Get ready for Y Combinator’s first visit to India

The Indian youth is all about mobile phones and internet. Photo credit: BollywoodBubble.

Paul Graham was shocked when he first moved from Boston to Silicon Valley in 1998. “I felt like an immigrant from Eastern Europe arriving in America in 1900. Everyone was so cheerful and healthy and rich. It seemed a new and improved world,” he told Randall Stross in The Launch Pad, a book that takes you inside Y Combinator.

It makes me wonder what kind of shock India has in store for Paul’s partners at Y Combinator, Tim Brady and Adora Cheung, who will be visiting India next month. Will they see the makings of a new, improved India in its tech startup hubs?

This is Y Combinator’s first visit to India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, and its closest contender, Delhi. The visit is part of the accelerator’s 11-country tour to meet founders and gather insights from the ground. Around 30 percent of the startups in its Summer 2016 batch are from outside the US. These include three from India: co-working space Innov8, self-drive car rental startup JustRide, and ecommerce enabler Meesho.

“In the past year, some of the fastest growing companies we’ve worked with were started outside the US… We want to meet and fund the best founders, no matter where in the world they’re from,” an official blog said, announcing the global tour.

India is the only Asian country in its itinerary.

The network effect

The accelerator, whose alumni include Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit, is keen to figure out how it can be helpful to international startup communities. In India, it has picked startups targeting the domestic market so far. Its first pick was online income tax filer ClearTax, followed by payments gateway Razorpay.

YC Partners Tim and Adora will be in Delhi on 22nd September and Bangalore on 25th September.

One of the biggest benefits of finding a place in such an accelerator is the access it provides to a wide network of influential YC mentors and alumni. As ClearTax co-founder and CEO Archit Gupta recounted to Tech in Asia, it was a meeting with YC alumnus Sumon Sadhu – a Brit of Indian origin – that led to a string of iconic investors.

ClearTax investors include PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, WhatsApp business head Neeraj Arora, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, Gmail lead developer Paul Buchheit, Uber investor Scott Banister, and Airbnb investor Elad Gil. They were followed by Founders Fund Angel, one of whose general partners is Peter Thiel.

It is these connections and their advice that Archit values more than the funding they brought. “Max Levchin and his team and are some of the best fintech experts in the world,” he pointed out.

Even in terms of follow-up funding, Y Combinator is among the top three accelerators with the highest percentage of its startups going on to raise US$750,000 or more. A guest post on CB Insights by Samir Kaji, MD of First Republic Bank, says 40 percent of Y Combinator startups had follow-on rounds with a median total funding of US$3.5 million. In terms of institutional funding, 33 percent of Y Combinator startups had at least one VC firm participating in a follow-on round.

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