it is extra-ordinarily inexpensive to start a startup in India - what it requires is seed funding - most of the time VCs don't fit the bill - funding from firms like Y-Combinator / Union Square venture will be more viable and profitable.
Right now copycats are more visible but with some effort and due diligence indian startups will take a center-stage in next five years.... with couple of hundred thousand dollars you can build world class teams working on multiple products, services and technologies. Its a red-hot market for angels and seed-funding cos.
Generation or two? How about right now? What about all the mobile payment (MChek, Paymate) companies? Something like WiMAX is def going to be bigger in India...Dating services?
Things are already starting to diverge...it's on a smaller scale right now but it's definitely visible
What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.
This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn't work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.
The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It's significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.
However, for better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few decades speak a single language. When I was a student in Italy in 1990, few Italians spoke English. Now all educated people seem to be expected to-- and Europeans do not like to seem uneducated. This is presumably a taboo subject, but if present trends continue, French and German will eventually go the way of Irish and Luxembourgish: they'll be spoken in homes and by eccentric nationalists.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadRight now copycats are more visible but with some effort and due diligence indian startups will take a center-stage in next five years.... with couple of hundred thousand dollars you can build world class teams working on multiple products, services and technologies. Its a red-hot market for angels and seed-funding cos.
Somehow I don't buy that
And just in the web space, how about Zoho and SlideShare?
Things are already starting to diverge...it's on a smaller scale right now but it's definitely visible
8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.
This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn't work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.
The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It's significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.
However, for better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few decades speak a single language. When I was a student in Italy in 1990, few Italians spoke English. Now all educated people seem to be expected to-- and Europeans do not like to seem uneducated. This is presumably a taboo subject, but if present trends continue, French and German will eventually go the way of Irish and Luxembourgish: they'll be spoken in homes and by eccentric nationalists.
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html