Wonder why India has no deep-tech/device startups.

I might sound stupid here but please hear me out. The market is crowded with so many startups in every domain. Older startups are much more stable, on track to become profitable or are already profitable with a huge market share. Not to forget the legacy companies with deep pockets and years of R&D and experience. Along with the competition, funding is another major pain point now because of various reasons we all know of. Also, somewhere I feel we don't face a lot of burning problems we faced a few years back which gave birth to a lot of startups who were actually solving some problem. Most of the new age startups out there are not really solving any problem but just offering premium products or services targeting just the high earning individuals. Most of the new ideas are repetitive with no major differentiation or value add. Because of all these reasons, I feel we might see very few new startups in future let alone successful ones. Share your thoughts please!

India's unstoppable rise in tech and innovation makes the West's decline clear. Yet immigration number always baffles me - are we being shortsighted? 🤔

Have been an entrepreneur since college days. Went full time on same idea and worked on it for a good 4 years full time before starting something new, raising some money, later pivoting (fucked up here) and eventually shutting shop last year. Life has been tough since then since there is no clarity on what to spend next 2-5 years on - acquisition offer falling apart, tried looking for jobs but didn't finalise and later did a bit of consulting (good pay but didn't really work out). I now have a few good conversations going on right now - leading product & EIR/Founders Office. What do you suggest would be an ideal thing to do? Profile - Solid Generalist. Non tech. Money ain't really an issue right now but can't stay dependent on savings for so long - its stupid. PS - If you or someone you know is hiring, please reach out. Happy exploring ideas as well.

Majority of Indian startups has toxic work culture and the same is not true for any US or Europe based startup. Indian startups just copy paste ideas from the west and apply it to Indian context. We don't have original product barring few such as Postman and all. Why is it so and how we can improve the situation?

I am building something, say like a social network, for the consumer where they will use it. Now, I don't feel good raising from any VC because of their heinous nature, Can I raise pre-seed funding for my startup via equity as tokens worth 1 lakhs- 5 lakhs for my own customers to purchase and minimum hold for 3 years as investment? (Given the value proposition and vision aligns with their customers) Is this possible? Ofc. Yes. Questions: Is this legal? If not, can it be made legal via some procedure like crowd funding? Unlike, ICO.

Hi all, I graduated from IIT Delhi and have been working at well established startup since. So for a while I have been wondering why we don't have any deep tech startups doing innovation. Don't get me wrong, there are startups doing innovations but not the kind of innovation which we would call industry shattering or taking the level up a notch. Most of these innovations are just integrating what others are doing in an aggregated platform. I again wondered this today when I saw cognition launching Devin the AI software engineer. They have a pretty small yet highly talented team. We in India too have highly intelligent folks educating themselves in CS, why don't we have this mindset (even I don't have this mindset). Is it about the difference in culture or a sense of security that folks in the US have that helps them be free from an economic point of view and try innovative things ?

Lately, I have been thinking very deeply about my college days when the Flipkart story had inspired the entire lot of my batch at IIT-D. We were starry eyed college kids who wanted to do something innovative in India and break away from the "three" most popular moves after IIT: 1. UPSC 2. MBA 3. MS/PhD abroad I proceeded to then work in various Indian startups and noticed an alarming thing. I began to realise a pattern across all my stints: The initial founding team does exceptional work innovating, they excel at what Thiel calls "Zero to One", the act of creation. I will concede that although most founders fail to innovate by often copying what worked in the west but the initial founding team usually excels in execution. It allows for initial traction as it breathes a fresh breath in the\ space that they are operating in. Almost always, when Product Market Fit is "achieved"(whatever that means), the founders begin to deploy insane amounts of funds into growth. By definition, Growth is not a bad thing. But, I have been noticing that across all startups I have worked at( all raised funds from the largest global funds) that it comes at the expense of product building. And during this era of hypergrowth, the product starts to stagnate while focus becomes marketing and sales. I often felt that this was temporary. That once we reach enough scale, we would start to innovate again. But time and time again, the ability to innovate atrophies over time. Rather than building something that has enduring value by executing faster than anyone, the focus becomes achieving growth at all costs. This ultimately leads to two outcomes: 1. The startup cannot sustain this growth and retention begins to look dire. The churn becomes unbearable and the startup goes out of business. 2. The startup gets acquired by someone bigger, allowing founders and investors to believe that they created value where none existed in the first place. I am completely dejected at this.

Kya dikat hai bhai, udane do paisa. Tumhare thodi hai. Good firms genuinely perform well and return money. The ecosystem is not forgiving -- you don't survive very long if you don't create any big wins. It's an extremely high stress job with very little WLB. You do make money but it comes at a cost. Layoffs are sad but at least those jobs existed in the first place? They wouldn't without VC money. India's VC scene is extremely young and it'll take time before we produce a Google. Entrepreneurs are not always right, they are not always nice either; but they definitely are courageous.

Why India does not have technology-based product companies and why early companies like TCS, Infosys etc did not focus on the product.