The Neon Show
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
00:39:35 · Bhaskar Ghosh
[00:39:35] S1: the portfolio, we have a small investment in a company called Titan which is in the MSP IT role up area. We are very proud of our clinical trials company called Tilda which is about automation of clinical trials, which is now in the CRO space, which is in the research space, which is doing extremely well. We have a company called Loop, which is not based out of India, which is based out of here. Tilde has its engineering team largely sitting in India, so there is a strong India, but Loop is an amazing company in the entire payment cycle space for supply chain and invoicing. So very promising company, has built amazing software. And we have a bunch more, we have something in legal we can't talk about, maybe we will someday have something in the services aspect of travel that we can't talk about. But in the context of The US market, from USA, we have a lot of companies. Coming back to the India corridor, I would love to see, I mean, the expertise that is sitting in India at all levels, business level, exec level, product level, around all things services is phenomenal. Probably number one in the world. Why shouldn't the AI enabled revolution in those services industries not be happening from Bangalore and Pune and Chennai and Hyderabad? Would love to see that happen more. That will create a much larger talent pool going after this. We are very excited to see those bottom up seed investments, investments happen from Silicon Valley, some from New York. But that is a big area of ambition that I have and helping make that happen from out of India. So that, in a weird way, the AI enabled services tech, the thoughtfulness, the nucleus of disruption is coming from Bangalore itself. That would create a very interesting world. That where the Indian leaders, the Indian investors, the Indian engineers are not just thinking about it in a defensive way, that our industries will be affected by something from outside, but rather they are charting their own course of revolution and evolution sitting in India. Would love to see that happen and help make that happen even more.
00:41:51 · Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Bhaskar Ghosh
[00:41:51] S0: So let's imagine a new age AI services company, sitting out of India, maybe targeting BPO industry, right, and serving The US market, for example. Like how could that kind of company, you know, if you have to think first principle, grow their business in The US, and what would they replace? [00:42:14] S1: So if you look at the BPO companies, I don't know about the really small ones, but I have looked... Taken a look at the mid market a lot. You know, the state called Texas? Yeah. You go to the two cities called Houston and Dallas. Yeah. Huge number of the mid market Indian BPO companies CEOs are sitting in these two cities. So think about it, 90 of the employees, 95% of the employees are sitting in India. But the CEOs are often sitting in these two cities and some in New Jersey. Those are the places where I found it. That is not going to change. I think the same way they are hustling and growing BPO output about getting same analogy as what you and I just talked about in the context of SaaS. Same thing has to be true. That the go to market, the expansion factor of... So the sales and marketing discipline and landing mode has to happen sitting in USA more and more, as it's already been happening. But the actual AI enabled BPO and the services, large part of that headcount and the and kind of the disrupted model of delivering more with less and growing faster with less could happen sitting in India.
00:42:14 · Bhaskar Ghosh, Siddhartha Ahluwalia
[00:42:14] S1: So if you look at the BPO companies, I don't know about the really small ones, but I have looked... Taken a look at the mid market a lot. You know, the state called Texas? Yeah. You go to the two cities called Houston and Dallas. Yeah. Huge number of the mid market Indian BPO companies CEOs are sitting in these two cities. So think about it, 90 of the employees, 95% of the employees are sitting in India. But the CEOs are often sitting in these two cities and some in New Jersey. Those are the places where I found it. That is not going to change. I think the same way they are hustling and growing BPO output about getting same analogy as what you and I just talked about in the context of SaaS. Same thing has to be true. That the go to market, the expansion factor of... So the sales and marketing discipline and landing mode has to happen sitting in USA more and more, as it's already been happening. But the actual AI enabled BPO and the services, large part of that headcount and the and kind of the disrupted model of delivering more with less and growing faster with less could happen sitting in India. [00:43:27] S0: And let's think from first principle wise, right? So they are not building a new industry or they are not getting contracts from a new industry. They are getting contracts from existing industries, let's say banking in The US, where like a Bank of America or JP Morgan is outsourcing the BPO. [00:43:47] S1: Yep. Right? And to be fair, the BFSI sector is a massive sector.