The Golden Tap - The Inside Story of Hyper-Funded Indian Start-Ups

By Kashyap Deorah

Ever wondered why global investors are willing to write million dollar cheques to young and inexperienced entrepreneurs? Why companies are no longer judged on their ability to make profits? Why the valuation of a startup can dwarf that of its well-established counterpart? Is it a bubble? Or have the rules of the game changed?

Can these hyper-funded; technology driven companiesbecome global superpowers? Or is it an unsustainable phenomenon? The Golden Tap gives you the answers.

In a remarkably honest, no holds barred account; Kashyap – himself a serial entrepreneur – demystifies the technology ecosystem that exists in India today. From the origins of Amazon and Google, to the remarkable growth of Flipkart and Ola, he meticulously plots and chronicles a connected global sequence of events.

Set in this background he recounts his personal roller coaster of a life.A story filled with ambition, greed, vanity, fear and success that all young entrepreneurs can relate to.

Is this the business model of the future? Or merely a game of poker played by master investors? The answers pour out of The Golden Tap.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Nov 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351941576

Book preview

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Ever wondered why global investors are willing to write million-dollar cheques to young and inexperienced entrepreneurs? Why companies are no longer judged on their ability to make profits? Why the valuation of a start-up can dwarf that of its well-established counterpart? Is it a bubble? Or have the rules of the game changed?

Can these hyper-funded, technology-driven companies become global superpowers? Or is it an unsustainable phenomenon? The Golden Tap gives you the answers.

In a remarkably honest, no-holds-barred account, Kashyap – himself a serial entrepreneur – demystifies the technology ecosystem that exists in India today. From the origins of Amazon and Google, to the remarkable growth of Flipkart and Ola, he meticulously plots and chronicles a connected global sequence of events. Set in this background, he recounts his personal roller coaster of a life. A story filled with ambition, greed, vanity, fear, and success that all young entrepreneurs can relate to.

Is this the business model of the future? Or merely a game of poker played by master investors? The answers pour out of The Golden Tap.

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Kashyap Deorah is an entrepreneur and investor. Over fifteen years, he has split his time between Silicon Valley and India building global technology companies. Besides India and US, he has done business in China, Southeast Asia and Northern Europe. Kashyap has started and sold three companies, worked with public companies in the US and India, invested in a score of startups, and mentored many more. He started his first company RightHalf.com during his final year at IIT Bombay in 2000. After an acquisition by a Silicon Valley company, Kashyap spent seven years in the US. He returned to India in 2007 to start Chaupaati Bazaar, a phone commerce marketplace, then merged it with India’s leading retailer Future Group. In 2012, he co-founded mobile payments company Chalo and sold it to San Francisco-based OpenTable, a leader in the restaurant reservations space. He is passionate about travelling to new places and telling a good story. He lives in New Delhi with his wife and three-year-old son. Hear him tweet @righthalf.

‘An amazing inside-out view of everything you wanted to know about digital start-ups in India. Kashyap, a serial entrepreneur himself, has masterfully integrated the US, China and India landscapes to give an honest real world view. A well argued, skilfully written piece of work.’

–  Sandeep Naik, General Atlantic India

‘A brutally honest narrative of India’s much hyped Internet start-ups through the eyes and ears of an entrepreneur and a born storyteller. In his shrewd yet lively writing style, Kashyap sews the 20 years of India’s digital landscape with global trends.’

– Shrutika Verma, start-ups team at Mint

‘A rollicking history of the Internet age told by a reflective fly on the wall, but also a human story of the greed, the fear, the ambition and the thrill of entrepreneurship. This is a book that is both intensely now, but will be of equal relevance a 100 years later.’

- Sudhir Sitapati, Vice President of Unilever, Advisor to Flipkart

‘Kashyap masterfully captures the behind-the-scenes look at the global and local events that have shaped the burgeoning Indian start-up eco-system. Not just for technology enthusiasts but anyone who is curious about how the next generation companies are born and raised.’

- Arvinder Gujral, Director APAC@Twitter

‘A candid view on the Indian start-up growth story from a straight-shooter who has been there and done that. The Golden Tap will keep every start-up founder up at night and ensure every investor sleeps with his chequebook tucked firmly under their bed!’

- Arjun & Rohan Malhotra, Investopad

‘This is a straight-from-the-heart, aimed-at-your-balls unputdownable page-turner about India’s Internet story.’

– Anshuman Bapna, serial entrepreneur,

Chief Product Officer, MakeMyTrip.com*

‘Kashyap synthesizes and articulates concepts sharply and humorously from his vantage point of being a repeat entrepreneur in the US and in India.’

– Ashish Gupta, Managing Director,

Helion Ventures and angel investor in Flipkart*

‘Kashyap’s phenomenal recall of events, unique insights and easy writing style make The Golden Tap a page-turner. Readers interested in learning about the evolution of e-commerce in India and the perils and pleasures of founding a start-up will find the book irresistible.’

– Meena Srinivasan, VP Treasurer, Fitbit*

‘Kashyap was there at the birth of internet entrepreneurship in India -arguably Techfest, IIT Bombay, 1999. He has written about his journey from days when Amazon and Google were in their youth to the days of Flipkart and Ola. He pulls no punches in a very compelling, well researched, honest, passionate and fun book written from the heart by someone who was there.’

– Rakesh Mathur, serial entrepreneur*

‘This is Michael Lewis meets Indian Startups. A candid and deeply personal insider view of the 15-year evolution of the start-up ecosystem in India. Kashyap’s analysis of the drivers of the ecosystem and the contrast with Silicon Valley and China is masterful and bold. No one involved in Indian start-ups should miss this.’

– Mohan Lakhamraju, CEO of Great Lakes Institute of Management*

*Endorsements by some of the professionals and entrepreneurs featured in the book

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ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in 2015

First published in 2015 by

The Lotus Collection

An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market

New Delhi 110 048

Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.rolibooks.com

Copyright © Kashyap Deorah

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Roli Books. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

eISBN: 978-93-5194-157-6

All rights reserved.

This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or cover other than that in which it is published.

For my wife Shruti, who came into my life when I started my first company

For my niece Zoya, who came into my life when I started my second company

For my son Kanav, who came into my life when I started my third company

For my mother, who brought me to life and taught me how to love,

and my father, who taught me how to start companies

Contents

Introduction

PART 1: THE INTERNET WAVE(1994-2002)

1.  The Internet Changes Everything

Netscape, Yahoo! and Amazon

The Stanford Startup

Heady Days at Amazon

The IIT Bombay Startup

Pop Goes the Bubble

2.  The Five Stages of Grief

The Day I Became an Entrepreneur

Go Back Home

There and Back Again

PART 2: THE GLOBALIZATION WAVE (2003-2009)

3.  Sand Hill Marg

Don’t Forget to Blink

The First Startup Gold Rush in India

Swades

The Poster Boys

RIP Good Times

4.  This-of-That Investing

Tiger Global Management and Lee Fixel

Digital Sky Technologies and Yuri Milner

Shanghai Wife

Rocket, Naspers and SoftBank

Good Times, Bad Times

5.  Level Playing Field

The Cage

The Inspiration

The Inception

The Team

The Funding

The Launch

The Bootstrapping

The Bells

The Deal

PART 3: THE SMARTPHONE WAVE (2010-PRESENT)

6.  E-commerce

The Amazon Renaissance

Flipkart.com: Early Days

Tiger Returns

The Future Becomes the Past

Unit Economics

The Poker Begins

7.  Waiting’s over

Reconnecting with Silicon Valley

Will Work for Food

Birthday Gift

Fortune Cookie

The Changing Face of the Indian Entrepreneur

Pay with OpenTable

Name your own price

8.  The Great Indian Boom

Father-in-Law Test

Indian Unicorns

Indian Rocketships

World War

The Pyramid Scheme

Race Course

PART 4: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

9.  Busting the Myths

India is the Next China

A Limited Window of Opportunity

Hyper-Funded Startups are Too Big to Fail

Build a War Chest

Amazon Did Not Make Money for the Longest Time

The New Government Will Change Things

If You Own the Market, Profits Will Come

India Has Enough Exits; We Don’t Need IPOs

Indian Startup Employees Don’t Care for Stock Options

10. The Next India

Sequoia and the Banyan Tree

Building Indian Businesses

Building Global Businesses

Acknowledgements

Introduction

On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées (An invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come.)

– VICTOR HUGO

4 December 2014, Downtown Palo Alto

It was a bright winter’s day in Palo Alto. As a kid growing up in hot and sweltering Mumbai, I had romantic feelings about rainy days with the cool monsoon breeze. I had always wondered why the western world was romantically involved with sunshine, until I made Silicon Valley my second home. The refreshing sunlight of the crisp winter afternoons of California had re-programmed my brain. Today was one such day. It had become a reflex action to start the conversation with, ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’

With pleasantries out of the way, I asked, ‘Is the urban legend true? About the golden tap?’

He gave me a quizzical look.

‘I have heard that the taps in his house are made of pure solid gold!’ My mentor who lives within a mile in Los Altos Hill had once told me about it.

He laughed a laugh that I had come to associate with him. He was not one to kiss and tell.

The previous night, he had had a sleepover at the most expensive house in the Bay Area. The house did not belong to the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, Intel or any other leading global tech company born in the capital of tech innovation. It was the mansion of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who reportedly overpaid for this mansion called Palo Alto Loire Chateau in Los Altos Hills by 100 per cent. Yuri’s fund DST Global had come to Silicon Valley in the middle of the financial crisis and invested in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation, when the Venture Capitalists (VCs) in the Silicon Valley were bidding at half of that. Over the next few years, as Silicon Valley companies started breaking the record for fastest company in the world to get to a billion dollars in quick succession, Yuri had invested in nearly all of them: Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, and Whatsapp, a record that even the topmost VCs in the Valley could not match. His world record was even more enviable. Besides Mail.ru in Russia which he had owned a stake in for over a decade and which had led to the inception of DST, he was an investor in Alibaba and JD.com (formerly 360buy.com) in China. Each of these companies went on to do an IPO in the US stock markets, except for Mail.ru, which was listed in the London Stock Exchange, and Whatsapp, which was bought by Facebook for $19 billion, becoming the largest tech acquisition in history.

There was suddenly enough depth in the market for companies to raise over $100 million without having to go public. Before the 2008-2009 financial crisis, global funds used to invest in companies that were public or about to go public within a year or two, leaving private companies to seek venture capital to get to that stage. Global funds had now disrupted the VC business by investing in private companies making venture capital an asset class. This was not true only for VC-rich Silicon Valley and its new innovative technology companies, but also for VC-starved countries globally that were transferring Silicon Valley innovations to their countries and applying them in local markets. This phenomenon gave rise to a new word, unicorn, or privately held billion dollar company. By September 2015, the number of billion dollar tech companies worldwide that had been founded after 2003 had sprung up to 182.¹ Well over a hundred of these companies were unicorns. Two-thirds of them were in the US, followed by nearly 30 per cent in China, and half a dozen in India.

He continued ravaging his burger. He was having a late lunch and I was sitting across from him. ‘Any good?’ I asked. I wanted him to experience the taste of a gourmet burger of Silicon Valley and had instinctively picked this cafe while walking down University Avenue. ‘Uhmm, it’s a burger,’ he said and shrugged. Should have taken him to Pluto’s instead, I thought.

I had last met Bhavish Aggarwal two and a half years ago, when he had raised his first round of funding of $5 million from Tiger Global Management and wanted my advice on the quickest way to do a country-wide expansion of his taxi service Ola Cabs. Tiger was a New York based hedge fund that invested in mature companies worldwide that were planning to go public or were already public. It was unusual for Tiger to lead the first round of investment in a company this early.

The story at the top of my mind was the $210 million investment in Ola Cabs by SoftBank Capital a month ago. Nikesh Arora, the new fund manager of the investment arm of the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Corporation, had shaken India with a dramatic entry. He had invested nearly a billion dollars in two weeks: $210 million in Ola Cabs, $627 million in e-commerce company Snapdeal, and $90 million in online real estate company Housing.com, marking a particularly unusual fortnight in the history of tech start-up funding in India.

‘Why do you want to raise more money? Haven’t you raised a lot already?’ The golden tap seemed more than just a bathroom fitting to me.

‘Well, this is a two-day Bay Area trip to meet everyone who wanted to meet.’ Bhavish put the conversation to rest.

After $5 million from Tiger in August 2012, Ola had picked up $20 million in November 2013, led by the India office of the east coast venture fund Matrix Partners, $42 million in July 2014, led by Hong Kong-based Steadview Capital with participation from the India office of the west coast venture fund Sequoia Capital, and finally $210 million from the US-based venture arm of Japanese telecom company SoftBank Corp. Yuri Milner had invested in personal capacity in an earlier round and was watching the progress of the company. Bhavish had celebrated the fourth year anniversary of Ola with Yuri the previous night. Ola was on its way to becoming the fastest unicorn of India.

I was in a tizzy. Nothing made sense. Not least of which was: how did I miss being an angel investor in this company?

In August 2011, less than a year after the incorporation of Ola Cabs, Bhavish had spotted me buying a coffee at the counter at Gloria Jean’s in Mumbai. Oftentimes it seems as if the physical space we are in has a direct bearing on our imagination. If the physical space has a high ceiling or is an open area or is a corner of a matchbox, our thoughts and imagination appear to follow that theme. He walked up to me at the counter and invited me to his table at the centre of this high-ceiling store of a global coffee chain in the sprawling neighbourhood of Hiranandani Gardens. The intrusion was welcome. We were both alumni from IIT Bombay, only eight years apart. We had been told about each other by a common friend and confidant, and had been meaning to meet. The friend had strongly encouraged Bhavish to get some angel investment from me and vice versa.

A San Francisco-based company called Uber was only in its second year of existence and expanding rapidly. Bhavish was on course to building India’s Uber. He always looked you in the eye when talking and the spark was hypnotizing. In the hour I spent with him, we talked about the market, product, technology, scale, funding, hiring, regulations, and pretty much everything else that an entrepreneur ought to be thinking about when building their first product. He led the discussion with childlike enthusiasm, yet mature thinking. In just that first meeting, we delved deep and talked about the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) second-factor authentication norm* and how that makes an Uber-like experience impossible in India. We talked about the ability to lock an Android or iOS device to the driver-side app so the phone does not get stolen or misused. We talked about how he would deal with driver unions in each city, which were politically motivated and had given the leading radio taxi company a run for their money in Mumbai recently. And then we moved on to transport regulations that required a commercial driving permit and idiosyncratic compliances like license-plate colour. Having used Uber in the Bay Area during my visit in the previous month, I was not a believer that the same model would work in India.

I was, however, smitten by Bhavish. One of the first lessons I had learned as an angel investor was to bet on people first, and then market space, and after that, everything else. I added Bhavish to my list of people to watch. From the meeting, I got a sense that he valued my inputs and that it would not be the last I saw of him. He asked if I wanted to invest but did not insist. I had started thinking about my next company, Chalo, and was conserving for that. I resisted the temptation to invest ? 20 lakhs ($40,000). I decided to think some more and thought I could always call Bhavish to take the money.

I never called. He didn’t either.

Had I invested in Bhavish on that day, my shares would have been worth over $10 million that winter afternoon in 2015. I had recently made a windfall because Chalo had been double acquired, first by the public company OpenTable, which further got acquired by a larger public company, Priceline Group, resulting in a jump in the share value. That day, my investment in Ola shares would have been worth more than the windfall I made from my own company. One alpha event exceeded two beta events. My only consolation was that the Ola shares were funny money worth that much on paper, while shares in my own company were now money in the bank. That’s what I thought, anyway. Bhavish had now finished his burger, and I had finished beating myself up for that miss.

In the run up to Bhavish’s Silicon Valley trip, I had volunteered an introduction to a board member of Uber. Both sides had privately confirmed that they would not mind meeting each other. The meeting was scheduled for later that day. I prepared Bhavish for the conversation.

‘What do you plan to talk about?’ I asked.

‘Aap batao (you tell me),’ he said.

I tried to prepare him for the unexpected. ‘What if he offers to buy the company?’

‘Should I tell you what I really think?’

‘I shall have it no other way.’

‘I will not sell. I am not building India’s Uber. I am building something larger.’

There was a pregnant pause. An air of anticipation filled the room.

‘More people order a cab from Ola every day than they buy things online from any e-commerce website. If I am the largest consumption engine of India, I can own everything else that Indians consume digitally,’ he said, with a total absence of doubt.

Ola Cabs had seen phenomenal growth since the start of 2014, after launching their new app to compete with Uber’s app, which had launched in India in the middle of 2013. Uber and Ola were now at war for market share in India, competing to give heavy discounts to consumers and handsome bonuses on top of payouts to drivers. Ola had grown from a few thousand ride requests a day to nearly 100,000 ride requests per day by the end of 2014. At the time, Bhavish did not share the number of fulfilled rides.

‘Have you spent much time in the Silicon Valley?’ I asked the question with part curiosity and part patronization. To me, Silicon Valley was the mothership of tech innovation. I thought any tech entrepreneur would aspire to maximize their time here, especially if the entrepreneur was building the Indian version of a product born in San Francisco.

‘If I do get time to travel, I want to spend it in China. Will you come to China with me?’ He laughed that signature laugh again, acknowledging the awkward gap between his clarity and my doubts.

It was not long after my meeting with Bhavish that my family and I set off on the holiday of a lifetime. Over the next 4-5 months, we travelled through all the inhabited continents of the world. As we used Uber and other on-demand services from our smartphones in each continent, I read the news that DST Global had led a round of $410 million in Ola Cabs, with half a dozen other funds participating, and SoftBank and Tiger participating further. This round had nearly tripled the valuation of the company since the SoftBank round six months ago. Ola was now a unicorn. A related news article revealed that the demand for Ola shares was high among funds, and angel investors had been given the option to cash out their shares in the round. If I thought I knew what fear-of-missing-out felt like until that day, my delusion stood corrected.

A twenty-something guy from Ludhiana. First time entrepreneur. Building the fastest billion dollar company of India. With the Indian adaptation of a Silicon Valley innovation. While actually being inspired by businesses out of China. With investment from a west coast VC fund, an east coast VC fund, a New York hedge fund, a Japanese telecom fund, a Hong Kong syndicate fund, and a Russian Internet fund. Nothing about this was normal. The landscape of Indian start-ups had transformed.

A new wave had begun.

Ɗ  Ɗ  Ɗ

I was trying to make sense of it all. I had been deeply connected with the Indian tech start-up scene since 1998, or so I thought. In recent times, I had only been away from India in the year 2014 and was suddenly unable to understand what was going on. When I returned to India in 2015, it became clear that most people I met were trying to make sense of it all, too. Entrepreneurs, VCs, fund managers, businessmen, professionals, parents, in-laws, shopkeepers, drivers, students, expats, everyone.

What had changed to cause such a start-up frenzy? Most VCs had been in India since 2006. Nearly a decade later, there were hardly any IPOs or acquisitions by public companies, and none in sight. What happened to the skepticism around returns on investment? Most of the companies that were growing fast had phenomenal user and revenue growth, but were bleeding deep losses to match. E-commerce companies were selling products for cheaper than their own buying price. Consumer Internet and mobile companies with high growth were losing money with every transaction, and cash flows and profits were not in sight. Yet, why were foreign funds investing unprecedented levels of capital in these companies? The India growth story with increasing Internet penetration, increasing mobile penetration, increasing young population, and growing GDP had always been in place. What had changed in a year?

In India, like in the rest of the world, there was a sense of shock and awe around the golden tap of global funds flowing freely. The funds were comfortable writing large checks to take big bites in companies they invested in. If the company did not want to dilute too much, they bought out stakes of existing shareholders. This resulted in cash returns for earlier shareholders in a market that had been thirsty for liquidity for over a decade now. This triggered a frenzy in early stage funding, from angels and VCs.

Some thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invest in the next billion dollar companies of India right at the start. Others thought it was a party that would not last, but if you were invited you might as well buy some lottery tickets, or at least some insurance plans protecting from future regret. There was a sense of mystery about all this. Is it a bubble? If so, how long before it bursts? When it bursts, what would that look and feel like? If it is not a bubble, when will these companies make money? How long will funds keep investing until the companies make money? Does it matter if the companies ever make profit, or will they just go IPO in an international market that does not care about profits? But then how do those markets work?

When the VCs had started setting up shop in India in 2005-2006, the gold rush was accelerated by the positive sentiment due to a new UPA-led government with an economist as Prime Minister who was perceived to have friendly financial and economic policies. There was a widespread belief amongst entrepreneurs and investors that India was going to be the next US and that it was only a matter of time. That did not unfold as promised. Now, when the global funds were making investments in India in 2014, the optimism seemed correlated with the entry of a new NDA-led government with a business-friendly prime minister. The widespread belief now was that India was going to be the next China and that it was only a matter of time. Would the outcome be different?

Many leading New York-based Private Equity (PE) investment firms who had set up shop in India starting 2005-2006 had looked at tech deals and passed on them due to absence of fundamentals or of scale. They continued investing in profitable companies in non-tech sectors in a later stage of their evolution. New funds, also based out of New York, were now writing large checks based on video calls and short visits to India, without having an India-based fund manager who made decisions. How could the same world through the eyes of similar people, who sourced their funds from similar places and had similar charters, invest so differently?

The average age of entrepreneurs who were able to get large funds and scale their businesses fast had dropped by about ten years. Entrepreneurship seemed to have skipped a generation and the generation gap between the new entrepreneurs and older ones was stark. Entrepreneurial learnings from the previous era seemed as obsolete to future entrepreneurs as investor learnings from the previous era were for future investors. This phenomenon seemed far more prominent in India than in Silicon Valley. Why was it so, and was it healthy for the ecosystem?

If you have asked one or some or all of these questions and are dissatisfied with the answers so far, you have picked up the right book to read. The book will not lay out the answers on a platter for you to consider and then accept or reject. Instead, it will tell you several true stories that you probably haven’t heard before, and in reading those stories, you will discover many of the answers yourself.

Ɗ  Ɗ  Ɗ

To understand these events and answer these questions, let me take you to an interesting time in history – the third quarter of 2008. Two independent events collided and profoundly altered the future of the world in more ways than we give it credit for. One, the financial systems of the greatest economy in the world collapsed, triggering the worst financial crisis since the world wars. Two, the world of apps was born. Apple launched the iOS App Store slightly ahead of Google’s release of the first commercial version of the Android OS with Android Market, later renamed to Google Play. Financing and technology are arguably the two largest drivers of the global technology ecosystem. It was a Byzantine period in history when both of them simultaneously encountered a rare and momentous disruptive force.

In September 2008, many of the largest financial institutions of the world’s largest economy went bankrupt, were acquired in a fire-sale, or needed government intervention to survive. This list included Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup and AIG. The Great Recession was the largest global recession since the Great Depression, and resulted in a global decline in GDP per capita and a rise in unemployment. Over the next two quarters, Nasdaq fell to nearly the same level where it was after the cumulative impact of the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000 and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. If you were an entrepreneur raising money or a graduate looking for a job, or if you were a venture capital or private equity investor looking at the tech industry at the time, this would probably mean more to you than a paragraph of history.

Earlier in the same quarter, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had unveiled the App Store with 500 third-party apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. By the time Sequoia Capital had released the epic presentation called ‘RIP Good Times’ on 10 October 2008, showing a large meat knife stuck in the belly of a pig sliced in half while asking the question ‘What Next?’, the App Store had crossed 5,000 apps and 150 million downloads in three months. At the time of release on 23 September 2008, Google’s Android 1.0 had an impressive deck of in-built apps, more than the default apps on the iPhone, but was supported by just one commercially available device, HTC Dream. A majority of the world had a mobile phone; most of them were feature phones with apps that the manufacturer bundled at source or the mobile carrier approved to be on-deck. Among the smaller population of smartphones, the leading Operating Systems by market share were Symbian (Nokia), RIM (Blackberry), Windows Mobile (Microsoft) and then iOS (Apple). If you had a mobile phone in 2008, then you would remember using features that the phone already had. There was not much question of downloading stuff other than ringtones, caller tunes and wallpapers.

The financial crisis disrupted the venture funding industry worldwide and created a new world order for financing tech companies. The birth of mobile apps accelerated the wave of iPhone and Android smartphone penetration at the expense of all other mobile operating systems. The worlds that were disconnected from risk capital in technology companies were now connected. The worlds that were disconnected from Internet access and converged commerce were now connected.

While I consider the post-recession proliferation of smartphones and mobile apps as pivotal in the history of tech start-ups in India, it is essential to understand the two major phenomena that preceded in the fifteen years prior: the Internet and globalization. While global events led to a unique scenario for India and her tech industry, it is important to note that it was built on the foundation created by the cycle of the Internet boom and bust, followed by the cycle of the globalization boom and global recession.

This book is organized in four parts. Part 1 starts with the beginning of the public Internet in 1992-1993 and ends with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, further accentuated by the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that pushed the markets to

Reviews for The Golden Tap - The Inside Story of Hyper-Funded Indian Start-Ups

[yashas hr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing read to know about the funded startups in India