Mohit Maheshwari

I really like this article. I think that the capabilities of a country are fully dependent on the local buying capacity and the size of the local economy. Whether physical or digital, the farther away you have to distribute something, the more expensive it is. Local distribution is always much easier but if local buying power is low then companies have to export which carries a bigger distribution cost because you have to compete against locals in other countries who have a much lower distribution cost. Actually it’s not just distribution: it’s everything from consumer insights to feedback to key relationships that are a distance away. So if you do innovate but you have to necessarily export that innovation to make money, you’re at a disadvantage against local players. One personal example is that India has never made high quality games simply because the local purchasing power is low. If we had a lot more PCs things would be very different. China has roughly 320 million PC gamers and India is about 39 million. So on players alone, China’s PC base is roughly 8x India’s. BUT China’s PC game spend is on the order of 80–100x India’s, even though its player base is only like 8x larger. The difference mainly is monetization as Indian gamers spend much less (core ARPU has run around $0.29/month), so 39M PC players translate into very little premium game revenue. Game Science’s art director Yang Qi confirmed that nearly 70% of Wukong’s sales came from China itself. Knowing a local buying market exists justifies spending. The only way we can justify what we are spending now on UTA is because we found inroads into global markets through content otherwise this would be a money losing exercise. The other problem is that low purchasing power economies have too tiny a market for early adopters. If you built an OpenAI in India before anyone else 50% of people wouldn’t believe you and 50% of people will tell you it won’t work or doesn’t have use cases. I think you need a crackpot high purchasing power early adopter network with high failure and bullshit tolerance to make truly innovative things and also forgive crazy companies during early mistakes because history teaches us that the best companies all had v0.1s that were not very convincing to the masses. Thats why it’s critical for anyone who wants this country to succeed to first really create more jobs, more disposable income, even if that means creating the nth packaged food brand (American grocery stores still have a much wider variety of biscuit brands than India for example) or food delivery apps before they take bigger bets. Not because they need the capital themselves to try bigger bets, but so that they can diffuse more capital into the ecosystem via jobs and the rewards of equity ownership such that that cohort of people become early adopters for other innovative companies. Success comes from satisfying local market demand (sometimes like in the case of Tesla or Ford there is hidden demand and entrepreneurs need to unlock it) and rarely comes from creating something that has no local demand. After studying Chinese social media so much I have a long thesis on why they did well (bans on global social media platforms constrain desire of products to local players only who now get revenue and profit to do RnD. Think about what % of disposable income from India is being spent on global brands where the desire to buy starts on a global social media platform). Anyway people complaining about India building “easier businesses” are really not spending the mental energy to think second order. And 9/10 times this same type of person will completely ignore local innovation that is almost always happening in parallel but gets less media coverage.

THE SELECTION MEETING IS UNDERWAY. 🇮🇳

The average Indian founder who builds something that lasts is 34 at founding. Not 22. Not fresh out of IIT. 34, with a decade of domain experience, a real professional network, and enough savings to not need a salary for 18 months. The myth of the young founder is a Valley import that has never fit India as well as the ecosystem pretends.