After 20 hours onboard 2 turbulent flights I just made it from San Francisco to Bangalore. The good thing is always that temperatures never disappoint here in South-India. 22 degrees at midnight is something not to take for granted. So I feel like bringing the good vibes with me which I had the last week in the U.S. and especially I was till yesterday noon enjoying sunny California at Pier 39 in San Francisco with a beautiful view on Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Having plenty of time on the flight I reviewed parts my notes and documents from the Web 2.0 Summit and thought how the latest learnings relate to India.
- India is growing strongly in terms of internet usage, like whole Asia is as this slide from Morgan Stanley shows (entire presentation for download here). The country has even moved up one place and lies now ahead of the U.K.
- All big VC-firms from the Valley have already made inroads, either by setting up shop like Kleiner Perkins who are invested in Naukri or like Sequoia who made the so far unsual move in the industry to acquire Westbridge Capital from KP Balaraj, a fellow EO member of mine in Bangalore, and renamed it, well, Sequioa India .
- However, from rather anecdotal evidence than from profound research, Indian online users have broadly populated services like Facebook or GMail. Given the the non-existent language barrier for the current online-population this does not come by big surprise. It will be interesting to see what sort of web applications come for those Indians who are not in the (minority) 140 mn English-speaking bracket of a 1.05 bn nation.
- Even more so when it comes to accessing the web via the more 200+ mn mobile handsets (growing at a rate of 5 mn per month!) and see the usage explode on a scale of unprecedented magnitude.
- At the same time, to be straighforward, the nature of homegrown Web 2.0-services in India is not overly sophisticated. The high-end concepts of particularly usability have not yet percolated through the domestic community of internet entrepreneurs and developers.
- Sometimes I get requests from German companies with respect to my company Level 360 to outsource development in Web 2.0 domain in the start-up phase. With my next question "How many people do you need?" and the subsequent answer "2-3" I can happily bury the plan after 30 seconds. For an offshoring assignment to India such a headcount is entirely, completely and uttely sub-scale. I wrote about this phenomenon already here. Also, given my last point, it is not just a matter of missing quantity which makes the plan unviable, but also a lack of quality where a product responsible dearly requires input on the concept-level though the technical lense.
The last thing in an internet start-up you want to do is document each and every tiny little function on the hightest level of abstraction. This will kill you and take out any momentum which is critical in the initial stage. Hence, my clear recommendation: Develop at home, hire a good CTO who sets the course and who can manage e.g. capable software engineering-students at equally reasonable rates. When your company got traction and you need a bunch of at least 8 people, come back to me and I will happily help find the right partner.
I hope to observe the Indian market a bit more in the future and come up with more posts on that exciting subject where my bets are clearly geared towards this huge mobile opportunity.
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