India Is Becoming Its Own Silicon Valley

[Music] [Music] [Applause] good morning all so what does telemarketing selling products over telephone social graces what are social graces good morning thank you you do the inbound call opening you say I'm calling you on behalf of Alec my name is Asha how may I help you good morning welcome to dr. wellness my name is Krishna how may I help you perfect this is a call center in Bangalore call centers were among the first outsourced tech companies to appear in India and they're still here good morning this is Krishna how may I help you it's a location of BFW in Bangalore call centre work has been out sourced from America to India for decades but this call center is different hello because many of their clients are actually Indian when we actually looked at the growth of India there were a lot of domestic companies that were actually you know that were you know growing you decided to do just the domestic market just companies that are in India okay and that actually did one does the fact that transact Global has found success by serving largely its own market is an indication of just how far the market has come India's IT sector has evolved so far out of its call center beginnings that it's now a 150 billion dollar industry this is the corporate headquarters of emphasis one of the biggest IT services firms in all of Bangalore why did India emerge and Bangalore specifically as sort of the site for this kind of growth we've always had in India a fairly large stem population right we've had a history of mathematics and science and engineering and medicine back in the eighties IBM was launching a PC Microsoft was launching the desktop operating system and computers are weighing mainstream so there was an opportunity for the Indian talent to be taken to where the work was which is United States as telecom infrastructure became more stable that led to this development of the offshore services that provided a much faster way to write software because if you can do it pretty much 24 hours a day and then came y2k what was the problem with y2k that India had to face the problem was the Western world had written programs that couldn't handle 0/0 at the end how do you make sure that the computers don't fail when they come across a zero zero that's the year 2000 year 2000 some members of Congress are worried that the computer glitch will lead to dangerous problems on the world's infrastructure that's when a lot of our Indian companies that were young innocent short the world they had the ability to fix problems and do it in a way that you can actually afford and over the last 25 years you know this is kind of become a massive hub for global companies to build software that essentially runs the world Indian tech workers are a worldwide phenomenon with 850,000 entering the global workforce every year a primary source of this talent are the country's 23 Indian Institutes of Technology they're among the most competitive engineering schools in the world ApS was set up in the 50s as institutions for engineering education and research modeled after MIT and Cambridge mother things so this is Indian sort of people get in here and after they finish their undergraduate went they sought after by all kinds of [Music] what does it like teaching them do you think one of these kids is gonna like maybe do something but it seems for some of these kids their dream is no longer to work in the u.s. instead they prefer to innovate right here in India there is an inherent sense of wanting to contribute to India's GDP and there's a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship and starting on your own this push towards entrepreneurship has become the primary focus as basic software engineering skills are no longer enough in response to this shifting landscape a number of startup incubators have sprung up to nurture creative ideas out of mathematically built Minds Science and Technology are the backbone of Indian education but if you want to go from a back-end coder to a front office visionary you got to learn how to sell so I've come to an incubator for startups called commencement which coaches would be disruptors in the art of the pitch how important is the pitch which is the moment of truth just having an engineering degree is not enough if you're going to build the business builders and the job creators of tomorrow they have to think about the world as a market I grafton early to work really coming from the company oshio water fix my gadgets and I do back change you know the a lot of gadgets are getting introduced to India so how we how we how we are actually we are creating a basically customer convenience through this web portal with this Butera video walk to where you can understand how to pay using change paid welcome to paradise hotel I would like to stay here for two days I don't have money do you accept change pay yes I would like to work on that you do this all the time right what is sort of common about the sort of shortcomings of how people tend to pitch ideas like this yeah I think it's so the big one is how do you tell a story this is what you get from people who know too much they've been an expert in delivering projects making products in a very corporate environment but I think we have to also come up with a solid business model which is innovative hello I'm from music money labs I'm go pal we are a music technology company that teaches scales music education it works very simply I mean you just put it in front of you and start singing and it tells if your frequency is off or if you're off the beat we show you detailed breakdown of how can you improve and you can track your progress over time in India you have so much diversity in music and my motivation is to build digital infrastructure for the Indian heritage this is cool cuz it sort of like very very culturally Indian things becoming potentially like a globally useful product but also it takes a non music person it figured out a new way to do easy to do music it didn't take a very social zuckerberg to figure out the social network god the stars in his eyes as you can see for many of these would-be entrepreneurs the hope is to one day join the fast growing list of Silicon Valley sized success stories who make up much of India's Nason venture capitalist culture I met at a Golf Club in Mumbai and I am playing around with one of the top pcs in the country he's been named one of the 50 most influential business people in all of India and he's funded some of the most successful online ventures that this country has ever seen so what would your big like first success back in India nice sitting in my office met one of these sort of fellows who does the traditional matchmaking like arranged marriages yeah it occurred to me that why not put this stuff up on the internet and so that idea was born and we started out with shaadi no compa there you go what were the next investments that you made about 2011 I met a young guy called bhavish he was looking at raising some capital for on-demand cab service we through your app and so I wrote him a check in 2011 and today of course the company's worth close to five billion dollars Wow would you say that the texting in India is at an inflection point in any fashion Indians have tasted blood and given the cultural advantages that India has in many ways I think it's a foregone conclusion that Indians will drive the coming tech revolution you're already seeing it as India's tech sector grows more sophisticated its entrepreneurs are becoming more ambitious driving development aimed at saving our lives and the environment oh wow I'm in like a operating room I can actually see my arm it's brown because we're in India yeah you can do the complete advanced cardiac life support protocol and you really feel oh my god that's a thing that's a real thing he does the real thing yes yes amazing while many technology companies here are focused on serving the world's economy I've come to the garage of Alti green a start-up that's trying to take a hands-on approach at solving some of India's problems in India there are 1.2 million people dying early every year because of poor air quality so what do you guys do we allow people to take their existing vehicle into our place convert into a hybrid aha at $1,000 saving 25% in fuel and 25% of emissions sure I mean are you trying to compete with like a Tesla no Tesla is still selling under thousand-dollar costs that doesn't work for India what we're doing here is you're democratizing the use of electric technology entrepreneurship is exploding here with over 5,000 verified startups currently operating nationwide projections are so good in fact that the blue-chip prospects who originally left India to succeed in America are beginning to return I understand most of you guys studied in the US or lives in the u.s. at some point until like why did you come back look at populations in India right you believe something that could potentially be used by a billion people and it's a lot like the Wild West the rules are being made I notice very very cosmopolitan now there are people from not just all over India people from all over the world if you lived abroad and come back I had a job offer interest from Google Mayo but I met some very nice people in Bangla that time and I thought that why not give it a shot so you gave up working at Google to come back it was startup given sort of the increasing amount of like anti-immigrant feelings in the United States does that contribute to your decision to move here you know Trump coming power has not been good for anybody and I think that is sort of forcing the pool to Bangalore we're coming home the Megan thumb happen too many the future of technology doesn't lie in Silicon Valley but in places like Bangalore recent evidence suggests that this is already happening as emerging economies like India's make up almost 60 percent of global GDP according to the IMF opportunities among software where all the valuation lies is now our calling card as a country Bangalore is a city primed to emerge as a global leader in tech with its nation's investment in education and innovation paving the way for a potential overthrow of Silicon Valley as the center of the tech universe what babblers got going for it is the scale of India it's like 1 billion people right now so even if you got like one out of two thousand being engineers right you've got a large population to make from yeah well the US and Europe continue to be the leading spenders the center of gravity of the global economy is seen to be moving east how did you eyes I found companies when I was 10 years old I was very curious and electronics and technology so I told of the drone which can detect and destroy landmines go on consequently Asia will account for at least 25 percent of global ER and DS spend before the turn of this decade and that defines the age that we live in and I want to congratulate all of you who have made this possible the fastest-growing segment in the entire IT BPM industry [Applause] you [Music]

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Keywords: VICE on HBO India Silicon Valley, VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, vice news 2019, Bangalore, bangalore tech hub, India tech innovation, Krishna Andavalou, tech boom, IT india, Krishna Andavalou vice, infrastructure India, bangalore work, call center bangalore, tech companies India, international, vice international, transact global, vice on HBO season 6, india tech support, india technology, Silicon valley

Id: YHVNWtBuDVk

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020