The India Portfolio Summit
From the License Raj to Liberalization, from the global financial crisis to the boom of e-Commerce, and from getting its first unicorn in 2011 all the way to 100 unicorns in 2022, the Indian business landscape has continued to evolve and reinvent itself to break through all hurdles and setbacks.
The India Portfolio is a first-of-a-kind virtual summit that chronicles this evolution through the lens of the torchbearers that materialized it. The weekend-long summit, on the 11th and 12th of June 2022, brings together some of the most prominent founders and CXOs of the country in an exciting 3-era-narrative starting from the 1980s to the present day. Register here to see it unfold.
What to expect?
The India Portfolio summit will narrate in detail the nuanced history of Indian businesses, through the eye of a founder. The landscape on which Indian founders have built businesses has changed a lot in the past 40 years and will continue to do so. Our vision is to provide people with the backdrop of Indian businesses, and connect past stalwarts with aspiring entrepreneurs, to help better understand how to build and scale sustainable businesses in a dynamic ecosystem like India. The summit aims to help founders learn how to build on these niches and ideate game-changing solutions.
This one-of-a-kind summit will introduce the world to a unique assortment of tales of success and failures through one-on-one fireside chats, open to all AMA sessions, and engaging panel discussions with India’s top founders and CXOs, who have been pivotal in shaping India’s startup ecosystem. Our stellar lineup of 35+ speakers includes Aadit Palicha (Co-founder of Zepto), Piyush Shah (Co-founder of Inmobi), Vikas Chauhan (Co-founder of 1mg), and Dipti Tandon (Co-founder at Jeevansaathi.com) and many more.
Motivation behind The India Portfolio
At Conquest, the only constant has been innovating and reinventing ourselves. From starting off 18 years ago as a Business Plan competition operating out of the classrooms of BITS Pilani to pivoting to a full-fledged startup accelerator model, Conquest continues its pursuit to find new ways to give back to the incredible Indian startup ecosystem.
The team behind Conquest has continuously striven to help ambitious founders understand the undercurrents and stay on top of trends. Observing the pandemic as an inflection point in the startup ecosystem, the Conquest Team observed that India’s business and entrepreneurial landscape had not been extensively documented over the years. Gnawed by this absence, the Team took it upon themselves to bring forth untold stories of founders, tales of sheer grit and determination, and of overcoming all odds in building India’s new economy.
So, what do we wish to achieve with the summit?
With The India Portfolio, we cover the rise of India’s new economy and its bustling entrepreneurial ecosystem through the lens of the founders and builders that played a key role in shaping the business landscape into what it is today.
Envisioning India as a VC firm, we believe these founders and leaders represent India’s best investments. India has not been built on the shoulders of its politicians and their agenda but on the vision of these founders who set out to make a change. These businesses have redefined India; the investments that are synonymous with ‘The India Portfolio’. The summit brings to you their stories in an unfiltered take to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Discover the past, understand the present, and ideate upon the future.
Narrative
Inception, Ignition, and Inflection.
India’s story is not over, in fact, it has just begun. To document this exciting journey and put things in perspective, we’ve broken down India’s journey into 3 broad eras — each era representative of a unique period in India’s history and its business landscape.
We begin with Era 01: Inception, set right in the backdrop of post-Independence India, which is chaotic — both politically and from an economic perspective. The India Portfolio seeks to assess this era with reference to the numerous archaic policies that existed and yet how various businesses managed to find a strong foothold and a niche for themselves.
In Era 02: Ignition, we look past the dawn of the new century. India saw the rise of founders building for the Indian consumer on the back of increased purchasing powers among people and the influx of various new technologies. But this era was replete with its own contradictions and ironies that often came to bite how startups navigated their way through red-tapism, corruption, and a market yet to understand its own potential.
We end with Era 03: Inflection — the period when the Indian startup ecosystem hit its inflection point. With the democratization of data and the last-mile delivery of services, this era is marked by new-age businesses going public and venture funding reaching a new high. It’s only upward for Indian businesses from here.
Era 01: Inception
The excessive drains on India’s wealth in the British Raj had reduced India’s share in the global economy down from 23% in the 1700s to under 4%. At the stroke of the midnight hour on the 15th of August, 1947, in a sleeping world, India awoke to its long-overdue Independence from foreign rule. This solemn, seminal moment gave India the hope that she could undo this colonial shrinkage.
In the years following Independence, India’s policies were largely governed by the Planning Commissions drawing five-year plans to guide the Government. Pandit Nehru’s Temples of Modern India — dams, research institutes, power, and steel plants were built by the likes of legacy names such as Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis to propel India into the modern era and build its foundational infrastructure. However, growth was severely hampered by the Quota-License-Permit Raj that with its extensive red-tapism disincentivized the starting and running of private enterprises. The extreme levels of bureaucracy and corruption coupled with heavy regulations on foreign investments forced many to leave the country.
From 1947 to the early 1960s, India was largely dependent on the West for its food needs. This changed with the Green Revolution as India moved towards becoming self-sufficient in the production of food grains. The White Revolution led by Verghese Kurien moved India from a milk deficient nation to the world’s largest milk producer and led to the formation of one of India’s most iconic brands, Amul.
In the 1970s, under the rule of then PM Indira Gandhi, India was faced with the nationalization of banks and the imposition of the emergency which led to significant suppression of human rights and censoring of the press. The policies of Demonetisation 1.0 and legalization of strikes by the following Janata Government lowered India’s business morale significantly.
Rajiv Gandhi, the Father of the Indian IT and Telecom Revolution, in the late 1980s established institutions tasked with bringing world-class telecommunications technology to India. He also reduced tariffs on computers and related tech introducing them to major industries like railways thus modernizing them. This was also the era where stalwart founders like Nandan Nilekani, Narayan Murthy, Shiv Nadar, and others founded tech behemoths like Infosys and HCL.
On the 24th of July 1991, the Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, faced with a collapsing economy with forex reserves enough for imports for only three weeks along with a debt crisis, liberalized the Indian economy. FDI was welcomed and domestic markets were free. He was prescient when he stated “India is now awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.”
The latter half of the 90s saw internet-first businesses and startups emerge throughout the world with companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix launching in silicon valley. India too saw the birth of its first internet entrepreneurs in Sanjeev Bikhchandani with Infoedge, Sridhar Vembu with Zoho, and Dipti Tandon with Jeevansaathi among many others.
Era 02: Ignition
The bust of the dot com bubble in the early 2000s brought panic in all parts of the world. The assumption that any Technology driven company could just put out its IPO to raise money was changing, and people recognized that saturation was increasing in the market.
In the late 1990s, the primary trend for college graduates, especially from prestigious universities like the IITs, was to look for a job in the US. Graduates would apply for H1B visas and go abroad to make money. However, the quota for the visa reached its maximum allowed value in 1998, which meant that no more visas could be issued, and those in the US would have to come back to India after their current Visa expired. This resulted in talented Indians coming back to India, which drew international companies towards the Indian ecosystem. Companies like Oracle, Amex, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo were the first to set up offices, while Microsoft invested another $1.7 billion.
Meanwhile, the giants in India, such as TATA, continued to expand, acquiring VSNL and CMC, while TCS, Infosys, HCL, and WIPRO crossed the prized $1 billion valuation.
The Telecom sector in India received a significant boost, with the Broadband Bill being passed in the Parliament and major players like Airtel and Reliance entering the fray.
The onset of consumerism was first seen in the travel sector. The coming of new airlines such as Kingfisher, Air Deccan, and SpiceJet and startups like MakeMyTrip was the critical foundations in this era. This was further amplified by the coming of Facebook and the iPhone in India.
With the increased market in India, it was now the time for the curtains to rise on the Indian Founders. These were founders building for the Indian consumer. They were not building software to export to the US or handing out cheap English-speaking labour in the form of BPOs. They were building world-class ideas. They were neither lauded nor supported by the ecosystem for their conviction, but they built on it.
Startups such as Paytm, Ola, redBus, Flipkart, InMobi, Zomato, and such, would become era-defining startups in their inflection period.
Their efforts were further amplified by the launch of Android, which brought the cost of phones lower than $100 in India, making it more affordable to the masses.
It was then, in 2010, that the per capita income in India crossed the $1000 line, increasing the buying capacity of each individual. This was both a result and a booster for the Indian ecosystem.
However, one can also say that this was an era of contradictions: While access to 3G internet increased, data costs remained high. Indian startups were still listing their IPOs on NASDAQ instead of listing on NSE and BSE. Though multiple Indian founders were starting up, India still ranked 132nd in Ease of Doing Business.
Era 03: Inflection
Despite the fact that Android smartphones had started penetrating the market and efforts were being made to increase digital adoption amongst Indians, it felt like the Indian Market was generating diminishing returns. Just when investors were becoming sceptical about the prospect of the Indian Startup Ecosystem Landscape, Indian governments started to warm up to the idea of fostering startup culture in India with initiatives like Digital India and Startup India. India truly hit its inflection point when Jio came into the markets in September of 2016.
No one piece of technology has created as much hype in the Indian markets as Jio. The DAUs on almost all eCommerce platforms started to shoot up and a large part of the Indian population was suddenly online. A Huge problem that RBI still had to navigate its way through was financial literacy and digital adoption. RBI came up with a vision statement to develop a safe and interoperable payment mechanism keeping in mind the hesitancy for non-cash transactions in the average Indian.
To this end, the NPCI worked to develop a secured backend system called UPI. The technology was safe, easy to use, and interoperable which dramatically reduced the barrier to entry. In under 5 years, the number of UPI transactions in India shot up to more than 25 billion. India had managed to leapfrog years of technological advancement in digital transactions with this one piece of backend solution. This unprecedented growth due to rapid digitization was followed closely by the fintech boom in India with India boasting of 11 unicorns and several soonicorns in the space as of today.
India was on an ascending curve when in the March of 2020 COVID broke out and the nation had to be shut down. The cash flow became stagnant and the stakeholders were sceptical. The stock markets were not being very kind either. In the wake of the pandemic, money that was flowing sector-agnostically now was systematically channeled to ed-tech startups, content startups, etc. Meanwhile, the market was suffering from a general loss of trust. The stock markets were volatile and a steady recovery was a primary concern for the government. Retail investors in India were jumping on the bandwagon to invest in the stock market when more steady income sources started to fail them. While new retail investors continued to be optimistic, the VC firms were willing to back startups only if they saw solid long-term fundamentals.
With a huge proportion of the Indian demographic stuck at home, the need for content and entertainment emerged as a natural consequence. OTTs were competing to churn out content that could challenge the long-standing monopoly that Bollywood had created. Parallelly, individuals sitting at home with time on their hands started to experiment by putting out content online. It was not long until these creators realized that they could leverage their followings online to help brands communicate with their audiences. Brands started to rely heavily on what was termed “Influencer Marketing” to market their products. The strategy seemed effective as these creators shared more intimate relations with the communities they had created online.
Meanwhile, as people started to lose trust in legacy institutions, the concept of decentralized systems started to gain more and more traction. The Web3 community in India was small but a bunch of motivated individuals who could see through the hype, the market volatility, and the jargon to look for the actual substance. From this community, emerged Matic which eventually became India’s first Unicorn protocol. It was not long before the government stepped in with the Finance minister announcing a tax regime to be imposed on “Virtual Digital Assets” which created trepidation in the already unstable crypto market. While most crypto investors expressed displeasure with the tax regime, some experts maintained calm suggesting alternatives to safely storing crypto assets with stable coins. The crypto space, with all the hue and cry surrounding it, continues to be an unrealized dream in India.
What’s next for India Inc.?
As India recovers from the global economic slowdown posed by the pandemic development peaked, and now we are witnessing a bullish market correct itself. The Financial Bill, 2022 has set the front for strategic and gradual development in the coming few years.
The entrepreneurial spirit in the country is soaring at an unprecedented rate and groundbreaking innovation is only an inevitable byproduct. India has surpassed the UK, taking the position as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world and the third country to surpass the 100 unicorns mark, behind the US and China. The dreams of the founders are getting bigger and bigger, thereby augmenting what the future of the Indian Startup Ecosystem has in store for us. The tier-2 and tier-3 markets of India are largely untapped, unlocking huge potential for scaling tech startups and we are seeing many investors banking on that.
Conclusion
The Conquest team put together this summit as a celebration of Indian entrepreneurship, an ode to the giants whose shoulders we stand on as we look to innovate and bring forth our ideas into the world.
The summit is poised to be an inspiring affair that brings together untold stories narrated by these giants. Join us on the 11th and 12th of June to live through this journey and immerse yourself in the Indian dream.
Register Now: https://lu.ma/the-india-portfolio
