *not oversell* the largeness or the nearness of the Incredible India Opportunity (IIO) because if we have to do this right, we have a long way to go.
I *worry* when people oversell the India opportunity with broad brush comments: look at the rise of UPI, look at the consumption trends, look at the smartphone penetration, look how early we still are in e-commerce, look at the quick commerce opportunity, look at the building-for-the-world opp, look at how Bangalore has become the Silicon Valley of India, look at how good life in India is, look how Satya & Sundar are Indians..we are going to rule the world, look at how India is the next China, look at... the list goes on.
I *worry because* translating all of this high-level broad brush opportunity painting into a real business is incredibly and excruciatingly hard and we are far from it: CACs remain high & have not been solved in spite of burning billions of dollars by many many companies, there is no loyalty in India's lowest-price-seeking consumer so retention still sucks for most and is really hard, the millions of smartphone users are largely freeloaders, age-old lending is currently the only scalable business model, B2B is even harder in India, building-for-the-world sounds great but our GTM capability right now is worse than a 2 person team in Europe or Australia, we deliver everything with a far higher cost basis than our counterparts in the rest of the world so there is literally no India cost advantage on most MISs, we can build good products but we haven't figured out how to turn them into great businesses at scale yet, we are still *inspired* by the west and original thinking is a tiny percentage, our engineering quality has greatly improved but the quantity of that great quality is abysmally low for the hype around the India opportunity, the vast majority of founders still have bookish knowledge of how to build great tech companies because they are just too young and too early, the true venture risk appetite in our investor ecosystem is low and we have far lesser number of investors (for varied views) compared to the largeness of the India opportunity that is painted, high pedigree IITian founders in India are more often building ops businesses than engineering and tech businesses, it has really hard to find a large population of truly missionary founders & early employees which is what Silicon Valley was built on,..... and more.
Every founder who is actually building a company on the ground in India is seeing all the above issues every day and when she/he looks at the hype around the India opportunity, it confuses them because they are not feeling it in their daily grind :)
They are not feeling it because it is going to take a lot more on all fronts - hard work, maturing of the ecosystem, cleansing out all bad behavior, thinking clearly about what end state businesses and sizes we can build & by when, enough mission orientedness more broadly, faster and higher quality learning loops beyond bookish learning, larger and more varied capital pools & more - to truly realize the India opportunity.
AND, it is going to take much much longer than what is concluded from all the broad brush hype.
AND, we might not see true decacorns - one that has fundamentals to support its valuation - for much much longer. The reality may be that we have to underwrite a far far lower end state valuation of a successful company than the hype assumes.
SO, the Incredia India Opportunity is real but not as near, is large but not as large as quickly -- and it is going to take a lot more hard work from everyone working towards it.
WE DON'T WANT to oversell and overhype it, then fall into that trap of believing it ourselves and crash and burn everything because we started to sprint with greed in what is likely going to be an ultra marathon!
Slow & steady wins the race :) ๐ฎ๐ณ๐ช๐ช๐ช
ps: all of the above learning is not an opinion but more of a conclusion/learning based on working *on the ground in India* with 600 very very high-quality founders across 200 companies over 5 years.