venturing.in

  • Challenging Silicon Valley’s Innovation Hegemony

    For several decades, Silicon Valley has had a near-monopoly on innovation. The Valley emerged out of America’s deep commitment to higher education and scientific research, combined with the American will to maintain leadership in defence technology. Through the second half of the 20th century, China was disastrously experimenting with Maoism, India was embracing Socialism, a fragmented Europe was rebuilding after the Second World War and the other superpower, Soviet Russia, was persisting with its Communist economic model. The Americans invested public and private capital in fundamental research and development, allowing private enterprise to drive economic growth and entrepreneurial small businesses to commercialize publicly-funded scientific research. America invented the venture capital model to commercialize such research.

    It stood out as an oasis in a world where central planning and a state control of the economy was the norm. Owing to a liberal immigration policy, it became a magnet for talent from around the world. Scores of scientists migrated from Europe to America in the throes of the Second World War, including titans like Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein. Nobel laureates Hargobind Khorana and Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, both of whom completed their college education in India, also made America their home.

    The migration of talent from other parts of the world to America continued through the 1960s and 1970s, with the best talent from China and India making the move, thanks to the economic havoc caused by the destructive ideas of Chairman Mao and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

    In this way, America managed to consolidate the world’s best scientific talent. It then gave them a platform and funding to invent and create. The scientists and engineers who went to America might not all have founded technology companies, but through their work at private research labs, government research institutions, universities and startups, laid the foundations for America’s technological prowess that underpins its military and economic might to this day.

    It is important to recognize that this was a historical aberration and cannot be sustained by design — America positioned itself to benefit from the poor choices that the rest of the world made. A reversion to the mean is underway, and the tide has started turning over the last two decades. Besides increased economic and financial integration worldwide permitting capital flows on a global scale, economic reforms catalyzing sustained growth in Asia and the creation of a common market in Europe have fostered economic blocks that can compete with America.

    Sector after sector has become more globalized. Venture capital investing, long the exclusive preserve of a clutch of firms on Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road and till recently heavily concentrated in the United States, is now unmistakably global. Risk capital flows to places that have talented people pursuing breakthrough business ideas — and sustained global growth over the last two decades has set the stage for a need for technological innovation across economies and geographies. The rise of the Asian consumer is creating opportunities for innovation in all kinds of consumer products. Transplanting ideas from elsewhere doesn’t always cut it with the taste and sensibility of consumers in Asian countries. With increasing consumption, there is a glaring need for efficiency in resource utilization and energy use.

    Challenging economic conditions combined with more stringent immigration policies in developed nations have made it appealing for accomplished scientists and engineers from developing nations to return home, where in many cases there is stronger economic growth alongside a new focus on nurturing and financing science and technology. This has set the stage for venture capital investing in emerging markets.

    America has a long lead, but the rest of the world is catching up. It will continue to maintain primacy in Internet innovation in particular because of the spending capacity of the American consumer. The Internet is a platform for consumption, be it consuming information which allows for digital advertising to flourish or purchasing products through Internet-based retailers. America’s consumption power allows it be the breeding ground for global Internet giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, and it will dominate in web innovation as long as the American consumer has clout.

    New York-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently wrote about how the Valley’s dominance could be upended if there was a new wave of technological disruption, far separated from the computing and Internet industry on which the Valley has been built. Wilson said that should Silicon Valley miss such a new wave, it could look like Detroit in a few decades.

    Just as a consumer-centric economy allows it to dominate Internet innovation, it also creates an insulation from innovation in non-consumer industries. The world has become a dramatically different place in the last few decades, and such innovations that define the next wave of technological disruption can come from any nation that has a sufficiently large pool of talented people working to solve the big challenges in energy, health care, clean technology and other sectors. That would weaken Silicon Valley’s grip on driving innovation — and further undermine America’s standing as a global power.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/1omJBAj

  • Economic Development As Foreign Policy

    In this piece, Harsh and I write about the importance of economic strength in the foreign policy arena:

    Military strength, despite its great importance, offers diminishing marginal returns. Possibilities of asymmetric power projections preclude any simplistic linear comparison of military resources. This is especially true for those who have crossed the nuclear rubicon – notice how India and China have astutely said “No, thank you” to matching America or Russia when it comes to the size of their nuclear arsenals. When a weapon is so massively destructive, there is no real difference between having a hundred or having ten thousand. Moreover, economic strength and military prowess are inter-linked – the proceeds of economic growth when invested in creating military technology can generate a mutually reinforcing cycle of innovation, productivity gains and military strength.

    More here.

  • Reason and Freedom

    The relationship between reason and freedom is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

    – Ayn Rand

  • Intuition

    The most important things in life, whether they’re personal or professional, are decided on intuition.

    – Tim Cook

  • Reality

  • Never confuse motion with action.

    Benjamin Franklin

  • Derivatives For Farmer Welfare

    Harsh and I have co-authored a piece on using financial derivatives for replacing the minimum support price (MSP) system for farmer welfare:

    With reduced risk thanks to commodity options, there will also be less of a need to keep crop inventories as buffer stocks. Farmers will be able to increase their incomes rather than forcefully smoothing production for consumption. Moreover, by not coercing farmers to sub-optimally diversify into different crops and different plots, agricultural productivity would increase and more land could be reforested, providing significant cumulative environmental benefits.

    More here.

  • India’s Rapidly Evolving Technology Landscape

    Most investors who have put capital behind consumer internet startups trying to build commoditised businesses will lose money.

    India’s technology landscape can be characterized as having seen three waves of evolution and growth. The first wave was led by the likes of Tata Consultancy Services, Patni Computer Systems, Infosys and Wipro, who pioneered the outsourcing model based on labour cost arbitrage. These were firms founded in pre-liberalization India and took decades to establish themselves as global brands. The second wave occurred in post-liberalization India of the 1990s, when several IT firms adopted similar business models to the outsourcing pioneers. The small- and mid-sized enterprises that emerged during this period strengthened the foundation of India’s nascent software services industry and today form the backbone of that thriving sector. The third wave can be said to have begun with the advent of the Internet – startups such as Naukri.com, MakeMyTrip.com, InMobi and Flipkart.com who have emerged as category leaders in providing web services.

    The common thread to the three waves has been the domination of the services-oriented software and Internet companies, and in recent years, the preponderance of ideas that have worked in the West that were repackaged to suit the Indian context. The fact is India has seen more imitation than genuine product innovation.

    India’s technology industry has been dominated by IT and Internet firms, and venture capital investment figures for recent years bear out this trend. Since 2009, VCs have poured over $810 million into 113 deals in the software, mobile and Internet sectors. In contrast, early-stage health care and clean technology companies have received $292 million across 71 deals. It’s also interesting that average deal sizes are larger for early-stage companies in software and Internet than for health care and clean technology – one would have thought that the former is less capital intensive than the latter, and would hence require lesser capital to grow at the early-stage. By some estimates, India’s software and Internet ventures have been raising larger amounts of early-stage venture funding than American clean technology startups.

    The data points to a clear mismatch both in terms of funding size and sectoral capital allocation. My hunch is that most investors who have put capital behind consumer Internet startups trying to build commoditized businesses will lose money. Most of these ventures are pursuing unsustainable business models. As if having imitators of American Internet startups wasn’t enough, we’ve seen imitators of Indian imitators of US Internet startups successfully raise funding. These ventures have almost no pricing power and hence almost no profitability. A fund raising arms race is under way, and the vast majority of startups will lose out as capital providers cluster around the top 1 or 2 category leaders.

    In a more rational world, India’s VCs would bring together some of the outstanding engineers and scientists working at corporate research laboratories operated by Fortune 500 giants like General Electric, who are conducting key R&D work that is in many cases indispensable to the parent company. VCs should be willing to back stellar teams pursuing big ideas, and should invest capital in ways that harnesses the economics of outsourcing to deliver path-breaking innovation.

    The data also tells us that more India-focused venture funds will be forced to look in places other than the tried and familiar Internet and IT sectors. Health care, clean technology and energy are mammoth markets that are relatively underserved and in dire need of early-stage capital, particularly for areas with substantial technology risk. Investors are beginning to recognize this, and several new funds have emerged that are both willing to look beyond IT and are comfortable backing early-stage ventures with $1-2 million.

    The emergence of product-driven companies in sectors such as life sciences and clean technology in this decade will mark the fourth wave of the evolution and growth of India’s technology landscape. India’s talent base extends far beyond computer science and IT into fundamental sciences and engineering – it’s only a matter of time before risk capital connects with this talent base to deliver world-leading product innovation across more sectors. In order to achieve outsized returns, investors should skate to where the puck is going, rather than where it has been, to quote ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky.

    Originally Published: http://navam.in/1iL99U1

  • America’s Presidential Election

    Harsh and I have co-authored a piece on America’s presidential election:

    Early next month, Americans will decide whether to re-elect Democrat Barack Obama as President or vote in Republican Mitt Romney instead. Reports of America’s decline have been greatly exaggerated—it remains the world’s most powerful nation, although it does run the risk of being eclipsed by China in a couple of decades. With the global economy still struggling and tensions in the Middle East still high, a presidential election in the US is bound to have far-reaching consequences beyond American shores. A Romney victory will be better for economic growth in America and will weaken the renewed global allure of interventionist or authoritarian state capitalism that is more likely to end up in crony, rather than competitive, markets.

    More here.