Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been helping review applications for next year’s Startup Leadership Program (SLP). After a successful year in Boston and Silicon Valley, the SLP (formerly known as the TiE Leadership Program) is opening new chapters in Delhi, Bangalore, Beijing, San Diego and New York. I’ve been involved in evaluating applicants for three of these chapters: Boston, Bangalore and Delhi and have noticed several remarkable differences between applicants to the India chapters and those to the Boston chapter. An off-hand comment I made on Facebook raised requests from some of my friends that I expound on these differences in a blog post.
First though, some background. The SLP is intended to groom current and future startup CEOs by assembling a top-tier class of entrepreneurial leaders. Through a combination of flexible mentorship and peer learning, SLP aims to inculcate lessons in many aspects of running a business, from ideation and fundraising to commercial deal negotiations and building a killer sales and marketing operation. The ideal demographic for the program consists of motivated professionals between the ages of 25 and 35 that are either working for a startup or developing a business idea.
India has had an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture for several hundred years, but not in the same way that high-growth entrepreneurship is understood in the US. The ‘Silicon Valley-style’ of building high-growth businesses in short time windows using angel and venture capital (i.e. other peoples’ money) has only taken root in India in perhaps the last decade. Although it has captured the imagination of many young, motivated professionals in India, it’s still far from mainstream; for most college and business school graduates, success means conforming to the norm of stable employment in a large (ideally multinational) corporation. Several of the following points arise from this status quo.
So without further ado, here are some of the more interesting differences I observed:
- Age and professional experience. The India chapter applicants tended to cluster more around the ends of the demographic range relative to the US applicants. The older cluster was fairly senior in their organization (most of the time a large company), whereas the younger cluster had graduated college in the last two or three years and has worked in several small or medium-sized companies.
- Entrepreneurial experience. The younger cluster of applicants had often done multiple startups already and generally conformed to a sophisticated serial entrepreneur stereotype substantially similar to that seen in the Valley. The older cluster of applicants had often never done a startup and most applicants in it were just thinking about a startup. Particularly in the older cluster, there were several applicants thinking of startups far afield from their previous experience. For example, it wasn’t uncommon to see someone with 10-12 years of business process outsourcing experience thinking of forming a clean tech startup in the next 12-18 months. This pattern of majorly switching fields wasn’t often observed in the US.
- Motivations. Both younger and older applicants in India frequently viewed entrepreneurship as a means of building a new India. It may seem that stating this is part of playing the application game, but this fact came through not just in words but in their past entrepreneurship and leadership actions as well. In the US on the other hand, the most common motivations for entrepreneurship I’d heard were either making a difference or implicitly, making money.
- Startup obsession. The SLP application asks applicants for an example of a time when they made a genuine difference to an individual or a group. Most US applicants and a few India applicants took this as a signal to talk about community service and volunteering experiences, whose immediate impact is measurable. India applicants who are full-time entrepreneurs, however, frequently cited their current startup or their previous startup as the response to this question. Whether or not this was true, to me it indicated a much higher degree of obsession with their startups and indeed, a view that the startup is wedded to their ability to make an impact and by extension, to their significance. For venture investors looking at India, this may indicate a lower ability for the founders to separate themselves from their business.
Applying to leadership programs like SLP resembles applying to business school in some respects. Applicants may perceive the process as an a elaborate game, where dropping the right buzzwords in response to purposely ill-defined prompts increases your chance of acceptance. The above observations are only intended to sketch out general differences I observed. Nobody should take anything I said above as specific tips on what to put in their SLP application.
Regardless of what India or US entrepreneurs said in their applications, it was clear that even though Valley-style entrepreneurship may be new to India, the caliber of applicants to SLP is at least as high as that of US-based applicants. Moreover, India applicants seem to have a risk-taking profile and sense of purpose not commonly seen in the US, which gratifies me and only reinforces in my mind what an exciting time it is to be an entrepreneur in India.
Pitch decks are usually associated with a specific request (I refuse to use
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But first, a brief recap of the facts. Some of my readers may remember that I described Tofu as an online service aimed at the Indian wedding market, specifically around gifts. I’m equally happy to report that I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect demonstration to myself of Atomized Enterprises as I had conceived them. After several lucky strokes of serendipity and many late nights, I’m happy to report that Project Tofu is now in private beta and stands at the threshold of launch as a service to the public.