What goes around comes around

It’s hard to believe that it was only in 2005 that Thomas Friedman, a fairly good golf caddy himself who was by the side of Chi Chi Rodriguez in the 1970 US Open, (the funnily named Chi Chi was apparently a seriously good golfer, something I learnt only when I dug around a little to write this article) discovered that the world was rather flat while playing golf at the KGA (Karnataka Golf Association) course. He was asked to aim at either “Microsoft or IBM”, and rather than orient himself towards USA, he had to aim at one of two adjacent buildings at the neighbouring EGL (Embassy Golf Links) business park, one of the tiniest business parks in Bengaluru.

Fast forward to now, 2018, while the world has remained flat, walls that were not around earlier have sprung up. Every mature market there is, is now looking inward in an attempt to trap economic value. Thomas Friedman, only five years into it, confidently called out globalisation as the most impactful development of the 21st century, but events of the last few years have seen the trend of globalisation reverse significantly.

Donald Trump became the President of the United States, on the back of little else beside bluster of reclaiming an imaginary past. Not too different from how Narendra Modi rose to power in India. And not too different from why the United Kingdom chose to leave the European Union when that choice was offered to them. These sort of political trends soon started reflecting in businesses too.

What does all this mean for Indian startups though? We all have encountered shady WhatsApp forwards that ask us to move to Telegram and support an Indian company instead of an evil American one, notwithstanding the fact that Telegram is not Indian at all. I have met quite a few people who say they prefer Ola over Uber and Flipkart over Amazon because they want to support Indian companies (however foreign funded they might be), and going by the murmurs of Uber conceding defeat to Ola and exiting India, it looks like such desi pride did have a business impact. This sort of a ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ ethos is definitely a big opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs to provide an Indian alternative where it doesn’t exist. And many have successfully done so as well, especially in the B2C space. One would think it would matter less in B2B, but one only has to look at the edge Tally has in India over an American behemoth such as Intuit. A deeper understanding of how Indian businesses work opens up a whole world of enterprise products that can be built for Indian businesses and snap at the heels of companies such as SAP and Microsoft.

The answer to the question of what all those people with years and years of experience in IT services, but now losing their jobs because of reverse globalisation, will do, possibly lies in building out these enterprise products for India. After the previous wave of Indian startups by kids just out of college, we may possibly see a new one led by veterans of the IT wars.