You just walk out, and you come across this,
this building that we genuinely thought was abandoned.
We're about to embark on a 33 hour flight. Across the world to India.
Before I came to India, there was one word in my head to describe this country. Chaotic.
You only really experience the city if you're on a scooter, not in a car.
There's this picture that our side of the world has about India,
and you can blame Hollywood and you can blame just statistics without a lot of context.
But the truth is that our image of India is incomplete.
And I've struggled with this for years.
I know first hand how many tech companies are coming out of India. Many of them are
good friends of mine.. I know how much people in tech make and how much that
contrasts with the rest of the country.
I know how many of you watching are from India.
But why, why do so many companies come out of India?
What advantages do they have for being here? What kind of life do entrepreneurs
and startup employees live? When they're making 10 times what the rest of the country is making?
From the other side of the world,
we just don't understand it. I don't understand it. So I needed to experience India, myself.
I spent two weeks talking to founders,
experiencing Indian food and culture and discovering a new side of India,
a side of India that us Westerners hardly ever talk about, and that I had no idea was so big.
More importantly, I discovered how statistics just fail
miserably at painting a full picture of what India is like.
I discovered how this chaos that we perceive is really a pool of innovation for tech companies
and how technology is transforming this country. Neighborhood by neighborhood and city by city.
Back in 2017, we hired our first employee out of India,
this talented UX designer. And he told us his salary expectation was $4,000.
And I looked into every single statistic about Indian median income.
And I could not wrap my head around it.
The average adult in India makes around $2,600 per year. That's $220 a month. That means a
salary of $4,000 or $48,000 a year puts you well into the 10% of income for the country.
But there is so much more to this.
For starters, that $220 a month income would allow most people to live a comfortable life.
- I think my early salary, when I started
my career in VidPro I was getting paid maybe $300. Back then I was able to survive with that.I
got my own car. I used to drive like 40 kilometers up and down every day.
If you compare the price of groceries here in India,
they're about 70% cheaper for the same product of the same brand.
That bracket of 10% earners in India. That's 130 million
people. That's more than the entire population of these countries.
India is big, vast, it'll soon outgrow China as the most. Populated country in the world.
And there is that reality that Hollywood loves to exploit.
That's only part of India. What I experienced was high income cities like Bangalore or Chennai
where tech and startup jobs are giving people transformative income.
- Uh, there's a whole lot of
action on the markets. I've seen the city grow, literally grow, grow out right from a time when
we had just one place, which is the city center to go hang out. Now, there are so many micro markets.
India has not had the kind of exits that US has, but there have been some exit,
very high profile exit, that have minted millionaires overnight.
In 2021, India saw thousands of new tech startup companies founded and
46 new unicorms, a good chunk of those are based out of Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi.
You can see that concentration of companies, coffee shops and co-working spaces.
Do you know where we're going? Uh, the hotel.
ok, we can only withdraw 10,000 Rupees that's the max.
Can't get money from either my account, which means we have some dollars, not rupees.
We need to exchange elsewhere. I feel uneasy if I don't have any local currency
So the reason I'm working late today is because, well, our team in New York it's daylight for them,
but for the most part, because today we released the biggest product. To,
to our product just yet. So slide bean is not a travel vlogging channel that makes cool videos.
Although I very much enjoy that part of my job, what we actually do is we run a
platform for startups and entrepreneurs to validate their business ideas
and get their documents ready to pitch investors in race
capital. As a venture backed company ourselves, we went through this pain of getting rejected
by investors and having to rethink our story and to estimate our financials.
And we made it our mission to consolidate all of this,
everything that we've learned into a single place to help other entrepreneurs.
Navigate this mess and not make the same mistakes that we made. Go check it out. If you haven’t.
I found two large trends with Indian startups
on one hand tech for India.Those are like your payment gateways and your delivery
apps. They're solving local problems and adapting technology that already exists
in the west for a local market that companies like Uber just couldn't figure out themselves.
- So I just woke up from my jetlag nap, and I'm really hungry right now, so I just need to order some food.
And on the other hand, Saan enterprise tech as a founder, you are probably their customer without
even knowing that they're based out of India, they understand how to sell to us customers.
They understand how to compete in that world. More importantly, though, the rise
of tech startups means that more and more people understand how tech can transform their lives.
The city is home to hundreds of colleges and universities. It graduates thousands of software
engineers every year. They are joining the workforce with a good chance of making an income,
their families and the rest of India would never have access to.
For you as a kid, did you understand how tech could make your life so different?
- I'm almost 40 years old.
I was growing up like tech wasn't, you know, didn't exist as a, today, even among the
people that we've hired. We've had so many people who've joined us while they were still in college.
But then again, that contrasts significantly, like if I speak to some of my younger cousins
or nieces who are in like, you know, tier two, tier three cities, they don't know.
I should probably explain what this tier system means. India uses a tier system
to classify their cities. Essentially they have cities going from tier one to tier six,
and they're generally classified by population. That's the official classification. So a tier one
city will have 100,000 inhabitants or more tier two city will have 50 to 100,000 inhabitants.
[Guest] And so on tier four, I guess, would be like a very
small town. And so you have people coming from these places. They don't come from means, right.
They don't have a good family name. They don't have connections. They didn't go to a good school.
I think that what you have to understand about these tiers, it's this contrast that we have from
the India that we've been painted to, which is probably cities that are not tier one.
This is a reality of India that we did not get to explore. And I don't pretend
to understand it's what surprised us about India is just how different tier one cities
are from what we expect that it would be and just this incredible access to opportunity
and how people are slowly beginning to understand how a job in tech can transform their lives.
‘What do you wanna be when you grow up?’
- I think the
gap between somebody going to a good university here and what they might make versus going to
like a tier three or. Lower college. And what you would make is huge.
So the cost of education at all levels has increased dramatically.
- When I did my MBA
13 years back in India, in India, uh, you know, the cost of that degree to what it is today is
almost 6X. There is so much more pleasure for you as a kid to get to a good school
and get to a good college and get to, you know, become a computer engineer and get to a tech job.
The bubbles that these high income jobs create are visible and they are tangible.
You pass them by as you drive and you see the contrast brutal side by side.
So this is the IT expressway, this is where a lot of the companies here
have their offices and universities like tech schools. By all means they
look like a super developed, fancy, cool tech building area.
If you turn around on the other side, there's this
building, which looks completely abandoned. We thought it was abandoned as we drove by.
And, you know, we were there maybe 15 minutes and then this lady came, this lady came in really,
really, really angry, demanding us to go with her, which got us a little scared.
Yeah. It turns out that you can't shoot video inside a train station.
But Bengaluru on the other hand, it feels like the entire city is that bubble.
We've been doing research about Bangalore, trying to understand what goes on in the city. I have
not seen a single reference that presents it as a city that would have a place like this.
And this is if this is across the street from our hotel, which is not a fancy hotel,
that means that there are places like this all over the city.
Maybe the street noise is a clue, but either way, this. Is not the picture of India that I had.
Inequality is once again a common theme when discussing India and it's real,
India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. But once here,
it's what I thought I was going to experience.
And that takes me back to that $4,000
salary that is transformative money, but it transforms lives differently.
- Indians love
to save. The one thing that a lot of Indians want is to buy a home.
- In general, the savings rates in India are pretty
high. Like people always have a very high savings rate, they want to save and I want to buy a house.
Meanwhile, the country still holds onto its roots. In spite of all this change.
- For example, eating out is
a relatively new phenomenon in India. Right. Like people would not eat out so much.
If you speak to a lot of people. Um, you know, from my parents' generation,
they look at eating out as like, oh, you, you didn't have the means to go get home.
It's not something they would look forward to. Even if they were traveling,
a lot of people would actually carry their supplies and cook there.
Because in the end, these salaries mean opportunity.
- Like in India,
it's very, very easy to get domestic health.
Right. You want a nanny for your kid? You wanna drive to drive
your car. You want somebody to come cook for you.
- Everybody here probably has at least one or two
people, you know, doing cleaning and cooking for them. That person is probably making around $500.
All of this is happening in one of the world's youngest countries, a country
on its way to being the most populated in the world. Imagine the potential that India has.
Thousands of young professionals earn big salaries
in the careers that are shaping the present and future with more on the way.
When we covered Silicon valley, we talked about that network effect. We talked about
access to capital. We talked about talent and the concentration of startups in the same place.
And all of that is here. Add to that, the fact that Indian entrepreneurs understand
selling to developed countries the same way they understand selling to developing countries.
- Have you heard of this term? Jugaad?. It’s
creating something out of nothing. That's one of my favorite parts of this ecosystem, personally.
I, and I love that word and I hope you remember it.
Cities like Bengaluru are a bridge. They're a crossroads of two worlds that can disrupt
each other. So there is no doubt that a new Silicon valley is not far from the horizon.
But there's something else here. India is a country with a fascinating history
that has learned to evolve with the time.
So we actually explore this in depth in our next video of Startup planet,
where we look at the entire history of Bengaluru and how it became the tech hub that it is today.
But for today, for today's point, this engineer's salary is transformative, a transformative salary
that ensures a future. Now I'm not talking about a future for themselves.
This is a future for the entire country.