1947 Tech 🇮🇳: 77

Once a week newsletter: Insights on Tech, markets, startups, venture capital, and foreign investments in India

1. Gurgaon vs Bangalore: Capital Leader

If you are looking to expand to India or if you are a founder looking to start a startup and don’t know where to launch.

This is a must-read article.

Gurgaon vs Bangalore 

• If technology is your differentiator, choose Bangalore

• If staying close to your market is important, choose Gurgaon. 

• Gurgaon is the biggest consumption market in the country. Residents are early adopters of new trends and are willing to pay more for a better experience or trying out new concepts.

• R&D centers of large and global companies are based in Bangalore

• Sales and Marketing teams are based in Gurgaon

• Bangalore is for Deep tech and B2B sectors 

• Gurgaon is for Consumer product and consumer service sectors

• It is hard to retain talent in Bangalore. 

• Comparatively easier to retain talent in Gurgaon. This doesn’t mean Gurgaon doesn’t have good tech talent.

• 2x-2.5x more startups in Bangalore than in Gurgaon

Capital Leader

2. Payments & food delivery apps launch games to increase users

Payment apps and food delivery platforms are launching games to increase user base and stickiness, with the ongoing cricket World Cup one such event where many Indian startups are utilizing to ratchet up the number of subscribers.

In-app games, such as Zomato Cricket Cup, Swiggy Match Day Mania, Paytm Games and Tez Shots by Google Pay, are just a few examples.

Paytm is offering a fantasy cricket game, First Captains, this World Cup which has seen more than 60% of users play the game daily.

Paytm has found that more than 70% of its users play these games daily.

Payments & food delivery apps launch games to increase users

3. India is doubling down on EV 

India has lost out in the solar power generation & mobile/smartphone industry previously.

But hey, it is doing everything possible to secure a position in the sunrise industry of battery storage & electric mobility.

Emerging whitespace industry in India — Manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, charging stations, smart cars, and electric vehicles. 

This past week, Indian government & policymakers took the following initiatives:

Govt eyes strict emission rules to boost EVs

Govt wants petrol stations to charge your e-vehicle

And startups in India are taking note.

Flipkart is moving its last-mile delivery fleet to electric vehicles

Ola Electric Mobility raises $250M from SoftBank at $1B valuation

4. How does India compare to SV hot-bed of enterprise innovation?

Excellent tweetstorm by Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India!

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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 👇:

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

1/n First, some market truths - more and more unicorns are now found outside of the US. Primary reason: internet penetration.

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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?

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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.

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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.

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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.

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

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

Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant

8/n And now India is very SaaS focused, built and delivered on the cloud, and not just that, our enterprise solutions have...

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A week in review 

Thank you for reading. Please share any feedback, questions or comments with me on Twitter :)