India is the new China. Not because it is like China, but because it is the next billion-person market building technology at scale.
Cash-on-delivery was 80% of our orders in the early days. People didn't trust online payments, so we literally collected cash at the door. That's how you build e-commerce in a country without credit cards.
Big Billion Days proved that Indian consumers will shop online if you give them a reason. We did $1.4 billion in five days. India wasn't an e-commerce desert — it was an e-commerce dam waiting to break.
In America, you build an e-commerce company. In India, you build an e-commerce company, a logistics company, a payments company, and an internet adoption company — all at the same time.
I was 17, traveling across India, and every budget hotel was a gamble. Dirty sheets, broken AC, cockroaches. I thought, what if every cheap hotel room was actually clean and predictable? That question became OYO.
Our average user is 25 years old, lives in a tier-2 city, and has never invested before. That's not Zerodha's customer. That's the next 100 million investors.
Only 3% of Indians invest in stocks. In America it's over 50%. That gap is not because Indians don't want to invest. It's because nobody made it easy enough.
All four of us came from Flipkart. We saw what happened when you made e-commerce simple for India. We thought: what if we did the same thing for investing?
Amazon and Flipkart serve India's top 100 million. We serve the next 500 million. The people who shop on WhatsApp, who compare prices in rupees, who need free shipping or they won't buy.
A chai wallah in rural India accepts PhonePe. A street vendor in Varanasi accepts PhonePe. That's not a tech story. That's a financial inclusion story. And it happened in five years.
Online payments get all the attention. But 70% of Indian commerce still happens offline. In stores. At counters. That's our market. The biggest market nobody in Silicon Valley talks about.
During the COVID crisis in India, we raised $100 million for oxygen and medical supplies. Some people build companies to make money. Some build them to make a difference. I want both.
India can't copy the West. We have 1.4 billion people, most of them on low incomes. We need solutions that work at population scale and near-zero cost. That's why we built digital public infrastructure — open, free, and universal.
India is where China was twenty years ago. The opportunity is generational, and we intend to be there for every decade of it.
India has 1.4 billion people and most of them are discovering the convenience of delivery for the first time. The market is just starting.
The Indian government wants 30% of all vehicles to be electric by 2030. We're building to meet that target.
India has 1.4 billion people in dense cities with cheap labor. Quick commerce was built for this market.
From IIT Bombay to fighting Uber to building EVs. India produces founders who don't quit.
Flipkart was a billion-dollar bet in a country where most investors wouldn't put a million. That's where the returns were.
India will become a great nation when the majority of its young people dream of creating jobs, not just getting them.
I want OYO to be a company where a 19-year-old from a small town can walk in and build something great.
India has the resources to be the next China. We are sitting on trillions of dollars of minerals we have barely touched.
Build the boring category that everyone needs but nobody wants to fund. That is where the best businesses in India have been built.
I spent seven years with no revenue and a wife who had every reason to doubt me. I kept going because I had no good reason to stop.
Multinationals have marketing budgets. We have Ramdev’s yoga camps. Guess which one reaches more Indians.
India doesn’t need to import toothpaste. We have neem trees. We have turmeric. We have 5,000 years of knowledge.
India has 1.4 billion people and most of them have never bought an insurance policy. The opportunity is not market share. It is market creation.
Insurance in India was built around agents. We asked: what if we built it around the customer instead?
India wastes 40% of its fresh produce between farm and table. That's not a supply chain. That's a supply tragedy.
If the infrastructure does not exist, build it yourself. That is the Flipkart lesson.
The NASDAQ bell was for every Indian engineer who was told they could only build services companies, not product companies.
If you wait for perfect regulatory clarity in India, you will wait forever. You build, you adjust, and you stay honest. That is the only formula that works.
We are not just a housing finance company. We are the bridge between an Indian family's earnings and their most important asset.
The IIT taught me to solve hard problems with limited resources. That is exactly what building a financial company from scratch requires.
India is not a market — it is a hundred markets. The biggest mistake is treating it as one.
In India, the biggest opportunities are always in plain sight. People just don't have the conviction to act on them at scale.
Real estate in India is not just a transaction. It is a 30-year relationship with the people who live and work in what you build.
India will need 700 to 800 million square feet of Grade-A office space over the next decade. We are building for that future.
When I left India for Carnegie Mellon, I had maybe two hundred dollars. America gave me an education and a platform. The least I can do is send something meaningful back.
Philanthropy is not charity. It is investment in human capital at scale. If we do not create jobs and skills, no amount of aid fixes the problem.
India has hundreds of millions of potential entrepreneurs who have never had access to capital or mentorship. That is not a social problem. That is an economic opportunity the size of a continent.
India's biggest risk is not poverty. It is the weakening of the intermediary institutions — the NGOs, the journalists, the universities — that stand between the citizen and raw state and market power.
India will produce the next generation of global technology leaders. I've bet my post-Cisco career on that.
Infrastructure is the bedrock of a modern India. Every road we build, every power plant we commission, is an investment in 1.4 billion futures.
You can't build a $110-billion global industry based on cheap labour.
Fifteen years is what you should consider the active VC build-out in India. For the first five to seven years, we were kind of faking it till we make it.
We get a lot of companies come say 'this worked in China, the US—this will work in India.' That playbook is over.
When I first started investing in India in 2002, it was very difficult for a founder to convince his family he wanted to start a company. That was taboo.