Of bees, flowers and why India's AI ecosystem
....is not at all inspiring.
Ever stop to watch how bees and flowers help each other?
The bee gets food, the flower spreads its seeds - it's a win-win!
Similarly, the flourishing of an ecosystem depends not just on individual actors, but on the quality of idea exchanges, i.e. conversations that facilitate their interactions.
What’s the point? What am I talking about?
Well, I am talking about India’s AI ecosystem and honestly, the lack of really high-quality AI consumer-grade products coming out of India (or even high-quality hacks or AI wrappers*).
Consider the stark contrast between Silicon Valley and India.
Silicon Valley
Lots of hackathons, lots of product demos, crazy amount of blue sky thinking, there is a visible rush (case in point: a16z’s Andressen (Marc) and Z ,i.e. Ben Horowitz are doing 1hr+ podcasts few days in a week now).
In Silicon Valley, the spotlight is on startups and developers - and importantly, students/freshers!
VCs are in the backdrop.
India?
Hackathons are whatt…oh, those hiring events, right?,
No conversations around products (eff it, we will build startups - not products).
Most AI conferences are about AI policies, “Techade” opportunities 🤣, and of course, those ministers ‘blessing’ the occasion (and sponsorship money🤑🤑).
In India, the spotlight is on VCs and traditional founders who have nothing to do with gen AI (except random commentaries like yaar, lagta hai AGI will come in 2 years).
As they say, what you sow is what you reap. While India dreams of becoming a global AI hub, our actions do not point in that direction.
Am I cribbing?
No. I helped sow the seed for SAAS revolution in India with NextBigWhat and UnPluggd conferences (pretty much the ONLY launch stage of today’s big SAAS startups like Freshdesk, Chargebee, Postman, MoEngage, WebEngage, Instamojo, Recruiterbox, Capillary etc) - but it’s disheartening that nothing much has changed, even after billions of dollars of funding and the quality of great talent we have!
What do you think needs to happen for India to really go to the next level when it comes to (global) AI products?
Who should lead the ecosystem?
PS: There are some really high quality dev conversations happening, but what I am talking about is at the ‘final’ product level.
PPS: There are some really great enterprise AI SAAS startups being built from India right now - but they are pretty much enterprise=- sales businesses and not consumer grade products.
PPPS: Of course, there are companies like Invideo, presentationsai who are building great prosumer products - but the density of such ideas area very less, as opposed to Silicon Valley.
*While it’s obvious that India’s AI startup ecosystem is anything but flourishing, a quick look at the response of a recent tweet by Kunal - will give you a decent idea as to what hackers are doing.
Have you come across any consumer AI product or wrapper selling in India and making revenues above $100K?
Looks like Indian ecosystem is closely following YC, they seem to be heavily focused on B2B SaaS and Enterprise.