Startup Bharat: @naval & @balajis

The full Clubhouse session in text

Thread Continued
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Naval: The Boston ecosystem has always regretting that they've sort of lost these companies.

India has to make sure it doesn't lose as entrepreneurs. And the way to do that is to give them the freedom to innovate. Everyone should be an entrepreneur.
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Everyone has a phone should be able to get a job through the phone. There's one level beyond that, that comes after that, which is everyone has a phone, should be a creator for the phone. And that's what platforms are enabling.
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There's the old, famous New Yorker cartoon with a dog on the internet, on the computer and it says on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Well, yeah, on the internet, nobody knows who you are or where you are or what you are. All they care about is your output
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And that is incredibly liberating for a country that's so large and has such a good English speaking population, India can win, it just has to remove shackles.
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There's nothing to add. There are things to take away that are in the way of people who want to create excellent celebrity creators.
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Question by Vishesh: Right now, SaaS startups are big in India, like KhataBook and PagarBook, but do you think we need technology startups in India, like Open AI or crypto and VR also, how do we come up with new technologies?
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KhataBook and PagarBook are like payroll management and personal ledgers
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Naval's Answer: Elon Musk got started with Zip2. There's absolutely no shame whatsoever, and in fact, there's good things in doing the blocking and tackling SaaS company if that's your passion, or if that's what you're good at, you should go after that
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You don't have to try to, like push the frontier of AI. In fact, if you get a win under your belt and you've got some capital, then it makes it easier to take a bigger swing with the next one.
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Sam Altman before he did Open AI, he was at Whitefield as president of YC before that, but his company before there was Looped, which was the local locality social network.

Elon Musk, before he did Tesla and SpaceX, he did Zip2, which was like an online yellow pages.
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So it's, it's a natural progression for entrepreneurs. And I would argue, even for investors, sort of seeing myself. Is, we all start out doing the quote unquote easy stuff, the financial stuff, the SaaS, the consumer plate, etc.
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But eventually we get bored that we all want to do something bigger with our lives. And so that's when we start going into rocketry and aircraft and crypto and VR and AI and so on.
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This is a natural progression. It's got to work their way up the chain, uh, do all the SaaS stuff to your heart's content, make a lot of money, gain a lot of expertise and then go looking for a meeting, and then you'll create the next level of things.
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Balaji: I think that's right. And I think, in particular there's just zero shame in doing basic India clones. That's fine. Go and do that. Knock yourself out, execute on that.
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If we're good at execution and then the next step will be obvious once you've got that first one. And that first one, it's actually pretty hard to get.
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Stay tuned for Part-II, Part-III...
Special thanks to @AHA1Shivam for recording the session and sharing it with everyone

Download the audio here: http://bit.ly/2XeOc0X 
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