I started a startup in India in 2012. Started a VC fund in 2019. Have backed 150+ startups and have met at-least 10,000+ startups. On this whole @PiyushGoyal comment : 1. No one hates the Govt machinery and babus more than me. On balance India succeeds despite their best efforts not because of them. 2. There is no need to dunk on delivery apps - in a culture where no one does what they say they will do - that too on time - it's insane that they manage to get millions of gig workers to do deliveries on time and give back time to millions of their users. It's an insanely tough logistical operation to crack and does actually require fair bit of technological prowess. India does it better than the west and we should be proud of them. And it's good they are creating employment. I can't believe he framed it as cheap labour exploitation. 3. People are building and investing in beauty and food brands because people are buying from these brands. Any smart entrepreneur/investor goes where the customers are so not sure what's the point of putting them down. However @PiyushGoyal is still right in terms of ambition and lack of deep tech startups in India. We at @All_IN_CAPITAL are proud first backers of hard tech companies like @piersightspace (Satellites for marine traffic tracking), @mavehealth (wearables to treat mental health), GridOS (ODM/ Manufacturing play ), Karban (air purifier+ fan+ light in one device) among others. At my last fund we had backed @BellatrixAero (thrusters for small satellites), @ePlaneCompany (Flying Taxis), @MayaLabsIO (General machine intelligence) etc. But honestly - we just don't meet enough founders who are doing something truly deep-tech or going after big ambitious problem statements. We see about 400 startups a month and less than 10 would be deep tech. IMO the reasons are : - A large chunk of our deeply technical talent left India right after their under-grad and works in deep tech in the US. Hence founders starting companies in India skew towards ops specialists/ product folks but not deeply technical folks. - No Role models : We just don't have examples of deep Tech founders to look up to and to learn from. A Flipkart spawned a generation of new founders in e-com, finctech, saas etc. Freshworks spawned a generation of SAAS founders. This hasn't yet happened with DeepTech. When I started my first company from BITS in 2012, the smartest, most ambitious thing one could do was to go to the US, do a masters and join Google or Facebook. Forget Deep-Tech, only 2 startups were launched from a batch of 600 students. The only entrepreneurial role model we had then was - Phani Sama who founded RedBus and sold it for $50M. Most of the 9 pointers left for the US and are today working at FAANG companies. Then ambitious kids in the 2016-2020 era started looking up to @harshamjty and @nandanreddy who founded Swiggy (now public) or @a85 (Postman, $5B co). Starting a startup after college started becoming more and more common (and also cool!) and folks started building SAAS, Edtech(Quizzes), FinTech (Groww) and other cool companies. Today, the poster boys for the startup ecosystem are increasingly becoming folks like @awaisahmedna and Kshitij from @PixxelSpace - raised $100M, launched satellites, all before turning 30 - truly path breaking stuff. I believe that smart technical talent has finally started staying back in India to build hard tech companies from India. And I think it's only going to snowball from here because the next generation of young kids from BITS (or otherwise) are only going to aim higher. Long India! 🇮🇳