Why Has India Failed To Produce Tech Giants Like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter?

This question originally appeared on Quora. The answers that follow were provided by users Joydeep Sen Sarma and Aashish Gupta respectively.

Joydeep Sen Sarma, engineer

There are a lot of reasons for this. I will try to do this in decreasing order of intractability (and focus mostly on the environment in India):

1. The Indian education system is hostile to outliers. As an example – a teen who just loves to spends all his time programming (and can’t stand anything else like social sciences/arts/literature) can have a very bright future (assuming he has talent) in the US – and has none in India. The system in India will give him/her poor grades, teachers/parents/friends would destroy him emotionally. Forget about doing well – such a person would do very badly in India – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up as a wreck.

Just to back this up – in all my years of interacting with multiple adjacent batches of IITians (and alumni of other Indian schools) – there is but one true outlier that I have seen who ever made it through the system.

To state the point a different way, what we consider top Indian talent (grads from IITs etc. – going to top schools or employers in US) is almost systematically biased (because of how they were chosen) to not be tech geniuses of the types that start large iconic tech companies.

2. The Indian technology market – whether it’s consumer or business – is not leading edge. This makes it very difficult for young local entrepreneurs to make a breakthrough. (After all almost all new tech giants emerge from new markets/technology trends.)

This is no less important than the previous point. By the time entrepreneurs in India latch on to something, they are both playing catch up and – even worse – competing with a lot of other people who have caught on as well. The fact that there’s very little about the Indian market that doesn’t make Western tech products (like Facebook/Apple) portable – doesn’t help.

Starting a B2B tech business in India is the hardest. The market for any leading edge business product is almost entirely in the West.

3. Indian venture capital markets are way behind American counterparts in terms of funding risky, pathbreaking ventures. The differences are apparent in valuation, in early focus on cost/revenues and in (predominantly) funding of copycat concepts from the West.

This point is not fundamental, and these things can change. Examples of breathtaking success can change the risk premium for example.

4. Startup and Engineering Culture in India is nowhere close to that in places like Bay Area:

• Engineers don’t remain engineers for long. Very soon they become hands off managers and architects. As a result, expert level hands on engineers – particularly those with both depth and breadth – are much harder to find.
• In my personal experience, intensity at Indian startups is lower. The urgency, the sense of do-or-die, is much lower.
• The few truly great hands-on experts prefer to stick to top employers like Google/Microsoft etc. and are rarely to be found sticking it out in a startup garage.
• Equity compensation is often drastically lower in Indian startups (especially for engineers). There seem to be a raft of reasons for this, but regardless, this makes the previous three points pretty logical. It’s a vicious cycle.
• Mentorship – there’s no Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel here to mentor the local Zuck. The people who made it big in India in tech (on the backs of the consulting industry) are unlikely to be the right mentor for the next Twitter/Facebook/Apple. Less dramatically, the lack of top class engineers who have spent 10+ years programming just means there’s less mentorship for the younger ones [1].

Again this point, overall is not fundamental – these things can all change with time. But these cycles are very hard to break and will take a long long time (if ever) to do so.