INDIA

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.

India has millions of small hotels. No chain, no brand, no standards. We gave them a brand, a technology platform, and access to customers they could never reach on their own. The value proposition is simple.

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.

I built an app that rewards you for paying your credit card bill on time. People said that's not a business. Then 22 million high-income Indians signed up.

India has 70 million credit card users. Only 30 million pay on time. We have 22 million of those 30 million. That's not a user base. That's a financial elite database.

We added 15 million users in one year. Most of them came from cities like Jaipur, Lucknow, and Indore — not Mumbai or Bangalore. India's investing revolution is happening in places nobody is watching.

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?

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.

Our average order value is $4. Four dollars. Amazon India doesn't even want that customer. We built the entire business around them.

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.

We started as a social commerce platform. Housewives would share products on WhatsApp groups and earn a commission. We turned word-of-mouth into a distribution channel.

India's real e-commerce penetration is 7%. Seven percent. The next decade in Indian e-commerce will look nothing like the last one. It won't be about metros. It'll be about Meerut and Madurai.

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.

Stripe was built for the US. We built Razorpay for India. Same developer-first philosophy, completely different infrastructure. India has UPI, net banking, wallets, EMI — Stripe couldn't handle that complexity.

We became India's most valuable fintech startup at $7.5 billion. Two guys from Jamshedpur who couldn't get a meeting with a bank five years earlier. India's startup story is being written by people the establishment never saw coming.

India has 1.4 billion people and only about 100 million demat accounts. The US has 330 million people and over 150 million brokerage accounts. The Indian market is barely getting started.

I have always believed that India is the best country to invest in. Not because I'm patriotic, but because 1.4 billion people waking up every morning wanting a better life is the most powerful economic force on Earth.

India has the developers. India has the users. India has the problems that blockchain can solve. Polygon was built in India, and I'm proud of that — we proved that world-class crypto infrastructure can come from anywhere.

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.

Every student in India deserves a chance at IIT. Not just the ones whose parents can afford a $3,000 coaching center in Kota.

We raised $880 million because India has 300 million students and most of them cannot afford coaching centers. The opportunity is real, even if the path is bumpy.

India is where China was twenty years ago. The opportunity is generational, and we intend to be there for every decade of it.

India is not just an emerging market. It is a surging market.

India is a market of extremes. You can deliver biryani to a tech worker in Bangalore in 20 minutes and you cannot get an address in a village 100 km away.

Indian women deserve the same access to beauty products as women anywhere in the world. That is not a business plan. That is a belief.

The biggest lesson from our journey is that Indian consumers will pay for convenience. They just will not overpay.

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.

We deliver food in Indian traffic. If we can do that we can do anything.

India will have a billion digital payment users. We intend to serve most of them.

I have always been very confident and very upbeat about the future potential of India. I think it is a great country with great potential.

I started coding in Bangalore because I loved building things. Postman exists because I couldn't stop building.

In India, cricket isn't a sport. It's a religion. We built a temple for the faithful.

India runs on two-wheelers. If you electrify scooters, you electrify India.

The Indian government wants 30% of all vehicles to be electric by 2030. We're building to meet that target.

India's smartphone penetration is still growing. Every new smartphone user is a potential Dream11 user.

1.4 billion Indians are discovering the convenience of delivery. We're just getting started.

From ride-hailing to manufacturing. Two completely different businesses. But the mission is the same: move India.

India has 1.4 billion people in dense cities with cheap labor. Quick commerce was built for this market.

We built cold chain logistics in a country where it's 110°F and the traffic is a competitive sport.

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.

Sports in India is an untapped goldmine. Kabaddi was a village game. Now it fills stadiums and gets TV ratings.

India doesn't need copies of Western companies. It needs Indian solutions built for Indian scale.

Getting millions of chai vendors to accept QR payments is harder than any MBA case study. That is real India.

India can be the pharmacy of the world. We have the talent, the scale, and the cost advantage. We just need the ambition.

India's first AI unicorn in under a year. The world underestimates what Indian engineers can build.

The best investment any country can make is in the education of its children. Everything else is secondary.

I want OYO to be a company where a 19-year-old from a small town can walk in and build something great.

India will become a great nation when the majority of its young people dream of creating jobs, not just getting them.

India has the resources to be the next China. We are sitting on trillions of dollars of minerals we have barely touched.

Indian internet took 10 years longer than everyone expected. The founders who survived until it arrived became very wealthy. The ones who gave up did not.

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.

India does not need more software companies. India needs better education. The companies will follow.

In 1978, we built one of India's first computers. Apple was building theirs at the same time in a California garage. Dreams do not have geography.

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.

India adds a new Germany in GDP every few years. Building capacity for that growth is the simplest investment thesis in the world.

If the infrastructure does not exist, build it yourself. That is the Flipkart lesson.

India's middle class needs financial services that banks refuse to provide. Technology fills that gap.

Build in India, sell to the world. The engineering talent here is as good as anywhere on Earth.

The NASDAQ bell was for every Indian engineer who was told they could only build services companies, not product companies.

The IIT taught me to solve hard problems with limited resources. That is exactly what building a financial company from scratch requires.

We are not just a housing finance company. We are the bridge between an Indian family's earnings and their most important asset.

India is not a market — it is a hundred markets. The biggest mistake is treating it as one.

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.

In India, the biggest opportunities are always in plain sight. People just don't have the conviction to act on them at scale.

India needs 25 million new homes in the next decade. This is not a problem — this is an opportunity of historic proportions.

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.

Gurugram was farmland when my father saw it. That vision — seeing what a place could become, not what it is — is what separates great developers from good ones.

India will need 700 to 800 million square feet of Grade-A office space over the next decade. We are building for that future.

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.

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.

India has the engineers. What it has lacked is the ecosystem — the funding, the risk culture, the infrastructure. That is changing faster than anyone expected.

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.

The real indicators of a country's progress are not the buildings it builds but the quality of its libraries and toilets.

When I started, people said I was making a mistake by working with weavers from lower castes. I said I was building a business. Forty years later, the business proved who was right.

India will produce the next generation of global technology leaders. I've bet my post-Cisco career on that.

India is a story of resilience and growth. Whatever short-term challenges we face, the long-term picture is absolutely clear.

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.

My husband always believed in India. I am only carrying forward his dream, and I am doing so with my whole heart.

Steel is not just a business. It is the material on which modern India is being built, road by road and building by building.

We have always believed that business and community are one. When you build a factory, you build a future for those around it.

You can't build a $110-billion global industry based on cheap labour.

The biggest issue for startups is the lack of adequate capital.

Nobody gives money in India. Everybody says they want a Microsoft or Intel kind of company from India. This is loose talk.

What Indian startups have achieved is unprecedented in the world.

For me, Unicorn 2.0 is about deep tech.

Innovation and entrepreneurship must be inculcated at universities, as they are the driving forces of national progress.

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.

There are two kinds of founders we back: those solving large, uniquely Indian problems by tapping into the country's dense network of micro-entrepreneurship, and those building global products with the ambition to compete beyond India.

India's time is here. Today's new tech role models are the founders of Flipkart, Inmobi, Snapdeal, Mu Sigma and many others.

There are a lot of opportunities for founders who have the capability to imagine and envision what products India and the world need. There is limitless headroom for entrepreneurs.

India's next global relevance will come not from code to capital but from IP-led manufacturing. From defence and aerospace to semiconductors and precision systems, this is where our edge will emerge.

We have come to a very nice sweet spot in the ecosystem where entrepreneurs understand how and what to build and investors also know what they are looking for.

Nobody believed that there could be a protocol coming from Indian co-founders.