Why Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley, and why that will likely not happen in India

This is an actually very true. I’ve seen developers who are very good in the stuff they do but lack the thinking from a customer / business POV. They take the PRD and convert it into code but never ever question whether this is the experience they want to provide to the end user. Everyone needs to understand code is a way to achieve business and to achieve business , you would need to think from a business prospective. That’s why , I always tell my juniors whenever they code , always take a step back and put yourself in the customer shoes and think what you are doing is what you want as a customer or not

Absolutely based take. That's now my approach for any side-projects as well. But I feel we'll get there eventually given the current environment. Very bullish on India rn.

I also think there is a brain drain overall - you do have a good chunk of the population moving abroad to study and then eventually settle there rather than coming back to build for India Now we can hold a lot of factors responsible for that - be it economic factors, salaries, standard of living, quality of education etc. etc. All in all I'm not surprised that a lot of smart talent would prefer to move abroad. India is a growing opportunity yes, but it's also tougher to build here I feel.

Would thinking more about business give a bigger upside? 10 cr company is not that difficult actually if you have good business acumen while one may take 10 years to earn that wealth.

In India, dev needs spare time to build side husstle. Most of their time is absorbed by the shitty wlb

Not only its about engineers. Its about the VCs themselves who were willing to listen to crazy ideas of folks and trust them fully with the money obtained from pension funds , etc. Their extreme risk taking mentality with patient capital, market's willingness to pay all of them made Silicon valley what it is today. India has to ready its own dry powder from LIC, EPFO, etc holding huge funds. Even 3% of the holdings of the institutions pumped will give a massive impact. Also, R&D has to be improved at the ground level and culture of questioning status quo must be alive. Added to that Indian Market's willingness to accept the solution and pay.

People there were starting up, building tech companies(both digital and hardware stuff) since 4 decades. You can read the book power law - which covers origins of VC funding in US since late 60s/70s. Now hear me out - what this does is create lot of workforce across roles not just engineers, but also founders, executives, leadership folks, and even VC who has experience building/seeing from front seat startups get built for ages. That's why a developer there at SV has project/idea that they want to test, they have better support and guidance from all types of experienced roles/folks to do things faster. Now I'm contrast - indian startup/tech scene only picked momentum in the Housing/Flipkart/Snapdeal beginnings of early late 2000s/ early 2010s. They has some employees coming from bay area experience to start building, but then most of key business, leadership roles were filled by folks who built their careers in India in FMCG, manufacturing or IT services. For them understanding how tech companies/digital products get built and grown was its own new learning experience. We are maturing and are churning more experienced, and skilled startup operators, and long-term this is gonna stay. Startups will be there to innovate on pressing problems. Large listed companies have to keep showing innovation and search for new problems or solve current problems in new "innovative" ways.

Yes, we should grow this culture of building side projects.

True. In India most devs think about making a big CTC without building anything great. Environment hi waisa hai. Very few are there who want to build products that people will actually use.

Indian coorporates want to reap all the benefits without providing any leeway/time for developing side projects. Ever thought this could be the reason for this ? But no, it's always the 'highly-paid developer who doesn't give a shit about UX' fault.

Interesting take 🤔

There is a crab mentality due to the inferiority complex of Indians. Indians will never use Indian stuff but will happily sell themselves off for American stuff. This snowballs into "kyu kare bro" mindset. We don't even own the communication medium, we have leased ourselves to American digital colonialism.

Silicon valley actually became silicon valley back when Fairchild semiconductors was founded. What made silicon valley the most successful in building generation defining startups is network of investors. A startup could so easily raise round after round with little effort that it allowed random ideas which could never become profitable businesses on their own to become explosive. Further, silicon valley investors realised the value of investing in new ideas and that continued as a culture till date. Indian venture capital ecosystem is still not that well built out. Further, it has been built on back of copy cat businesses where primary leverage has been a business model/scale and not tech. Since no one is willing to take a bet on deep tech startups in India, no one is building one.

I told a coder on GV most coders don't have long term vision or business sense, he got offended and took it personally 🤡 Code is useless if you can't package and sell it. Indian coders shy away from starting up for this exact reason, they will see failure sooner than they ever did in life and that scares them.

Over engineering and unnecessary excitement over new features needs to be cut just the way staff is being cut across the ecosystem. Shipping is not equal to outcome but is only an output, as long as this correction does not take place Indian devs will never go beyond engineering. And a lot of them with engineering background want to become PMs, without business, and user understanding.

What do you guys think the startup scenario of Israel, India should take a lesson from them

Thinking innovative is not part of Indians

I said the same a while ago but people got offended lol. "How dare you ask us to earn less", while not understanding that coding alone doesn't make a business 😂 I would say there's plenty of people working on side projects but Indian investors and VCs don't really fund projects. They fund businesses and business ideas. Indian investors mostly don't have the silicon valley mindset of letting a project play out with support. They ask about returns within 5-10 years. This is why we'll never be like SF and we will always lose the best of our talent to USA and other countries.

😂