00:29:53 · Bhaskar Ghosh
[00:29:53] S1: I think there was growth all around. There was prosperity and growth all over all over the world. I think a few things happened. I think Internet and mobile phones changed everything. So people were much more connected, not just social media, but through commerce. If you look at India, India basically hopscotched and went from one generation to fifth generation through mobile phone infrastructure and the use of mobile phone, number one. Secondly, India and Brazil did very foundational work and went from a first generation to seventh generation for its payment infrastructure. All the stuff you know really, really well. And that has caused feedback loops and network effects in not only bringing people out of poverty, but in expanding the middle class. So if worldwide there is more growth and more prosperity getting created, then the answer is yes. It so happens that the enterprise software market has grown remarkably in the last twenty years during a time of mostly peace. And of the middle class rising in many companies, rise of China, rise of India, rise of the Far East of of Southeastern Asia. I don't know, I can't predict the future well enough to tell you that in the in the, you know, in the presence of climate change and in the presence of the current geopolitical situations, how global prosperity will grow. But I think TAM is also tied to that, which is probably something that you're also bringing up. Yeah. Don't know the answer, but that's the... How the question should be posed.
00:31:28 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:31:28] S0: And and then the next thought is, you know, the India US corridor. It saw in last twenty five years the emergence of IT services companies. I think that's why, you know, India had a what worked for India was highly qualified labor that could do IT services and various kind of services available in The US and that was a tailwind behind TCS Infosys and all the services companies that got created. In the initial part of 2010, Zoho Freshworks captured a bunch of use cases starting with ticketing between the India US corridor because as the new economy was growing, new companies are getting built up, they needed software like ticketing and much other software. We are seeing the third era, if you have to say the first era was IT services, second era was some products, SaaS. So what is this third era and how much companies can we see, how big companies can we see in this era and what needs to happen for that to happen?
00:32:39 · Bhaskar Ghosh
[00:32:39] S1: That's a great question. Just to like frame the conversation well, remember, and you and I talked about it, in my past life, some of my best teams during my LinkedIn days and my Yahoo days sat in Bangalore and Hyderabad. American companies, whether it's Oracle, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Yahoo, it's Google, it's Facebook, have had phenomenal... And you know, before that Cisco, analogue devices has had amazing core product team sitting there. Not QA, not support. Not like what we call wink wink, second class functionality, but core functionality. Secondly, if you look at amazing deep tech companies, whether it's Nutanix, whether it's Rubrik, whether it's ThoughtSpot, whether it is Qubole, whether it is today Databricks, have had amazing engineering teams there. I just want to call out, these are all core, deeply difficult software pieces that were sitting there. The other thing I'm very excited about India. So, you know, I I gave a very engineering centric view of the world, it's a bottom up view. So let me finish that first. I am very excited about the technical talent and leadership I saw in quote unquote Indian native companies like RazorPay, like PhonePe, like Swiggy, like Flipkart. I think those are very important things to call out. The reason being, these are the kind of cadre of engineers and leaders who are thinking about much deeper systems problems, AI problems, data problems. And I feel that's where a lot of the heart of Silicon Valley lies here. That those level of problems, people have to know how to solve them, want to solve them, and want to do deeper things which lead to technical modes and network effects. I am still optimistic that will keep on happening in India, not just SaaS. So if I look at my portfolio, some of our best engineers of my portfolio, whether it's in Rocketlane or Usher or Yugabyte or Pankaj Patel's company, John Timers company, Nile, and I can keep going on and on. The best engineering teams and the major part is all sitting in Bangalore and Madras. So to me, the score daring and technical depth that these teams bring in is really important for the future of the India US corridor. SaaS, indeed, departmental SaaS, I see more of that happening. Vertical SaaS, I've seen a bit less happen out of India.
00:35:02 · Bhaskar Ghosh
Because when you're building in India, selling in The US, and you're not selling generic enterprise software, you need much deeper domain expertise of the vertical you sell into. That's probably needs to scale in India more. To me, I think India should continue to accelerate SaaS companies because of the companies you pointed out and the companies I pointed out. And you gave an example of Atomicwork, which is a fantastic company. And there are several such examples. I would like to see more examples like that of core enterprise SaaS functionality being developed in India. The question then becomes, what sits where? What you and I both talked about is, you see a secular movement of those founders coming to the Bay Area for multiple reasons. One is they want to be closer to the AI wave, which surely is the deepest here and the highest here right now. And there is no sign of that changing anytime soon. Second and equally important is the go to market part. So I think starting with Freshworks and Zoho, I think now, I think the field is just getting formed. I think all these amazing founders who have probably never been in India before, I mean, our amazing founder, Rocket Lane, moved from India, was in Utah and then we are like, hey, you gotta move. She's move to the Bay Area. He's finally moved to the Bay Area. And we are very proud of Rocketlane, of the technical team sitting in Chennai. It's amazing and Sri is amazing. But he's happy to build his go to market team out here. I think these are the specificities of the India US corridor in our area, which is software, that I think is still being worked out. What is amazing is, you know, we have a small investment in a company called Thesis, which is in the software around design cycles, workflow software. A lot of the AI infused enterprise software ideas around tooling, around workflows for every department, every persona. We are seeing more and more come from India. That's very, very, very, very positive. What would I like to see happen? I would like to see much more applied AI AI infused work happening sitting in Bangalore. It's starting. We were just there a month ago. We did a bunch of events with my friend who's the CTO of Cloudflare. It was amazing, exciting, phenomenal talent. Just want to see more companies. Coming from there, want to see more funding from our Indian VC friends.
00:37:31 · Bhaskar Ghosh, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
I'm friends with everybody there, all these great funds. So the question then remains, it's pretty clear the tech part will continue to be built really well from these these ecosystems. The question is product mindedness. The design aspect of product, the geometry of the product, and then network effects around developer uptake or customer uptake and go to market. To me, those are the areas that are still being proven out. Because when these founders, for example, and so many of your founders are moving here, what will the go to market team scale as? Where will the heads of sales set? Where will marketing be done in terms of actual branding? To me, I'd love to see faster and deeper execution there. So that's on the enterprise software side. Is it okay if we talk about services side also? Yes. Your and my passion is this future facing thing, which is about AI enabled services that you and I feel very strongly about and we are debating a lot of questions about structure and the nature of the returns and stuff, which is exactly the topic to think about. I would love to see deeply disruptive AI enabled services companies coming from India and based in India. Why? So much of [00:38:46] S0: Serving India or serving US?
00:38:46 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Bhaskar Ghosh
[00:38:46] S0: Serving India or serving US? [00:38:48] S1: So think about not serving India, I would like it to serve India also. We have the India market part that we haven't talked about, which I don't invest in, which is I think a very fertile area. But in the context of our discussion, everything is about serving the multinational market. So I would say massively Europe, increasingly Middle East and surely massively USA. It is about building in India and selling into the whole world. Right? And you just mentioned people selling into Australia at the beginning of this conversation. I really have this dream and ambition, and I want to do my bit to help out and invest and even incubate companies out of India, which is in the AI enabled services area. AI enabled software services, AI enabled non software services. [00:39:33] S0: Can you give some examples in the portfolio? In