I spent the last 15yrs in US in enterprise engg/product/venture @AMD, @Google & @a16z before returning to India. I'm often asked how India compares to SV hot-bed of enterprise innovation. Besides US, I feel world-class enterprise startups will come from India & here's why 👇:
1/n First, some market truths - more and more unicorns are now found outside of the US. Primary reason: internet penetration.
2/n Strong correlation exists between internet availability and affordability to large pools of value creation. The story that played out in US & China b/w 2000-2018 is starting to play out in India now. But aren’t these mostly B2C companies like Google/FB?
3/n Internet penetration has benefited B2C but has 2nd order impact on B2B. For every Dropbox or Facetime, there’s also a Box or Zoom using digital tools to build, test, & launch at breakneck speeds & then in “consumerish ways” brands, sell, & monetize enterprises.
4/n “Developer is the new buyer” -- think fewer site-wide MSDN or RHEL licenses, more personal/team-wide Github/Slack/digitalOcean accounts. Corporate IT spend will disaggregate and many top-down decisions will turn bottoms-up where individual “consumer” needs to be influenced.
5/n Founders w/ dev-first mindset will win big globally & Indian founders have a unique advantage here: our developer ecosystem is one of the most vibrant in the world. We are curious, engaged, & hungry to learn. Being a techie in India isn’t “geeky/nerdy”, it’s cool, fashionable
6/n But wait a minute? Isn’t India the call center / BPO capital of the world? You would be right.. 15-20 years ago. Simpson has a hilarious take on it.
7/n If you’ve been following the India story since the late 90s, the top students from IITs were going into BPO/KPO roles at firms like Infosys/EvalueServe, etc. By late 2000s, India had started to shift squarely to product w/ companies like InMobi / Exotel paving the way
8/n And now India is very SaaS focused, built and delivered on the cloud, and not just that, our enterprise solutions have...
9/n ...gone global from humble beginnings in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, etc. E.g. - postman just raised a massive 300M round w/ huge developer adoption. Browserstack has seen fantastic growth, & Freshworks hit 100M ARR last year (public sources):
10/n By itself, India is now the 2nd largest public cloud buyer in APAC, ~50% of China & growing faster. Vs China, the Indian buyer is hungrier & doesn’t care for brand or roadmap (so, ideal for startups), is more top-line focused & trying to get more process-driven to scale.
11/n With a lot of headroom yet to grow - almost 90B of IT spend overall, much of it in devices and services that are bound to get eaten by software in coming years…
12/n ...which is where, as you would expect, most of the growth is coming from (note: this is just the public cloud consumption data; pvt clouds may be multiples):
13/n While India-to-US has been tried before successfully, India now has the potential to be the Enterprise / SaaS hub for local and SEA markets. Why?
14/n China enterprise cos are either h/w focused or serve local markets. Meanwhile, rest of SEA has strong cultural, language AND use-case alignment w/ India given history & development stage (gig-based, migrant population, etc). Works in India? Can work there.
15/n and to support all this value creation, the key pieces are coming together nicely. Vast majority of founders now have prior startup experience -- this is where many of the smartest people are headed -- not banking, consulting, or Google/FB.
16/n and governmental reforms across taxation, ease of doing business, payments, and updated bankruptcy codes are providing additional tailwinds and making it easier for founders to take more risks and fail gracefully:
17/n Results? Large companies picking India as their 1st international market, while indian cos going global both in consumer & enterprise - e.g. @LightspeedIndia portcos @innovaccer (US) & @oyorooms (China, US, etc), & @thedarwinbox & @YellowMssngrAI getting inbounds frm SEA
18/n Indian enterprise founders have tasted blood. They are hungry, experimental, and live/breathe tech. The next 10 years in India are going to be really exciting for enterprise founders! If you are building for a massive whitespace out of India, I’d love to hear from you
Edit: 50m round, not 300m. :) Though I think the team will get there!
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So now that Nvidia has far outstripped the market cap of AMD and Intel, I thought this would be a fun story to tell. I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today. Back then it was unimaginable for AMD to beat Intel in market-cap (we did in 2020!) and for Nvidia to beat both! In fact, AMD almost bought Nvidia but Jensen wasn’t ready to sell unless he replace Hector Ruiz of AMD as the CEO of the joint company. The world would have looked very different had that happened. Here’s the inside scoop of how & why AMD saw the GPU oppty, lost it, and then won it back in the backdrop of Nvidia’s far more insane trajectory, & lessons I still carry from those heady days:
After my MS, I had an offer from Intel & AMD. I chose AMD at 20% lower pay. Growing up in India, AMD was always the hacker’s choice - they allowed overclocking, were cheaper, noisier, grungier and somehow just felt like the underdog david to back against the Intel goliath!
Through the 90s, AMD was nipping @ Intel’s heels but ~2003 we were 1st to mkt w/ a 64-bit chip &, for the FIRST time, had a far superior core architecture. Oh boy, those were exciting times! Outside of SV, I haven’t seen a place where hardcore engg was so revered. Maybe NASA.
Speed of execution is the moat inside which live all other moats. Speed is your best strategy. Speed is your strongest weapon. Speed has THE highest correlation to mammoth outcomes. Those who conflate speed w/ 'thoughtlessness' haven't seen world class execution @ speed. E.g.:
Many confuse speed w/ impatience. Impatience is your boss pinging you @ 9pm then calling @ 6am to check if a task is done. Speed is strategic. It is a permeated sense of urgency built w/ a shared belief that what you are doing is important & if you don’t do it, someone else will.
AMZN defines speed. Their 2015 SEC filing () is a must-read: (1) deliberate irreversible decisions (~10%?) (2) expedite all else. Founding teams need to learn how to apply judgment w/ <70% of data (<50% for early stage cos). Move fast, “disagree & commit”. shorturl.at/xDEU1
For those of you following anything SaaS, you'll note there have been a lot of calls around 'saas is dead' lately. If you are wondering why, I wrote about this last yr here👇. This isn't just about saas but rather a 50yr macro CAPEX/OPEX cycle at play under the hood. : shorturl.at/sJ4IZ
Over the last 20yrs, both the cost of building and distributing software has COMPLETELY crashed. 20 years ago, it’d take a 4yr CS degree to write software, today thanks to internet anyone who wants to work hard can learn to code. In 20yrs world has gone from 5-6M software developers to 60M+ today. Second, the cost of distribution has gone to zero thanks to SaaS. I remember the days MSFT used to ship us a new MSDN CD monthly; imagine if you had to burn 60M CDs monthly as MSFT today? Software is shipped hourly, globally, all at once to everyone now.
Result? A Cambrian explosion in SaaS Globally. Every revenue pool is fragmented across lots of players now. This is also why even at $200-300M ARR scale, network effects of brand/WOM are becoming harder to see -- there are very few to none of "no one gets fired for buying IBM" type businesses today. Public markets can't foresee a 300M ARR business going to 1B ARR as easily as they would in the past. Ergo, multiples compression across the board.
This is for SaaS & esp India-SaaS but applies more broadly as well. I’ve been investing in India-SaaS since '18 & harping abt this endlessly to anyone who’d listen. I’ll say it again: the age of “business model innovation” in SaaS is over. It’s done. What does this mean? 🧵1/20
If you don’t have a fundamental product or tech innovation at the heart of your company, you are looking at a 10yr slog ending in a $5-10M ARR plateau → a [10-20]% CAGR lifestyle biz; a sub-$50M M&A by the category leader; or a slow death to $0. What changed, you may ask? 2/20
10yrs ago, “GTM as product” still had a shot. Building a basic SaaS product was *hard*. Cloud was in relative infancy. At GCP, the 1st thing customers would ask us was ‘why should we entrust our mission critical software, infra, data to a 3rd party?” Today we laugh @ this Q. 3/20
gm! We are pumped to release v1.0 of Lightspeed's India & SEA Crypto market map spanning L1 & L2s, devtools, CeFi & DeFi, NFT & P2E gaming, DAOs, analytics & more across India+SEA. See shorturl.at/lwJQ4 for the full blog & what we are looking to invest actively behind: 🧵
Circa Nov'20 we were seeing 1-2 crypto cos/mo. Today we see 2-3 crypto cos/day! India & SEA are fast emerging global epicenters for crypto. Lightspeed has invested in 50+ crypto cos since 2013 - most of it in 2021 e.g. @FTX_Official@AaveAave@OffchainLabs@solana@PintuID & more
The opportunity set 2-3yrs ago in this region was primarily in CeFi -- e.g. @CoinDCX@CoinSwitchKuber@WazirXIndia@PintuID@indodax have scaled really well. Today we see a much broader opportunity set spanning infra, devtools, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs and Gaming - v. exciting times!
The 2010s were all about the Cloud wars. The 2020s might just be about Chain wars. Before chain maxies, there were cloud maxies. I know because I was one while @Google. We ended up in a precarious race to the pricing bottom before learning few hard lessons & innovating out of it:
In early days of a stack, innovation first concentrates & then moves up. The 1970-80s were about the processor wars. The 90-00 were about the OS wars. Early days of cloud were about basic storage, compute, networks, before moving to higher level services e.g DB-aaS.
But Fragmented lower layers can't support upstream innovation; good luck building higher-order services when the underlying infra keeps breaking apart. So, not only does innovation concentrate, lower layers also consolidate as innovation starts to move up.