In the first week of October, around Dussehra, a bunch of Indians gathered in the Bay Area. The setting had nothing to do with Dussehra, it had more to do with whether they would be spending their next Dussehra while settled in India or in the Bay Area.
iSPIRT conducted two sessions around opportunities emerging in India, spurred by new digital public goods that are going to create a Cambrian explosion of new software products.
The startup activity in India over the past few years has been noted by Silicon Valley and the attendees had a keen interest to discuss what has been happening on the ground.
There were two primary tracks to the discussion:
- how India has changed in the past decade or so and
- what factors have contributed to that radical change
The largely held view of the ecosystem among those gathered was of the 2008 – 2014 period, when the majority of them were last in India, studying or working.
The concerns raised about starting up were around ease of doing business and culture at the workplace but the consensus was that things are improving in these regards.
The keywords that came up to describe the factors causing the change in India were Jio, Modi and so on. However, the fascinating point to learn for all was about the rise of digital public goods and how they are fundamentally changing the market playground in India.
Many had heard of UPI (Unified Payment Interface) and rightfully so, credited Government for it but what awed everybody was how it came about with the effort of a bunch of volunteers believing in the idea of open-source public good and making India a ‘Product Nation’.
Everyone agreed that a new growth journey lies ahead for India, created by factors such as the rise of internet users, internet penetration with Jio, high data consumption and user education that comes along with it. However, it will get catalysed further when coupled with digital public goods.
UPI has been a success story and it crossed more than a billion transactions last month and had overtaken global volume of American Express months back! A number of successful companies like JusPay and PhonePe capitalised on UPI and similar opportunities now lie ahead with :
- Cash flow-based lending (https://pn.ispirt.in/flowbasedlending/)
- With Consent Layer of India Stack – DEPA and Account Aggregators (indiastack.org/depa)
- Health Stack (https://bit.ly/36CFqgK)
- Logistics Stack (https://digitalsky.dgca.gov.in/)
We dived into specifics of all these to discuss myriad product opportunities that will emerge, enabling new success stories.
This will further be enabled by :
- Talent that is more agile and honed to operate in an ambiguous startup environment. This has turned around in the past few years, while a lot of talent was tuned to work in a corporate environment earlier.
- More access to seed capital as more startup operatives have gained wealth and experience in the past few years
- And parents are more supportive of the idea to join a startup or start one!
Capitalising on all these would need a new entrepreneur archetype that operates from first principles thinking to dig deep in the market and create viable products and business models taking advantage of unique local factors.
Volunteering with iSPIRT can act as a good channel to understand the market better, to get involved with understanding and building digital public goods that are shaping the times ahead in the country.
It’s the forum to engage with peers that help you learn more about yourself, discover your flow that brings joy and contribute towards a public good.
One attendee summed up the takeaway beautifully –
“In the US, I have created a professional career and learnt lessons by building on top of platforms in the West. Now, there are similar opportunities to build on top of platforms and participate in Indian playground. If I get to become an iSPIRT volunteer, I can not only build on top but also help build the very platforms that are driving India forward.
In my own backyard, I have the local know-how to build for India and should act on it, instead of watching Chinese and Western apps put their stake from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.”
To know more about emerging public goods, iSPIRT Foundation and know our volunteering model, check out www.ispirt.in and write to [email protected]
We would like to thank Jaspreet from Druva, Anand Subbarayan from Lyft for hosting us, Hemant Mohapatra from Lightspeed Partners for helping with the setup and our local volunteer Pranav Deshpande.