India: Cash Rich, Product Poor

[OhioChick]

Sramana Mitra 03.07.08, 6:00 AM ET

BURLINGAME, CALIF. - Never in its history has India been so flushed with venture capital money. In 2007, 50 new VC firms sprouted in India. There are about 500 in total now, a far cry from the mid-1990s, when I started my career as an entrepreneur doing business in India. In 2007, close to $1 billion in venture capital funds washed through India.

That's led to a problem oddly familiar to Silicon Valley investors: too much money, not enough worthy entrepreneurs. In VC parlance, fundable deals are few and far between. Why?

India's meteoric rise in the tech world has been driven by providing back-office services. That work puts a premium on skills such as engineering management and coding. Someone else--somewhere else--writes the specifications for the projects. Again, someone else, somewhere else does the market studies analyzing the potential of a new product.

Indian managers have had scarce opportunities to learn the nuances of how global technology markets work. That means that local entrepreneurs can try to position products, but they do so without detailed and disciplined marketing knowhow.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/03/06/mitra-india-venture-tech-enter-cx_sm_0307venture.html