A Talk given to Wharton Students & Alumni, visiting Bangalore on our journey, the Entrepreneurship ecosystem in India, the challenges, pitfalls and benefits of starting a product business from India.

1. How to Build a Global Tech
Business from India?
Krishna Mehra
@kpowerinfinity
21-May-2013

2. The India Growth Story is Quite
Fascinating
Which is probably why all of you are here…

3. A Little About Me…
• Entrepreneur, co-founder @capillarytech
– 5 Year old startup in the Consumer CRM Space
– 10,000 Stores, 70M Consumers, 10 Global Offices
– $15.5M from Sequoia & Norwest
• Earlier Researcher at MSFT, B.Tech from IIT
Kharagpur, Worked at Minekey Inc.
• Family into the Book Publishing

4. How’d all Begin?

5. Choosing the Space
• Mobile & Retail looked like a great opportunity
– Easy seed financing from alma-mater
– Wanted to do something similar to Groupon… before
Groupon
• Early Challenges
– The “Indian Baniya Businessman”
– Cost of Data
– The Mobile Savvy Indian Customer is probably not so savvy
• The Pivot into CRM

6. Getting Initial Traction
“You” are the “Product”

7. Traction begets Money
• Angel Funding Eco-
System in India is
harder
– Real revenue
traction expected
• Focus on Business,
Funding will
happen

8. The Team is the Clincher
• Hiring is
hard!
– Money
– Equity
– Marriage
– Distance
– Work
– Passion
Picture taken from http://therodinhoods.com/profiles/blogs/flat-marriage-and-family-3-reasons-why-young-indians-don-t-turn

9. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

10. Growing Pains

11. Selling Software in India
• Indians Buy a Phone Number
– @mukund,
http://goo.gl/RE9B1
• Nobody wants to be a “Sales
Guy”
– Sales as a function is not as
well established
• Fragmented Channel for
Selling Software
• The frustrations of Getting
Paid for your work

12. India Runs on SaaS
• Op-ex based Pricing & Servicing model better suited to Indian Customers
• Fuse Products & Services together
• Prevent Piracy

13. The Product vs Services Debate
• Initially, it doesn’t matter
– Getting traction is most critical
• It’s always going to be both
– They can’t exist without each other
• It’s where in the continuum you fall – Strongly
defines the growth curve

14. The Decision to Look Abroad
• Is your product sellable in global markets?
• Market Size Challenges in Scaling up
– Lack of a large local market
– The Currency-Conversion Factor
• Investor Pressure? Many VCs (at least in India) today
prefer a Global Story
• Regulatory Challenges in building a Global Business
from India

15. The Advantages of Jugaad
• Frugal Innovation: Indian Customers are more
forgiving to product defects
• Talent Availability, and ability to iterate quickly
• Capital is Easier than many other parts of the
world

16. Thank you!
@kpowerinfinity