The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself going to Cypherpunk meetups in 1992
Diving into the e-mail forum that started the crypto movement
The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself trying to start a company in an industry that hasn't changed in 5 decades
American Dynamism represents the urgency for builders to revitalize sleeping incumbents.
The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself building an open launchpad for new visionaries
Web3 Product: Launchcaster. Category: Product Discovery. Analogy: App Store Connect
On The Bigger Picture, I use the history of tech to explain emerging web3 trends.
The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself going to Cypherpunk meetups in 1992
Diving into the e-mail forum that started the crypto movement
The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself trying to start a company in an industry that hasn't changed in 5 decades
American Dynamism represents the urgency for builders to revitalize sleeping incumbents.
The Bigger Picture by Yash BoraPicture yourself building an open launchpad for new visionaries
Web3 Product: Launchcaster. Category: Product Discovery. Analogy: App Store Connect
On The Bigger Picture, I use the history of tech to explain emerging web3 trends.
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I finally got around to doing some introductory research on the Indian tech scene. As a start, I went through all the essays posted by Sequoia India in the last year.
The key takeaway is that up until recently, India was just building for themselves and trying to catch up.
However, now they're thinking about their customers as the global market. Indian founders are hungry and they're operating at the pace and scale that's no less than American & European builders.
Why should you care?
It's looking like India is going to overtake Japan & Germany to be the world's third largest economy by 2030. Additionally, earlier this year, India surpassed China in population. And the US & Indian governments have been only getting closer to take on a growing China.
People living in the US & Europe tend to forget that there's a whole new wave of development happening in the east that's catching up in scale & pace to western innovation.
Those who ignore the Indian tech scene will be operating with an incomplete mental model of progress and innovation.
Sections Below:
India won't disappoint
Shifting from domestic to global
Started with SaaS, headed towards Deep Tech
The reverse migration
Let's dive in 🚀
If you're on tech twitter, you've probably seen one of Balaji Srinivasan's bull posts on the Indian tech scene. Balaji is one of the strongest proponents of Indian founders and has provided countless arguments for why people in the west should be paying attention.
But last weekend, something really crazy happened: PM Modi QT a post by Balaji discussing how it's +EV to invest in India.
For the past few years, as an Indian American, I've been liking Balaji's posts and have had second hand excitement about cities like Bangalore & Singapore. But the truth is, I can't tell you a thing about what's actually happening there. All I know is the basics - Ola, Zomato, Oyo, etc.
On a recent Farcaster AMA, I asked Balaji how I could get more involved as someone who wants to learn more and his response was to just go there and check it out for myself.
I think first step is to just travel to India and see how much Bangalore and the like are improving. You’ll be able to answer the other questions for yourself after that.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that in the next few months, but his response did get me excited enough to at least start learning the basics.
To kick my research in the Indian tech scene off, I decided to keep it simple. I went through Peak XV's website (aka Sequoia India) and read through all the blog posts from the last year.
Here's what I learned.
Back in June, after 50 years of investing, Sequoia Capital finally hit the point where they had to break up the empire.
The result was: Sequoia (US), HongShan (China), & Peak XV (India & SE Asia).
The name Peak XV is actually what Mount Everest was initially called.
Shailendra(managing director) has a beautiful post about the parallels of climbing a mountain and starting a company.
The workplace may seem a world away from Everest Base Camp but there's much that trekking teaches one about life and work. Step by step, breath by breath - Peak XV's Mohit Bhatnagar lists the lessons learned from the Himalayas.
Some stats on Peak XV
In total have raised $9.2 billion across 13 funds
Invested in over 400 startups
Have had 50 companies cross $1 billion USD
19 IPOs & M&As
$4.5 billion USD in exits
11 managing directors, average tenure is 12 years
Currently, the firm has ~$2.5 billion USD of uninvested capital
The key takeaway from my research is that Indian founders are now thinking globally.
Up until recently, they were building for India and playing the catch up game. Now, from day 1, Indian founders are thinking of how they can scale globally.
In the past 15 years, it's been India's exceptional developers that helped build the foundation of the tech scene.
It's the SaaS companies that brought the Silicon Valley startup culture to Bangalore.
GitHub predicts the # of Indian devs will match American devs by 2025.
Now, founders are bringing this startup spirit to other verticals - most notably deep tech & D2C.
The Indian gov has made one thing clear: as the economy grows, it's essential the country is self-reliant.
Most importantly, India must invest in the semiconductor space.
In order to do this, India is betting big on RISC-V.
Simply put, RISC-V is an open source instruction set built by Berkeley that can be used in chip development.
Up until now, companies had to pay ARM for expensive licenses. RISC-V helps democratize chip development.
What India already has when it comes to semi-conductors: the talent.
I was shocked to find out that 20% of chip engineers in the world are of Indian origin!
Many of them have been trained by IIT Madras legend Professor V. Kamakoti. Check out 'Project Shakti' to learn more.
Some Deep tech company examples:
Digantara is building a google maps for space on steroids
Metastable is working on chemical free recycling of lithium batteries.
Mindgrove Technologies is building system on chips (SoCs) which are customized for specific verticals
DTC
On the D2C side, Indians are realizing they don't just have to buy foreign products, they can sell internationally as well.
In 2022, exports by Indian brands on Amazon crossed $2 billion, with most of those sales coming from the US.
e-commerce is a no brainer now.
AI
In the AI vertical, naturally there are a lot of new ideas being built especially since the launch of ChatGPT.
But one thing I wanted to call out is how the founder of gan.ai, Suvrat, moved back from the US to India when he was started the company in 2021.
Before, most stories would be of people heading out to America to start a company. It was pretty crazy to see a founder go the other route. Seems like a growing Bangalore tech scene, covid, and work from home really changed things up.
Crypto & Cybersecurity
On the crypto side, Polygon Labs is easily Peak XV's MVP. Another notable investment is in Stepn (the walk to earn app).
Other than that, it seems like the team is focused on the gaming & media side - Ethlas, Fancraze, Metasky, etc.
The last point I wanted to mention is Peak XV's focus on cloud based security & monitoring.
They have an article called "The evolution of observability" which goes in depth on how they're actively looking for the "next Datadog".
Hopefully you found this deep dive helpful and it gave you a quick glimpse on what's top of mind for Peak XV investors.
Note: this was an into post and represents 1 firm and its thesis, not the entire Indian tech scene.
If you enjoyed, please share, collect, & subscribe!
I finally got around to doing some introductory research on the Indian tech scene. As a start, I went through all the essays posted by Sequoia India in the last year.
The key takeaway is that up until recently, India was just building for themselves and trying to catch up.
However, now they're thinking about their customers as the global market. Indian founders are hungry and they're operating at the pace and scale that's no less than American & European builders.
Why should you care?
It's looking like India is going to overtake Japan & Germany to be the world's third largest economy by 2030. Additionally, earlier this year, India surpassed China in population. And the US & Indian governments have been only getting closer to take on a growing China.
People living in the US & Europe tend to forget that there's a whole new wave of development happening in the east that's catching up in scale & pace to western innovation.
Those who ignore the Indian tech scene will be operating with an incomplete mental model of progress and innovation.
Sections Below:
India won't disappoint
Shifting from domestic to global
Started with SaaS, headed towards Deep Tech
The reverse migration
Let's dive in 🚀
If you're on tech twitter, you've probably seen one of Balaji Srinivasan's bull posts on the Indian tech scene. Balaji is one of the strongest proponents of Indian founders and has provided countless arguments for why people in the west should be paying attention.
But last weekend, something really crazy happened: PM Modi QT a post by Balaji discussing how it's +EV to invest in India.
For the past few years, as an Indian American, I've been liking Balaji's posts and have had second hand excitement about cities like Bangalore & Singapore. But the truth is, I can't tell you a thing about what's actually happening there. All I know is the basics - Ola, Zomato, Oyo, etc.
On a recent Farcaster AMA, I asked Balaji how I could get more involved as someone who wants to learn more and his response was to just go there and check it out for myself.
I think first step is to just travel to India and see how much Bangalore and the like are improving. You’ll be able to answer the other questions for yourself after that.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that in the next few months, but his response did get me excited enough to at least start learning the basics.
To kick my research in the Indian tech scene off, I decided to keep it simple. I went through Peak XV's website (aka Sequoia India) and read through all the blog posts from the last year.
Here's what I learned.
Back in June, after 50 years of investing, Sequoia Capital finally hit the point where they had to break up the empire.
The result was: Sequoia (US), HongShan (China), & Peak XV (India & SE Asia).
The name Peak XV is actually what Mount Everest was initially called.
Shailendra(managing director) has a beautiful post about the parallels of climbing a mountain and starting a company.
The workplace may seem a world away from Everest Base Camp but there's much that trekking teaches one about life and work. Step by step, breath by breath - Peak XV's Mohit Bhatnagar lists the lessons learned from the Himalayas.
Some stats on Peak XV
In total have raised $9.2 billion across 13 funds
Invested in over 400 startups
Have had 50 companies cross $1 billion USD
19 IPOs & M&As
$4.5 billion USD in exits
11 managing directors, average tenure is 12 years
Currently, the firm has ~$2.5 billion USD of uninvested capital
The key takeaway from my research is that Indian founders are now thinking globally.
Up until recently, they were building for India and playing the catch up game. Now, from day 1, Indian founders are thinking of how they can scale globally.
In the past 15 years, it's been India's exceptional developers that helped build the foundation of the tech scene.
It's the SaaS companies that brought the Silicon Valley startup culture to Bangalore.
GitHub predicts the # of Indian devs will match American devs by 2025.
Now, founders are bringing this startup spirit to other verticals - most notably deep tech & D2C.
The Indian gov has made one thing clear: as the economy grows, it's essential the country is self-reliant.
Most importantly, India must invest in the semiconductor space.
In order to do this, India is betting big on RISC-V.
Simply put, RISC-V is an open source instruction set built by Berkeley that can be used in chip development.
Up until now, companies had to pay ARM for expensive licenses. RISC-V helps democratize chip development.
What India already has when it comes to semi-conductors: the talent.
I was shocked to find out that 20% of chip engineers in the world are of Indian origin!
Many of them have been trained by IIT Madras legend Professor V. Kamakoti. Check out 'Project Shakti' to learn more.
Some Deep tech company examples:
Digantara is building a google maps for space on steroids
Metastable is working on chemical free recycling of lithium batteries.
Mindgrove Technologies is building system on chips (SoCs) which are customized for specific verticals
DTC
On the D2C side, Indians are realizing they don't just have to buy foreign products, they can sell internationally as well.
In 2022, exports by Indian brands on Amazon crossed $2 billion, with most of those sales coming from the US.
e-commerce is a no brainer now.
AI
In the AI vertical, naturally there are a lot of new ideas being built especially since the launch of ChatGPT.
But one thing I wanted to call out is how the founder of gan.ai, Suvrat, moved back from the US to India when he was started the company in 2021.
Before, most stories would be of people heading out to America to start a company. It was pretty crazy to see a founder go the other route. Seems like a growing Bangalore tech scene, covid, and work from home really changed things up.
Crypto & Cybersecurity
On the crypto side, Polygon Labs is easily Peak XV's MVP. Another notable investment is in Stepn (the walk to earn app).
Other than that, it seems like the team is focused on the gaming & media side - Ethlas, Fancraze, Metasky, etc.
The last point I wanted to mention is Peak XV's focus on cloud based security & monitoring.
They have an article called "The evolution of observability" which goes in depth on how they're actively looking for the "next Datadog".
Hopefully you found this deep dive helpful and it gave you a quick glimpse on what's top of mind for Peak XV investors.
Note: this was an into post and represents 1 firm and its thesis, not the entire Indian tech scene.
If you enjoyed, please share, collect, & subscribe!
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