Is India being bitten by the startup bug?

When is the most recent time someone suggested that you float your company, a startup rather than put in grueling hours at your job? Let me guess, sometime in the last few weeks?

When was the last time someone told you that they are moving to a smaller company or starting something of their own? Some time in the last few months?

Why was this not the case 20 years ago?

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

The serious answer to this is ‘It is easier to float a startup(in India) now than it has been any time in history’. It’s got very little to do with govt and mentality and a lot to do with existing opportunities as well as current digital reach we have.

Breaking that down:

1. Companies are no longer compartmentalized. Everyone does everything. Right from tier 1 companies till startups, there are very little roles or Job description coming into play. Whatever needs to be done, has to be done. With the exception of stagnant fields like Finance, operations, HR, etc., — all other fields have expanded to handle anything under the sun.
2. Better awareness. A lot of leaders are reaching out to folks using broader mediums like social media, digital marketing and such. This awareness removes a lot of inhibitions and clarifies most of the risks involved in starting and running a business. There are businesses now that can help you deal with the lot of those risks!
3. Digital reach. At any given moment, a business that has a small scope can fail big time. But a business or idea that can cater to any number of locations across the globe to reach any number of potential clients has a lot of things going for it. Ten years ago, this was impossible for people to visualize, right now it’s within our grasp. Using cloud, you can scale to any limit with the right funding in place, thanks to services like AWS and Azure.
4. Treatment of employees. Companies in India largely treat their employees like cattle. While situation was bad for a long time, the Tremendous economic divide between employees who jump ships often and those who stay in the same company have frustrated many. Especially during covid, Traditional companies in IT for example have reaped huge profits with very little being passed on to employees. It’s no surprise that a lot of these employees want to go their own way.
5. Ease of Reskilling. Youtube, Udemy, Coursera and such have simplified the transition from one core skill to another. Right now, with abundant data, you can basically learn any skill for very less. A decade ago, learning a skill and polishing it was a huge task. You had physical centers with ungodly timings, there was little sandbox or test environments available. Most of all, you could not bet on getting a good mentor or the right guidance. Today, you can literally select one of the best teachers on the planet and take their course for as little as $8.
6. Rise of the open source. Licensing some expensive software itself is a huge turn off for a lot of people looking to start their own thing. Learning it also cost a lot of money. This put off a lot of people. Right now, open source software and framework have made it easy to build alternate solutions that can give existing solutions a run for their money.
7. Of course, all of these are just reasons for people saying things like this. The challenges of building a product and marketing it are still huge even today. Only the options to tackle them have become more straight forward.

Photo by Nowshad Arefin on Unsplash