Why doesn’t India come out with innovations like Deepseek?
Try going to most Indian VCs with anything that’s “new” and not an exact copy of whatever that’s already been done in US or China atleast a few years ago. They’ll look at you as if you’re a guy without a job who has asked for their daughter’s hand (while also insisting on Dahej).
And this isn’t an anecdotal observation. It’s a pattern.
When Thrasio happened in US, literally billions of dollars went into its clones in India. It’s another thing that neither Thrasio worked there, nor those clones in India.
When NFTs were raging, Indian VCs had suddenly found Shree Krishn. They had elaborate thoughts on how NFTs were going to “revolutionise” the “art ecosystem”. Obviously, they had no clue about what they were saying as they had never picked up a paintbrush (or a guitar) in their lives. They were regurgitating some nonsense they had heard from somewhere. Didn’t work for anyone anywhere.
When Uber worked in US, a stream of Uber clones were funded, without even contextualising that innovation to India. “They did cabs, we’ll do cabs”. Doesn’t matter if Indians can’t even afford cabs. 15 years later, Ola’s founder is making scooters, all while trying to make the cab company go public with remarkable financial engineering feats. And a sudden winner is Rapido - a bike hailing company.
I can go on…
Right now, it’s AI. So anything with AI is being considered for funding. But don’t come up with something that hasn’t happened before, or anything that’s too “incomprehensible” for these guys. You won’t have a nice call.
And if your startup is not in AI, well then, don’t think about reaching out before you’ve built the product, are doing revenues, are extremely profitable, and are showing terrific growth. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is what you already read the first paragraph.
So while possibly having good intent, Indian VC ecosystem is fundamentally against innovation. They’re private market, risk capital investors on paper, but essentially retail type stock pickers with a 7-10 year horizon. While that may be good for them, it’s obviously bad for people who are passionate about innovation and are willing to put in 100 hours a week (straight out of Mr. Narayan Murthy’s dreams).
In fact, if you think about true “innovation. Things that India came up with and the world might follow. Things which truly broke ground here. They didn’t come from the private industry at all. They were, quite interestingly, government initiatives. Of course I’m talking about UPI and ONDC.
UPI and ONDC. Both extremely innovative, were totally designed and implemented by the Indian government, and then taken over by the private sector. Usually, the government is supposed to be many steps behind private players, but in finance tech (and even space), Indian government actually led the way.
We really need an early stage funding ecosystem.
P.S. I know Deepseek wasn’t funded by VCs. But hope you got the inference.
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