TiE Global Summit 2022 Roundup

I had the good fortune to attend the 2022 TiE Global Conference this past week! I was especially excited because it was my first time in Hyderabad and I was quite curious to see how it would be. The multi lane highways from the airport (see below my Uber ride ), the greenery, the food, it was all one of a kind...

I will say that the great state of Telangana – which is where Hyderabad is -?is putting it’s best foot forward, for a?state only born on June 2, 2014, it is definitely punching above its weight, by contributing to 5% of India’s GDP despite only having 2.5% of the population. Over this time, per capita income has risen 130%, 250% IT export growth, 190% agricultural growth, green surface area has increasing from 24 to 31% while about 1/3 of all vaccines administered in the world were produced in the state! The Telangana community appears to have some real ties that bind – not sure if it because they’ve been in the shadow of traditional South Indian power cities such as Chennai and Bengaluru , maybe some historical divisions , or maybe just the love to have a good time – or the fact that it’s a brand new state and ready to give the ‘Telangana dream’ to the world.?

The effort put in to attract global companies is astonishing – and is why Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many others have their second largest offices in this city. Spaces like T-Hub and others have incubated 6,500+ startups across 50+ sectors kudos to the IT minister KT Rama Rao (KTR), a very well-spoken forward thinking, seemingly unpolitical-like, politician, who’s mandate to nurture, amplify the tech ecosystem and infrastructure in Telangana is clearly coming to fruition. On a lighter note, even Shantanu N. – Hyderabad’s very own son, was not able to get away with the lack of an Adobe presence in Telangana – so much so that it became a bit uncomfortable for Shantanu – goes to show KTR’s focus to keep raising Telangana.?I can’t help but imagine what he could do at a national scale.

The event was held at the grand Novotel Conference center, with giant spaces as big as Moscone center in San Francisco. See here for what the building looked like as I rolled in...

The halls were constantly buzzing with activities, people uniting after several months, taking selfies and so on, see here to get a taste of what it was like...

The conference was kicked off by the Kuchipudi dance – a dance form that amalgamates temple and theatrical dance. Yamani Reddy and her troupe ( see video below ) performed an awe inspiring ‘Shiva’s dance’ – based on the strong devotion Telangana has had towards Lord Shiva dating back to 12th century. Shiva’s dance depicts the cycle of creation, preservation and destruction – which was an apt dance for an entrepreneurial conference … where in a sense, one can think of societies’ governments, businesses, systems,?tools and technologies getting refreshing in cycles involving these same three stages.?Creation as represented by new businesses, technologies, NGOs, social and political movements; preservation as depicted by scaling and growth strategies, and destruction spearheaded by the next round of disruptive technologies, business models, societal uprisings, environmental shifts and other arbitrage opportunities.?

Lord Shiva’s invocation seemed perfect for vibrant startups to be the dancers in His cosmic universal dance?in the world. For nature to take its course of cyclical evolution, sustenance, and dissolution.?Food for thought isn’t it??If you agree, then flux and change seems to be the name of the game - and the only constant. This then begs the question of whether the large monopolistic corporations, social and political movements, which continue to try and increase shelf life and staying power are going against ‘Shiva’s desired flow’??Certain an interesting contemplation!

Kanwal Rekhi , the founder of TiE, was his unabashed bold self – always concerned about making life easy for entrepreneurs and removing any and all obstacles, often in the form of government and public policy planning…he came to the event with a renewed approach towards rural entrepreneurship by putting his money where his mouth is and creating the Kanwal Rekhi Center of Rural Entrepreneurship ( KREST ) in a place about 200km outside of Hyderabad.

“No one is smart enough to plan", exclaimed Kanwal to the packed room. Kanwal’s energy levels and enthusiasm for entrepreneurs are unparalleled. “Entrepreneurs are the fuel and no one can tell them what to do, how to do, because they know best”. It reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the Stadium’ poem.?Could Kanwal’s assertion be true – that the ‘lack of clear thinking’ from governments and public policy think tanks could be holding India back? More can be read about his views from the conferences in a write up immediately published the next day, in the Times of India – India’s largest newspaper; here is the article in print:

Now I understand where Kanwal is coming from when he suggested that bureaucrats, policy and planners should get out of the way, mostly because he is an entrepreneurial savant who takes no prisoners and recommends the simplest, most direct solution ( in an ideal world). Pragmatically however, I am reminded of Harish Mehta's approach ( see below video) where took the very same policy makers under his mentorship and brought them along for the journey, with empathy and patience. Harish recognized that policy makers, at heart, wanted the best solution for India but they just did not know what it was at the time due to a combination of inexperience, lack of mentorship and patience from industry leaders who had ‘been there, done that’. So he worked to solve this problem by creating a neutral community platform comprised of leading business and technology leaders on a strictly volunteer and selfless basis: NASSCOM...

Harish took it upon himself to build trust between all stakeholders, most of who were fierce competitors, aligning them to a common vision of “India first” and in doing so molding them into a cohesive, undefeatable unit to interface with the policy makers and government ministries.?This is all detailed in his book which I really enjoyed, the Maverick Effect, as they solved various hairy problems successfully, as evidenced by drastic shifts and simplification of IT import and export policies.?This led to the fluidity much required for industry tech giants to flourish and provide back office, IT implementation and software development services to the rest of the world.

The concept of entrepreneurship was best summarized by the conference’s leaders, Suresh Raju and Murali Bukkapatnam , who described it as an unequivocal way to leave one’s footprint behind, for future generations to benefit from and carry forward, and to do it for the ‘common man’. If you dug into history, you’ll notice that there’s a precedence to this going back to India’s independence movement where through ‘Ahimsa’, Mahatma Gandhi – probably the nation’s greatest ‘entrepreneur’ in recent history, created an indelible footprint and platform for the future. Gopal Srinivasan 's call for ‘Dharmic entrepreneurship’ was very much aligned to this – and his recommendations for Indians to rediscover the roots of Indian culture, steeped in respect for the divinity in all animate and inanimate, was quite refreshing.

Gopal’s speech took the audience back to India, pre-12th?century, where it was the world’s largest global economy and the leading trade hub. ?After the 12th century, or since ‘enslavement’ as Gopal put it, India lost its ways – and he has likened the solution to the ability or degree to which India as a nation could rediscover what its ‘dark matter’ was – that ‘secret sauce’ that creates sustainable and endemic advantage. For example, one may argue that America’s ‘dark matter’ is centered around the the unquestionable freedom and the chase for the ‘American dream’ – for a better life – and it is what has kept America going through thick and thin through tough times – be it economical social, natural, economic or geo-political.

So what is ‘India’s dark matter’? Is it the young spirited people, the?community centric and familial culture and relationships, or could it be the yogic traditions? Perhaps the clue lies in Gopal’s exquisite recitation of Sanskrit shlokas from the Gita, and in doing so, encouraging entrepreneurs to find personalized roots in equanimity and for that he emphasized spiritual strength - for all to align with the divine purpose present in each and every one of us since we are all unique and original – and have something to offer. It was fitting how Shivani Sen, the energetic host of the conference welcomed all 3,000 conference participants, with a resounding ‘Namaste’ which when translated means ‘I bow to the Divine in You”.

In counting from the 160+ speakers/panelists/moderators, ~ 130 were men and ~30 women, creating about a 80:20 (men:women) ratio. Not to single out just TiE, because this is the case in all business conferences, but I will say that this should be brought to at least 50% if not more – and I hope the organizers of the next few conferences take this to heart and improve the ratio. That all said, it was indeed an inspiration to see some strong women leading conversations and investing into each other - VCs, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders like Vani Kola , Neha Poddar , Seema Chaturvedi , Priya Rajan , Pranoti Nagarkar , Deena Jacob , Charu Mathur , Mansi Kasliwal , Ruchee Anand and others.

Hearing Kunjpreet Arora , a young woman from Udaipur Rajasthan, communicate her business plan on stage at the startup pitch competition, where she had a new idea for a brick made from recycled plastics was inspiring. (Waste management is a major employer in India, about 2% of Indian population according to Abhay Deshpande during the sustainability economics panel). See this pic here of Kunjpreet holding the brick ( those white spots in the brick are actual plastics - I held the brick myself and it felt completely 'normal' ):

The bricks are as strong, if not stronger, than regular bricks and the unit economics are much more attractive as well?– but the best part is she has kept a very local context given the situation with plastic waste in Udaipur.?I am so glad to see a young woman stand up and give her best self to India, and I am sure mentorship from advisors and investors such as Meera Siva, CFA awakens the courage in her to persevere, and hopefully she can continue to be a model for other young entrepreneurs in Tier 2 / 3 cities and rural locales ( i.e., ?Bharat ). But let us not forget, that males - be it a family member, a community member, a co-worker, or friend - need to also step up to the plate and become allies ... ( and most importantly, look themselves in the mirror to transform their own dispositions). I wrote about my own journey here; and it was great to hear Ronald van het Hof affirm this perspective as well …

I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of ‘Bharat’ a lot lately, especially given the two conflicting narratives I’m hearing consistently: on one side we hear about ‘incredible India’ , the growth story for the next 10y, etc. While on the other side, there is the narrative about growing inequality ( 300M people below the poverty line within ‘Bharat’ ) as well as the environmental impacts and unsustainable ways that need to be curtailed across the entire country.?

Gopal was clear that if Indians adopt a lifestyle that OECD countries have enjoyed over the last few decades, the universe would need a whole new planet Earth just for India alone. On the other hand, Sudhir Rao ( see below for his perspective), aptly describes it as a 'never before moment for Bharat' from an economic perspective, and the big construct he asserted is the emerging public infrastructure...

One great example is ONDC, where CEO, T Koshy's vision ( see below for his perspective ) for creating an India wide open e-commerce platform, which will provide small merchants in Tier 2/3/4 cities with the reach across all of India. Koshy was clear that this will lead to the flattening and democratization of, strangle holds that traditional brick and mortar merchants enjoyed as a result of physical location, but now, this will create an India wide market for a small handicrafts, clothing, or arts vendor and many more.

Such platforms, along with disruptive complimentary plays such as Udaan, (I got a chance to talk to the founder, Amod Malviya ), are breaking traditional business-cultural norms at scale across India. What Udaan is doing is approaching small rural merchants, most of whom have decades longstanding, often decades old, family based relationships with various stakeholders in their value chain ( this is the business cultural norm I referred to ), are now being convinced to adopt an e-commerce platform in less than 15m. Key to this is to preserve the essence of what kept that little merchant with his supplier over the last few decades: trust. Amod has built a technical fabric / architecture to guarantee trust, be it failover, alternatives, rebates, refunds or SLA promises and so on.

In a sense, Amod is adhering to ancient Indian principles of family/community culture but just putting it in a new tech enabled avatar! This is exactly what Swiggy, and other distribution platforms have done as well where they have fundamentally flipped towards instant community and togetherness via technology!

On a very related note, here is a short snippet of my dad buying vegetables via digital payments, taken just this past weekend, in ShahpurJat, New Delhi where the merchant is simply providing a QR code to scan and pay!

Key to building 'Bharat' startups is localization. Best summarized by C.K. Ranganathan, President of TiE Chennai, when he explained the importance of developing empathy towards the context of locals and the negative consequences of not doing so: for example, how locals lose confidence due to an inferiority complex of not knowing English well. But it doesn’t need to be this way, which is why CK drove initiatives that embraced the local vernacular.

By instituting the TiE Catalyst program, in local vernacular, combined with the power of storytelling, CK and team were able to create a vibrant hyper local ecosystem of entrepreneurs, mentors and advisors. Storytelling is something in India many believe is a lost art, but it’s coming back slowly but surely. K.K. Senthil Kumar, the cinematographer behind RRR, said it best – that If you can tell the story behind the product, you’ve won!

Storytelling utilizes a bit more of the right brain than the left brain, and this is a departure from the traditional educational emphasis in India for the most part.?in this vein - should education need to revisited?

One of the audience members, an IIT Kanpur B.Tech CS graduate, who explained his journey of studying for 2 years for JEE, had asked if this was necessary – whether entrepreneurship is transforming the need for academic rigour and prestige? I think we all know the answer to this. But there is a not so pleasant flip side to this as explained by the head of CSR for BYJUs, Mansi Kasliwal, where she paints an extremely dire picture ... ( see this video) ...

...where out of the 350M+ students in India, 250M are in public/government schools in the rural education system and about 75% of teachers in these schools are absent. That is a travesty and a disaster waiting to happen. It is obvious that a new model of education is required. One that may need to be structurally different to a school setup, and use more digital methods such as BYJUs, LinkedIn Learning and other platforms, all while preserving the ancient ‘Guru Shiksha’ principles of physical proximity between student and teacher. This new structure may also need to involve a blend of gamification into the learning process, to incentivize participation as explained to me by a young entrepreneur, Akshay Jain from MyyTake a gaming studio in Delhi that has built gamification interventions in many of the travel and commerce apps that we use on a daily basis.

Rajesh Nair led a fantastic session on building confidence of children by introducing a new type of curriculm to foster creativity through ‘making’ and giving them the building blocks for entreprenership. I think Rajesh’s work – where he believe entrepreneurship is nurtured and can be inspired -?should be front and center of every school’s curriculum, to?convey the ‘How’. Starting from how to think of an idea, how to conceptualize and make it, how to create a business model from pricing to marketing to packaging, to understand who the customer is, to raising money and running the operations and understand the basics of the power of technology in all this - because I don’t think that it is ever too early to teach these things… even if 10% of it sticks, believe me, it will be worth it to produce the next hidden Steve Jobs of India. Imagine then, making school fertile ground for building leaders who are truly changing the world ( vs. just studying academics - don’t get me wrong, academics is key - but I know I wish I had?more of this other side when I was young ).

One way to truly get this rolling is to incorporate into CSR programs, and empower the efforts of benevolent startups like Fuel led by Ketan Deshpande - who incidentally was the business plan winner of the startup competition in TiE 2007 - disseminating knowledge amongst rural areas...

Back to my original point of building for ‘Bharat’ at scale, I’ve been contemplating the nature of leadership required for India and what it takes to enable others to self actuate and organize. I believe it ultimately it boils down to an expanded understanding of how to practice Ahimsa within the nation through everything we, as an individual, corporate, NGO and society, do - as much as possible. Perhaps Gopal's recommendation to remove oneself from passion/emotion but rather to focus on what one is good at and finding ones best self during the process is key to this. Funny enough, today I came across this quote from a great saint (and disciple of Aurobindo) at their Center in Delhi this past weekend...

It reads, "One can free only soaring to the heights, high above human passions" ... It made me think that Indian entrepreneurs have an endemic advantage that they should truly tap - so many learnings, at their fingertips - accessible from ancestors, available via studying ancient wisdom.

When Richa Chaddha , during the ‘future of alternative proteins’ session, asked the audience the question, ‘why is it that a certain type of grain/plant which is extinct in the Himalayas is being grown in abroad in western countries?", it was a great call to action for India to wake up to the forgotten richness and to especially take care of the environment. For Indians to remember that, without Mother Earth, there is no government, no conglomerate, no small business entrepreneur, and it is on every citizen to put sustainability at the forefront in their own individual ways.

According to Rudra Dalmia, Partner at Frontier Capital, $650B has been invested globally from alternative investment funds out of which only?$14B is India’s tiny part in this. Sustainability-tech in India has been a slow burn, Radhika Choudary has been involved in Solar since 2014 – at that time the market wasn’t ready – but starting to pick up now quiete rapidly – especially in the EV space, with big strides being made by entrepreneurs such as Avinash Sharma and Pulkit Khurana ( see below video ):

Pulkit is CEO of a battery exchange startup, BatterySmart, with a tech platform to enable EV vehicle owners to seamlessly replace and exchange their rechargeable EV batteries has grown from 100 to 13,000 batter replacements in a year. Interestingly, Pulkit has taken modularity?to an extreme lelve, by creating reusable components which after a variety of combinations, extends the number of EV vehicles serviceable by his company to over 200+ different models!?Avinash , CEO of ElectricPE, has aggregated all the latest, most relevant and contextual, EV charging stations in major cities to a point where he has now listed about 30k unique charging points.??

Another EV entrepreneur, Sameer Aggarwal Agarwal, CEO of RevFi,?helps T3 city inhabitants to finance 2 and 3 wheeler EVs ( e.g., EV auto rickshaws ) and it truly is amazing how his customers lives are positively impacted because save 2-3x money by saving on fuel costs ….and as a result they have evolved from financially ( excluded?à?included ) status. ( Fun fact: majority of EVs in rural India are from virtually unknown brands because of a failure on traditional vehicle manufacturers to capture the hyperlocal nuances – which only reiterates the requirement for hyper localization ).

These are great examples of local direct impact, but it doesn’t always need to be that way. There are plenty of ‘Made in India – but sold to the world’ SaaS startups – according to Shivani Nagpaul , head of EY Tech advisory for India , there are 84K SaaS startups out of whih 150 are unicorns, and from which another 50-70 have hit the $100M ARR milestone. Darwinbox – HR Automation founded by Rohit Chennamaneni , Leadsquared – journey centric CRM founded by Nilesh Patel ( see his interview below ), and Tablespace founded by Srinivas Prasad , are great examples of this. They are creating wealth which in turn gets ploughed back into the entrepreneurs via angel funding.?

There are so many others just like Nilesh, Rohit and Srinvas - most of who are from young, hungry middle class backgrounds - which provides an indisputable level of grit and tenatiousness.

Take Kedar Kulkarni, an extremely soft spoken young graduate from IIT Madras, ( btw - it is not going unnoticed that IIT Madras , and the city of Chennai in general, is churning out some real heavy hitters of late), who has built a profitable SaaS company which has implemented KYC for 9% of the world’s population. Hear his amazing accomplishment here...

Key to this is the community surrounding Kedar – from his alma mater at IIT Madras, to the TiE community in Chennai, rest of India, and globally - where he has been able to incorporate presence in Palo Alto and raise from top tier funds like NEA - and he is the first to acknowledge that he wouldn’t be where he is today without the TiE ecosystem.

When Suresh introduced the TGS100, a compendium of ‘global’ SaaS startups across various sectors, with a vast majority of them from Telangana, it signaled the kind of attitude India needs to redevelop – and how angel and seed funding is so key to catalyzing innovation. TiE Angels, led by Shankar Ram, ( see his video below), are certainly leading the way through their new unified platform which creates a cohesively uniting major TiE chapters such as Boston, Atlanta, SoCal and Silicon Valley ( the four biggest ) and allows them to exchange notes/investments and unify as a single unit ( more importantly, a single line of the CAP table ) if they invest.?

My favorite, very touching, moment of the conference was when the TiE global President, BJ Arun , spontaneously told the audience about the impact of TiE in his own personal success, culminating in him touching Kanwal’s feet on stage...to a standing ovation of 3,000 people in the main room! incredible, and doesn’t get more Indian than that!

Is Kanwal’s assertion that we need to get from 150k entrepreneurs, to 1M , to 10M realistic? He very much encouraged the room to know so given India’s previous place as the world’s largest economy. But, we must always remind ourselves that Earth, the Human Spirit, Ahimsa must be at the center of it all.?

Thank you to the amazing vibrant community of TiE Hyderabad, for an amazing event, where we were taken to the Stars and also back to ground. It will be tough to live up to what they did. In his opening remarks, Suresh ( TiE Hyderbad leader) likened the conference base to Everest base camp, where it was all about meeting, igniting thousands of conversations , learning, teaching, and taking! ( FYI - see Shantanu N. in the bottom left listening intently to Suresh ) ... and to say his vision came through is certainly an understatement!

In closing, I will hope no one ever forgets the Maverick Effect, Harish is an often unspoken about pillar of the Indian Tech industry - not because he's forgotten, but because he doesn't look for credit or attention.

India is approaching an inflexion point in the not too distant future, one of entrepreneurial abundance and innovation unbounded, and the question is can we learn to become ‘Dharmic entrepreneurs’ and in process, ensure we are fostering a collaborative, unselfish, ecosystem for the greater good of business, society, and above all nature. We should learn, and imbibe principles from the same model Harish evangelized through NASSCOM, where a community to advocate and partner with private and public sector alike moved the country forward.

Even though he deserves a mountain of credit for orchestrating it all - you ever will you hear Harish say, "Me or I", it is always, "We or Us". Respect. In his book, Harish in great detail highlights what made NASSCOM so successful in moving the IT industry forward – and we should study that and take the principles from it to scale out many more Maverick Effects, across every city, state, and country, across many subject areas - from tech to sustainability to social work.

Underlying this is the principle to be selfless, just like Harish himself, and the desire from within to give time and to put India first – which is what Indian entrepreneurs now need to figure out …