My guest today is Anand Chandrasekaran, Partner at General Catalyst. While India has become a popular investment hub in recent years, it wasn't the case just shy of a decade ago. Even more rare were investors that spent equivalent amounts of time in India and the Bay Area. Anand has a unique perspective, and it's why I wanted to bring him on to Return on India. He's operated and invested in both the East and the West. He has spent time at formidable players in both countries, such as Facebook, Yahoo, Bharti Airtel and Snapdeal, and coalesced those perspectives into over 80 investments prior to joining GC. For that, Anand is widely recognized as one of the top seed angel investors in the Indian ecosystem. Today we went wide and deep. We unpacked the different phases of India's growth, the challenges of building in India, and how India compares to the US ecosystem with some insight for the outlook ahead. Please enjoy my conversation with Anand Chandrasekaran.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:02:50] - [First question] - The Cowboy, Jio and Growth phases of India’s startup ecosystem
[00:06:18] - Moving from basic infrastructure to a creative hub for entrepreneurs
[00:11:04] - How we should appropriately think about India
[00:14:54] - Startups are seen as the solution for building a great country in India
[00:17:47] - Thinking about the size of the opportunity set that sits beneath each of India’s innovation archetypes
[00:19:55] - Characteristics of companies that are building natively for India
[00:23:32] - Why differentiate between India’s consumers using the english and hindi word for India
[00:25:47] - How to build successful companies depending on which Indian consumer you’re addressing
[00:28:59] - Reacting to the US statement that Indians make great employees but not leaders
[00:32:57] - Why the west erroneously refers to India as the developing world
[00:34:46] - What the US ecosystem can learn from India
[00:36:30] - Bullish factors about India that the rest of the world doesn’t understand
[00:39:27] - The bear case for India that people may not be aware of
[00:41:46] - What will have to go right or wrong in the future to elevate or hurt India’s success
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Return on India