Funding crunches, massive losses, and employee churn: India’s startup sector’s growing pains are no different from those of the Silicon Valley’s.
Yet, there are huge differences, too.
Rahul Ganjoo, vice-president—technology, Snapdeal, has seen the best and worst of both worlds. He has traversed the two very different ecosystems of New Delhi, where Snapdeal is based, and Silicon Valley, home to some of the biggest names in the global startup system, including Twitter, where he worked before joining Snapdeal.
A product of Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT) and BITS Pilani, Ganjoo moved to San Francisco in 2006. What he expected to be a short stay turned into a nearly decade-long run in the Bay Area. “I lived nine years in one apartment thinking that, next year, I will move anyway,” Ganjoo said. During his time in the US, he went from working for technology consultancy Thoughtworks to cyber security firm Symantec to blog solution provider Six Apart. Ganjoo eventually bagged a stint as technical program manager at one of America’s buzziest startups, Twitter, half-a-year before it went public in 2013.
Since August 2015, he has been with Snapdeal, one of India’s 10 unicorns (private startups worth over $1 billion). And he is seeing the west’s story of struggle play out in the east. In a conversation with Quartz in San Francisco, he stressed that the sector is way too nascent to get things right from the get-go. Startups need room to make their own mistakes and learn from them.
Edited excerpts:
Does bringing in people with Silicon Valley experience help when startups are trying to scale?
A lot of things with Indian e-commerce are so different from problems that, say, Amazon may have faced here. Here (in the US), the infrastructure is totally reliable, right? They don’t have to worry about FedEx, for example. Out there (in India), there are at least seven courier companies that started off after I went to India and they’re no longer in operation now. So, somebody from Amazon cannot go and translate that. He has to now think about supply chain very deeply.
What are some of the problems that e-commerce companies face that are unique to India?
This is not a general comment on Indians, but I don’t know how much people value design aesthetics in an app. They’re still primarily a price-sensitive audience. Literally, the only thing that moves the needle for anybody is pricing and discounting.
In terms of challenges, I feel infrastructure is a huge one. Predictability, like how do you account for a Ganpati (festival) in Bombay (Mumbai) disrupting service for three days or a Chennai strike in some warehouse? There are always these one-off events that can just derail your (plans).
The thing that we celebrate a lot in India, jugaad, actually hurts more than it helps. We’ll always look at these small hacks to get our stuff done but it may not be for the greater good. You’ll drive on the wrong side on a one-way (road) and be happy you reached early but you screwed 1,000 peoples’ commute. That is the jugaad we always do: A lot of the focus initially is on small hacks versus systemic fixes. A lot of companies (in India) just let it linger, so when they get to a bigger size, they have a lot of underlying issues that must be cleaned up.
Amazon is a clear leader in the Indian market today. What is it getting right?
Who’s talking about Amazon’s profitability right now? In some months, they spend $150 million on marketing. If an Indian startup did that, (people) will be saying “they’re so arrogant, they don’t have any business…