After ping pong tables, motivational posters and casual dress codes, India’s tech startups are following California’s Silicon Valley lead and embracing the “fail fast” culture credited with fueling creativity and success in the US.
Taking failure as a norm is a major cultural shift in India, where high-achieving children are typically expected to take steady jobs at recognized firms. A failed venture hurts family status and even marriage prospects.
However, that nascent acceptance, fueled by returning engineers and billions of US dollars in venture fund investment, is for many observers a sign that India’s US$150 billion tech industry is coming of age, moving from a back office powerhouse to a creative force.
Srikanth Chunduri returned to India after studying at Duke University in the US, and is now working on his second venture.
“I think what’s encouraging is that acceptance of failure is increasing, despite the very deep-rooted Asian culture where failure is a big no,” he said.
The shift has come about as engineers began returning from Silicon Valley to cash in on India’s own boom, as hundreds of millions of Indians go online.
To be sure, the pace of change is slow in altering a culture that has produced top software engineers for decades, but — as yet — no Google Inc, Apple Inc or Twitter Inc. The freedom to fail remains restricted to a small portion of India’s corporate fabric, booming tech cities like Bengaluru or Gurgaon, outside New Delhi.
There is also still no revolving door with big corporations, whom one senior Bengaluru headhunter described as beating down salaries of executives who dared to risk — but then came back.
However, big homegrown successes, such as e-tailers Flipkart and Snapdeal, or mobile advertising firm InMobi, as well as the multi-billion US dollar firms set up by former executives from the likes of Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and Google, have created role models, encouraging graduates to take risks.
Meanwhile, billions of US dollars in investor funding have fed the sector.
External cash — as opposed to more traditional bank loans tied to individuals, or family savings — makes a difference. Failing there can involve walking away Silicon Valley-style, not years of court proceedings in a nation with no formal bankruptcy law.
Between 70 and 90 percent of startups are estimated to fail.
However, the biggest test might be the first bust after the boom.
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