It’s 2007. Flipkart starts. People still tell stories about Sachin Bansal approaching VCs, only to be told, “Hey, Amazon already exists. Why are you trying to copy it? Anyone can do this.” (I am paraphrasing.)

And what Sachin replied: “Sure, why don’t you do it and show then?”

It’s easy to critique in hindsight. Because Flipkart started, many people realised there was an alternate career path for Techies in India. Before that, when I was a kid, whenever people talked about IT or software, they meant Infosys or TCS. Or maybe, if you were especially ambitious, you went to the US for an MS and landed a job at Google or Oracle.

Flipkart was built and they grew, people got to work at scale. They learned what it takes to build consumer products that generate billions in revenue and serve tens of millions of users. The ecosystem matured. And because Sachin Bansal made money, he was able to invest in and support companies like Ather, which recently IPO’d.

Now imagine Flipkart never existed. Sachin wouldn’t have got his exit, and Ather might not have been built. Today, more people are doing deep tech in India.

Same with UPI. There’s always noise from critics, especially self proclaimed NRI experts. “Brazil has this,” “Other countries also have UPI equivalent ,” and so on. But honestly, I don’t care if Brazil has a similar system. What matters is that I can step out, pay someone instantly, without logging into a bank app, adding them as a beneficiary, and navigating a painfully slow process. UPI made commerce easy. And I’m still glad it exists.

Related: I haven’t been able to log in to my HDFC app for the past three days. Thankfully, I can still use PhonePe.

Oh, and by the way PhonePe only exists because Flipkart does.

Because Flipkart existed and succeeded, the VC ecosystem happened. More and more startups emerged.

Swiggy, Zomato, Ola, Rapido, PhonePe, Razorpay, Groww, and others.   Some public companies already, others gearing up for their IPOs.   The ecosystem matures. Success inspires more talent, and more people join the game.

And now that we have this talent density, it’s easier to attract global talent. A friend who leads hiring at a large global startup told me that he’s been able to bring many Indians back to the country. Earlier, they didn’t have many options. But now, with so many global companies setting up offices in India, it’s easier to target people in their late 20s or 30s.

These individuals are often getting married, having kids, and currently dealing with the uncertainty of the U.S. visa process and green card delays. As a result, many are open to returning to India, especially if they get to work on interesting problems, and don’t have to take a big hit on their compensation.

Think about how many people returned from the US once India’s tech scene became capable of offering competitive salaries and the chance to work at scale. If people had dismissed Flipkart back then, as some did, all of these second order effects wouldn’t have happened. They only happened because Sachin and Binny Bansal had the courage to build Flipkart.

Now let’s look at Southeast Asia. The Indonesian tech ecosystem is probably 10 years behind India. Before Gojek, there weren’t many notable Indonesian tech companies. People probably said the same thing: “Why build Gojek? Uber already exists. Why bother building a super app?”

But Gojek did it anyway. And because Gojek exists, many people in Southeast Asia have got to work at scale. They learned, went on to build their own companies, serve other companies who wanted the talent to help them scale. I’m grateful I got to be part of a company managing that kind of volume in Southeast Asia. None of that would’ve been possible without Gojek showing the way.

Here’s what I’m getting at: it’s easy to be a skeptic. It’s easy to poke holes. It’s easy to say, “OpenAI already exists, why build another LLM?”, “What is the point of Sarvam?”

What matters is that more companies are working on foundational problems. Take Paras Chopra, for example. He’s pushing research forward. Maybe the researchers joining him aren’t quite at Silicon Valley levels yet, but they’re working on frontier tech. He’s attracting talent interested in pushing boundaries, and massive kudos to him for that.

Success or failure isn’t the point. I still remember Polygon. It was one of the early L2 chains in crypto. I was surprised to see an Indian crypto company forming global partnerships and building at scale. Love or hate crypto, many people went on to build in Web3. A lot of them have moved to Dubai since (haha), but they proved to themselves they could build global web3 companies from India.

Slight tangent, but I remember when Dara came to Uber and made it clear that they would only operate in markets where they could be number one or number two, and the business was big enough to justify the investment. And sure, Uber still operates in India. I don’t think they’re number one or number two anymore.

But imagine if the only alternative Indians had was Uber and Uber just left because the market wasn’t big enough. I would’ve been screwed. I can’t drive. I hate going out on the road and haggling with auto drivers.

But because Namma and Rapido eventually came in, despite other dominant players already existing, and even though people may have thought it was foolish to enter a market that wasn’t growing fast and where Uber already had a presence, thanks to them existing I don’t have to worry about what Uber does.

I still get to enjoy ride hailing.

UberEats shut down too, if you remember, and we hardly cared, because Zomato bought them out.

We have our own homegrown players.

It’s easy to criticise. It’s easy to mock. I’ve joked about Bhavish in the past. Yes, Ola has as real quality issues, no doubt about that. And he does post some truly questionable things online. But he had the audacity to try building hardware companies in India. He created one of the largest hardware manufacturing operations in Indian automobiles. That’s no small feat. I’ve criticised him before, but I respect his ambition. Maybe we should all focus more on that kind of bold vision.

Maybe then, we’ll all start dreaming a little bigger.

Yeah. That’s it for now.