A recent article in The Economist said that in 2015, 44% of newly registered businesses in Germany were founded by people with foreign passports. Leave alone Germany, this is a pattern that one sees in many parts of the world. Take a look at those who have started up in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area; those elsewhere in the USA, even Bengaluru, or Mumbai. In all these places, you will see that the number of people who are not local, i.e. people who are not native to that place, are self-employed in a percentage that is disproportionate to their percentage in the population.
One reason why this happens in India could be that when Indians move to a different city for work, they tend to naturally gravitate towards people who belong to the same community. In a country like India, with so much diversity, a shared language or subculture is a great adhesive. They end up spending many hours together every day. They slave away together, usually at a large technology company, or a call centre, or a similar business process outsourcing unit. And then, after work, they hang out together too. When this happens, it is not surprising they dream up plans of doing their own thing, because they are so frustrated with their current lot at work. In some cases, there may also be the angle of them feeling discriminated against, which tends to add to the frustration of working under someone’s ‘yoke’, and quit to start up. So, they do. India’s start-up scene sees a large number of sets of co-founders who usually belong to the same community and come from the same college or company. This is, of course, above and beyond the factor that certain communities in India are predisposed towards starting up on their own, irrespective of which city they go to.
For many other outsiders, they default to being self-employed because they have no other choice. Outside of certain sectors, it is usually very hard for outsiders to find the sort of job that they want. They either find something that is well below their level of education or competence. Or they end up in jobs that are not commensurate with their skill set at all. These are the ones who usually then start something on their own, with something that they can do better than the locals because of where they come from. An eatery or restaurant that specialises in the cuisine of where they come from, or a trading house that brings to big cities things that are cheaper in their hometowns — say furniture, or raw materials of any sort. They are, in every sense of the word, startups too.
So a rather useful piece of advice one can give to anyone who wants to start up, especially in India, is that they should get out of their hometown and go somewhere else.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
