PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

M&A, Venture Capital, and Private Equity: A Thriving Investment Climate
the decisions get made fast and you are dealing with less uncertainty.
India, on the other hand, is a more chaotic bottom-up
model—the entrepreneur is the change agent here, while the top is
slow and bureaucratic, but that’s also a good thing, because even
though the change is slow, it is deeply ingrained and hence more
sustainable in the long run.”
He sees a natural synergy between India and Silicon Valley.
“When you see people going back and forth, it’s very healthy for
both countries,” he explains. “For India, returnees from the Valley
are bringing with them experience, culture, and values which proliferate
throughout Indian management and companies. For the
Indians coming to the U.S., there is an opportunity of lifetime—to
get higher education, to gain world class experience, and to accomplish
higher milestones professionally by working on innovative
products and technologies.”
Dham notes that the spirit of creativity and innovation is so deeply
embedded in the Bay Area that there’s no comparison with either
India or China today. “But that’s fine,” Dham says, “since as an
emerging nation, India brings the enormous advantage of it’s
demographics and educated workforce to provide productivity improvements
in the services industry. The focus in India today is to
create disruptive business models, as opposed to in America
where the focus is disruptive innovation.”
“Entrepreneurship is embedded in the DNA of Indians—they have
been trading since time immemorial on the Silk route and have
honed their survival by struggling every day to survive,” he says.
“The simple act of catching a public bus on India’s roads itself requires
advance preparation—since in India the bus never stops at
the same spot at a regular time. You have to make necessary
changes in real time to position yourself correctly to catch the bus,
otherwise you will be left behind. In America, the infrastructure and
systems are very efficient, and therefore it is much easier to
accomplish much more with relatively less effort.”
Lightspeed Venture Partners was co-founded in the late 1990s by Ravi Mhatre, a
Stanford graduate and veteran of Bessemer Ventures, Silicon Graphics, and Lehman
Bros.’ technology investment group, and former Cisco Systems executive Barry Eggers,
who set up several of Cisco’s largest distribution channels and directed its first wave of
acquisitions and integrations.
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