“It is never just an incredible idea; it is the ingredients that make a startup successful.”
When he started Web Summit from his couch in Dublin with Daire Hickey and
This man is a firm believer of the potential of the Indian start-ups ecosystem. He said the Indian market is experiencing the second wave of the ecosystem and technology is driving it.
“People are entrepreneurial when it comes to tackling the traffic,” jokes Paddy while explaining the potential of
How far behind is the Indian start-ups ecosystem in the global competition? Or, is the real question is it ‘far behind’? Paddy describes the ecosystem step by step.
1. From 2011-2014 the world has witnessed an explosion of Indian start-ups.
“The ecosystem was hell back for years and everything else was moving ahead. It is almost like an elastic band that just exploded.”
And the explosion is not gradual, unlike anywhere else in the world. There is the second wave right now in the Indian market with a diversity of start-ups. It is happening pretty fast.
Paddy explains that there was a time when Indian engineers formed a major part of
2. Where the whole world has moved on from the ecommerce wave and experiencing a surge of second generation start-ups, hardware and mobile communication start-ups, ecommerce is still huge in India. It is time for India to address the question: What comes next?
“If you look at the funding over the last four years, ecommerce is huge and everything else is a little bit smaller in India. But if you look at the history elsewhere in the world, ecommerce was huge first and then everything else expanded.”
Kshitij Marwah, founder of Tesseract, the company that built the world’s first 360 Virtual Reality Live stream Video Camera, believes hardware start-ups would form a major part of the second wave. It has huge potential and will boom soon.
3. But the interesting thing is where in US, the ecosystem is mainly bound within the Silicon Valley, Indian start-ups ecosystem is dispersed in many different cities.
4. India has kind of leap frogged to the second wave with the penetration of smartphones. The world moved slowly from dot com to applications. But India jumped the desktop and laptop level to directly make it huge in applications.
“People have smartphones before they even know what a laptop is..So there is a whole generation of applications built in India that we probably haven’t seen anywhere in the world.”
5. Where there are innumerable start-ups coming up in the same genre, how do we become unique? Paddy has made Web Summit unique via engineering. He believes one needs to ask one basic question- ‘Why?’ This is what makes their start-up different than the rest. From applying engineering to maintain the queue to applying it to make the most suitable length of name plate for every participant, engineering is the secret. Indian start-ups need to apply it more when it comes to form an incredible idea, making smart money to finding the right market.
But all is not different. Startup ecosystems face one major hurdle in most parts of the world- the mindsets. When it comes to people leaving their 9-to-5 job to work in a start-ups, not many are willing to take that risk. Though the younger generation is catching up, the elder generation is yet to make up their minds.
“My granny doesn’t really like the idea that I left my job and am working in a start-up. She doesn’t introduce me as a start-up founder to her friends yet,” laughs Paddy.
(Image credits: Indiatimes)