Back in full swing

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With the economy booming, entrepreneurs with overseas experience are relocating to India and are building companies with cross-border models that leverage technology and skills while catering to customers across the world. Most of these ‘big-ticket’ entrepreneurs relocating to India are from top-notch universities and blue chip corporates in the US.

Take Harvard Business School graduate Naveen Tewari for instance, he co-founded InMobi, a technology company for mobile advertising networks that is now the second largest network globally behind Google’s AdMob.
Speaking about his journey, Naveen says, “To be compared to some of the big product companies such as Google and Apple is even more gratifying specially since InMobi has managed to grow from the emerging markets and take its stance on the developed nations as well.”
Naveen feels that with more and more US returned entrepreneurs coming in, the Indian start-up ecosystem is surging in the global arena. “So far, it has been the Silicon Valley that has been giving birth to large successful product companies and now India is being put on the map. With InMobi, this is exactly what happened. We adopted a reverse market strategy. We will be seeing more of this trend in the future, since countries like India have the strength of a large user base. However, to tap this, companies need to understand the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the country,” he says.
The pace of change in the start-up ecosystem is something that most returning entrepreneurs are buoyed about. Ashwin Damera, who founded Travel Guru in 2005, has lived through the entire lifecycle of a start-up from early inception to the sale of a venture aimed at the local market. Similarly, Gaurang Shah, co-founder and CEO of Digital Signage Network (DSN), left a high-flying job with McKinsey when he hit upon a business idea while vacationing in Mumbai and has now made it bigger than he had thought. Shah and Damera are examples of a growing breed of Indians who are coming back to take part in India’s economic success story. “I knew the minute I struck upon this venture that I wasn’t going back and I’m proud to have made it happen here,” says Shah.
The most important factor in the return of such skilled technologists to India is the booming Indian economy and the huge opportunities that it provides for entrepreneurship. “These returnees are bringing with them a knowledge of western markets, contacts with the West, and a knowledge of entrepreneurship. This is fertilising the local technology ecosystem. It is changing India’s attitude about risk taking and entrepreneurship. India is becoming a global R&D hub. Within five years, a series of Silicon Valley-class firms will emerge,” says Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American technology entrepreneur, who is the senior research associate at Harvard Law School and the director of research at Duke University.