All happy companies look different ~ Peter Thiel

The evolution of the United States, China and India happened in very unique ways, economically and politically. They are different systems today and ecosystems within them will evolve differently as well.

The US saw the birth of amazing startups like Intel, Apple, Microsoft and later on Amazon, Google and Facebook.

Although with similar level of developed economic status we did not see an Intel, Microsoft or Google come up in Europe. Google is the Google of Europe and Microsoft is the Microsoft of Europe.

There used to be a Nokia and that was pretty amazing. Korea has Samsung and two key reasons China saw Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent come up is by having a highly protective economy and strong and rapid interest infrastructure roll out, which helped enable a huge internet economy.

Google is infact not the Google probably only in three economies which are China, Russia and South Korea. So India not having its own Google is actually the norm, so cannot be an indication of something being unusually wrong.

Copycats of existing newly high growth businesses is a trait fundamentally more common in China than in India. There were 100x more Groupon clones in China than in India. So borrowing ideas cannot be a flaw of the startup ecosystem. It’s more like a characteristic. Hey Google copied Facebook to build Google Plus after Orkut flopped and Microsoft copied Google to launch Bing. Facebook copied Snapchat, Wechat and so on. This ‘stealing of ideas’… it just happens you know! Ask Steve, he believed in it.

The startup ecosystem operates within the larger economic system and can only evolve within its constraints and despite its constraints. My office is extremely well located in South Delhi, bang opposite IIT Delhi, our premier engineering institute. I still don’t get quality internet bandwidth. Net speeds were 100x better when I was hanging out in Mountain View. But anyways, just a speed bump. Me and other startups here, will get ‘there’ all the same. We are just getting started. And we all (most of us) bootstrap, it’s part of the game.

India and our startup ecosystem are on different evolutionary path. There will be ample examples of successes and failures to quote from, to make a point, either in favour or against, if we are inclined to compare pixel to pixel. But I believe comparisons of this sort are irrelevant because we are on a different path. I am still trying to think if there’s an Infosys of China. Maybe there’s one.

Of course we are all extremely open to learn, what we can from everywhere we can. The quote on top is from the book “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel. It’s a great book. Everyone knows there’s no Google or Facebook from India, yet. Tell me something useful.