For startups, India is the place to be

With top-notch talent ready to work at a fraction of Silicon Valley salaries and pathology data available in abundance, India has the ecosystem to build world-class technologies

- Vivek Wadhwa

I have just been reminded of the days when I was a fledgling entrepreneur going door to door on Sand Hill Road seeking funding. I remember how venture capitalists (VCs) would make me wait for hours and try to look smart in front of their partners by finding petty faults in my business plan. They were the kings and kingmakers and treated entrepreneurs as beggars. Fortunately, the cost of starting software companies soon fell to the point that crowdfunding and angel capital provided a better alternative. This shift in the power balance forced VCs to suck up to entrepreneurs instead.

However, this shift was only in the software space. In capital-intensive fields such as biotechnology, little has changed. Moreover, because of the spectacular failure of Theranos, VCs are more risk-averse than ever, literally traumatised.

But with exponential advances in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), computing, sensors, and synthetic biology, not only have costs dropped, but cutting-edge innovation has now been globalised.

Today, there are many better places to build world-changing technologies than Silicon Valley. One of these places is India, where you can hire top-notch talent for less than 10% of what it costs in the Valley, and pathology data needed to train machine-learning algorithms is available in abundance.