Delhi pricked the Bengaluru bubble

The conventional wisdom is that Bengaluru is India’s Silicon Valley. It’s the cradle of India’s tech revolution. First there was Infosys and Wipro on the IT services side. Then when startups become cool and hip, the default location to get it all started was also Bengaluru. 

Take the leaders across sectors, and you’ll see they belong to Bengaluru — Flipkart, InMobi, Swiggy, PhonePe, Myntra, Ola, Amazon, Unacademy, Byju’s…and much more. 

But of late, it looks like something has changed. There’s now a sentiment that Bengaluru is for people who “want to” build startups, but Delhi is for people who build businesses. 

Delhi companies are the ones who seem to be gutsier, more resilient, and stronger. The list of tech companies that have gone public — Zomato, Paytm, Mamaearth, Infoedge, Delhivery, have one thing in common, i.e Delhi. 

Why is this distance so wide? Do cities really influence businesses that much?

Our guests for this episode have stories that might make you agree. 

Our first guest is Prashant Singh, who’s the Head of Product at JAR, in Bengaluru. He’s spent 20 years in Delhi, where he set up his own startup and sold it to Paytm. He’s now in Bengaluru, and he’s not convinced that a city can affect a company’s future…but he remembers the early building days of Delhi – a city with a get-thing-done attitude and massive “ops chops.”

Our second guest is Arnav Gupta, the Director of Engineering at JioCinema. He has also founded and sold his own edtech startup, as well as led the engineering and product for the Zomato app. Arnav worked in Delhi before VCs pulled him to Bengaluru – and now that he’s spent a few years here, he knows what sort of companies only Bengaluru can give birth to, and why. 

Joined by hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, our guests discuss the unique cultural context each city adds to a business, why it’s causing a rivalry, and what this means for the Indian startups ecosystem, going forward.

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