The Google of mobiles WILL COME FROM INDIA

Over the past decade, Google has been every entrepreneur’s benchmark for success through innovation. Besides its founding duo, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, there were a handful who saw the internet search engine’s potential and backed it when it was still being run from a garage. And here’s the Indian connection. Ram Shriram, who went to school in Chennai and later migrated to the Silicon Valley, was one of the pillars that built Google. Ram Shriram considers himself a guide for entrepreneurs rather than a mere cheque-writing angel investor. Known as the ‘Sherpa from Palo Alto’, he runs Sherpalo Ventures and also serves as the founder director at Google Inc. He spoke with Ritwik Donde in a freewheeling chat about entrepreneurship, technology, India and of course, Google.


Fundamentally two biggest applications on the internet are search and email. And there was a quantum order of magnitude improvement in quality of search at that time that Google presented that resonated with me and resonated with its early users. That is what prompted my interest in it. Agreed that we did not have a business model or a revenue model figured out at that point but you have to start somewhere small for you to grow later. And if u do that piece really really well then you may have a future as big as Google.
So was it their luck that they found an investor like you?
No, I would not call it luck. Not for me not for them. In my case, I do not think lightening strikes three times as it did for me. I had done Netscape and Amazon before I did Google. And then there have been more successes like Stumbleupon and mint which is a financial services portal aggregating personal financial information. Google is the most prominent one in my portfolio but it certainly was not just luck.
You have seen Google grow like no other dotcom in the internet space. Do you see another Google, may be, in India as entrepreneurship is on a high here?
Frankly speaking. No. Not in the internet space at least. The challenge in India to create another Google is not that somebody can not build a big internet company, I mean look at Naukri, it is a pure-play dotcom company. The market is limited by the size of the internet population which is somewhere between 30 and 40 million and unfortunately it is staying somewhat stuck at that level because we have a last mile problem. We don’t have an Digital Millennium Copyright Act equivalent law or a spectrum policy that opens up broadband spectrum. I have had conversations with the policy makers and unfortunately the pace at which it is moving is slower than I like. It is important for Indian dotcom space as the trickle down economics of having more Internet access is that it could generate more jobs, generate a great deal more new companies that can be bigger companies than Google. It not that the entreprenuership spirit is low so India is not getting a Google out, they can do it. Wipro and Infosys have shown that there can big companies build around outsourcing so Indian entrepreneurs can easily do it on the Internet.
Ok. So, what you are saying is if America’s Google was in the Internet space, India’s could be in some other?
Yes. Looking at the amount of innovation happening in India. I think there is a Google waiting to happen in the mobile space. I see somebody like Google coming about every 10 years. In the 80s it was Microsoft, in the 90s it was Cisco and Google in the period up to 2010 and there may be a garage start-up right now in some part of India in the mobile space that would set the tone for the coming decade. Lots of interesting content companies coming about as there are confluence of cellphones and entertainment content. The big success will happen on mobile and it would happen on mobile because the mobile market is growing by 8-10 million users a month and most importantly almost all users are attuned to the use of the technology on offer when you say mobile like it is with Internet in countries like the US.
But is there enough spark then in the Indian space for bigger companies to come out?
Absolutely. There is spark. We are in the age of entreprenuership in India. There are good market spaces to nurture businesses. But the Internet user base has to go up from 30 million to 100 million for any dotcom company to scale up like Google or may be also an Yahoo.
If any entrepreneur has to take lessons from Google, what would those be?
It’s not just about having a good idea and a vision. But it’s more about great execution as successes come with great execution. So what does great execution mean? Hiring great people, building right partnerships and more importantly than doing the right things success for a start-up, it is in figuring out the things not to do. This keeps you focused and finally making sure that you make the right choices in terms of capital i.e. making sure the right kind of people invest in you..
If you look at the dotcom players in India, there are a lot of ‘Me Too’s. For every Yaari.com , you have a Facebook. Comment.
I don’t think that you can make the characterisation that they are all ‘me too’s in the Indian market. What happens is that there are only so many market segments in the dotcom space, so you can only build companies in the market segments available to you. When you talk about segments like search, emails, social networking, since there are global giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook. So the chances for scaling your own ‘me too’ here are far and few. But if you take something like jobs or travel, those are areas that need to be targeted more. Yes there is an Expedia for a Cleartrip, but those are not successful in India because they have not focused on India as a market. So just because a company exists in that space does not mean that you cannot build a success in the same space. Look at China, it has a company in each of these spaces where US dotcoms are dominant. There is 51jobs.com, then there is qqq for messaging. That proves that there can be a successes where the US already has a success. Having said this, there are growth areas like these but these areas have been invested in quite heavily. There are 6-8 companies invested in the same sector and there are all not going to be successes. I think there will be a shake out in terms of successes from the next set of venture backed companies. Nobody in India starting a web venture would die for lack of funding. There is a good angel network here as well. The law of averages however would now start to apply in the dotcom industry and only a small number would actually succeed. But this phase is still 2 years away.
A lot has been said these days about the US slowdown. Do you think the US recession affect the Indian start-ups?
I think the recession will affect the tech spendings. It hasn’t yet affected any start-ups and it won’t affect the start ups because unlike the 1999-2000 period it wasn’t the tech bubble that has caused the decline in the markets but a set of financial issues. Recessions are when great companies are built. If you look way back at Microsoft, Google, these were companies that were essentially born at the depths of the downturn because that is a great time to hire people and it is a time when valuations come back down to normal levels. It is, however, affecting the private equity companies and in turn the fund flow to Indian companies.