I am thinking of writing a book on my experience. Many employees have taken time off for “death of a grandparent” more than 10 times in the same year. If it weren’t this costly, it would be downright funny.

Not only is infrastructure bad, it appears to be getting worse. I have not seen any meaningful improvement in Bangalore or Bumbai, two cities I visit often. I am pushing to close Indian operations completely. A few million $ down the drain, I don’t think we have anything to show for it.

Why doesn’t MSM (Main Stream Media) cover any of this?

And..what makes you an authentic source for predictions like this asshole? You are a fucking failure yourself and laid-off ass.

flavor of the month, of the year, of the decade, but soooooooooooooo much work to be done. not helped by complacency.

Deadlines do not exist. They come and leave and are least bothered about the upcoming deadline. “I have my daughter waiting for me. ” Pressurize a bit and do not be surprised that he is absorbed by your competitor.

Be happy if you get notice period of one week. Multiply 10x if you are running a BPO.

I have dabbled as an Angel investor in India having built and sold a company in the Valley a little over 10 yrs back. I now split my time in India and in the Valley.

Within the limitations that come with every generalization – I have the following experience on this issue. Indians are good, fun people. But Indian college students are anything but creative. And creativity is the one thing you need for a venture bet that produces the next big thing. Please, I am not trying to flame people, and as I said, generalizations have their limitations. But within that, I believe the above to be true.

The one thing Indian youth had going for them a decade back was work ethic. That has taken a trashing in the last decade. The following anecdote captures this reality. On my desk is teh resume of an engineer who is 6 years out of college. This young man has worked for 5 different companies. Two companies I had backed – one in Baglaore and the other in Pune – couldn’t get a thing done with the revolving door nature of the workforce. They folded India operations and moved to the US. When all is said and done, I don’t think India operations offer any cost advantage. The downside is an amateur workforce.

One CEO told me that in interviews all Indian engineers “want to work on latest technology so they are constly learning new things.” Most often cited reason for leaving a company is “I didn’t have opportunity to learn and grow.” While that sounds like a commendable outlook, there is a way to abuse that notion and I think that’s what is happening. Three months on the same technology and our bright engineer gets bored and some fool across the street offers to double his salary, so he leaves.

Lastly, quality of work is pathetic. Sorry, there is no other word for it. Indians who have never left the shores just do NOT know Web design or any design for that matter. There would be value if the US-trained expert could quickly train these people and then build something. But you guessed it, the moment this person feels he is trained, he quits. The entrepreneur is constantly spinning their wheels.

Call it Wild West, call it Chaos. Fact is the only ingredient of interest is the large consumer base. While that is reasons to build businesses in India, it’s not the raw material for entrepreneurship.

The overall PE market in India is flooded with capital currently, I would be looking at these sort of VC opportunities IF I could get the allocation!!

http://www.indiashines.com

India will soon be the center of attraction for mobile related products. There is massive depth in the market. We add 8 million new mobile users every month, higher than the total users in many saturated markets. A projected 600 million users by 2011! Indian telcos will be MNCs cos they know how to operate in ARPUs as low as $7/month.

Mobile phones will be the first device offering internet experience to millions of people in India. I think we missed the broadband wave & jumped directly into the mobile one!

As for doing business in India, its one big country with 25 odd states & by normal standards (language, area, culture etc) should have been 25 different countries! But still its one & thats the charm of it. It would be hard for an MNC to setup shop & hope to understand Indian audience that easily unless with an Indian partner.

If you look at the SMS social networking space there are a number of them already. SMSGupShup, a service similar to Twitter with over seven million users is huge and many other examples can already be cited. But which ones of these will be able to scale out of their niche on to the global stage is the question.

KB

http://www.indi...ndian-startups/

Someone (VCs/Angels) needs to take a risk while being patient and provide grooming to the budding enterpreneurs and transforming their raw idea into successful business.

Take 10 cool ideas (6 established business models, 4 new ones), invest $250K each and see what happens. Even if one clicks, you have made the money.

I think there is a lot has stifled some creativity in India and I will be excited to see these shackles shed and true entrepreneurialism take root.

Here’s my takeaway from India:
1) Extremely intelligent culture.
2) Work ethic much greater than many other cultures I’ve done business with.
3) Loyalty is pathetic. Perhaps because it’s the wild west days for India.
4) Due to such chaos in the market there are many con men. (true in every market but India is something else).

Best way to make returns in India is for private equity investing into infrastructure.

btw- the dollar no longer goes that far in India. As a matter of fact many of the Indian outsourcing companies rather get paid in Euros and engineering costs are WAY UP.