Rohit Yadav

I am happy to see the YCombinator wave arriving in India. Our co-founder Tony and I were in silicon valley during the original YC wave of companies. We learned a lot from the YC companies. We also made the conscious choice to pursue a different course. In the ancient Bharatiya tradition of philosophical debate, I am going to offer this. I will start with things I agree with YC on. 1. The biggest lesson anyone can learn from YC: small passionate teams can do magic. This was true way before AI coding arrived and will always be true. 2. YC is absolutely right to not over-emphasize "innovation". Doing a similar product as the bigger guys, faster and cheaper, is often the best course. Google did not invent search. OpenAI did not invent the LLM. Anthropic did not invent agentic coding. 3. YC companies tend to geographically cluster, and that can lead to subtle peer pressure and group-think. So the "laggard" founders who are not growing like a weed every week start to feel left out and eventually the result is "founder depression". And YC has counselors. By the standards of 2007 silicon valley or even 2014 silicon valley, we were thought to be losers. Just keep that in mind. 4. Many deep tech problems like building a better, cheaper MRI machine or advanced semiconductor equipment require long focus and patient execution and lots of capital. These are endurance tests, not weekly sprints. 5. YC too often optimizes companies for "exit". That philosophy was built for and requires prolonged bubbles, which American policy has delivered, at the price of nearly wrecking the country (note the extreme inequality and political division). If you love India, you should not wish for similar bubbles. 6. YC model worked in silicon valley. One of the reasons it worked was that silicon valley could get any talent from anywhere in the world, notably from India, easily. That era may have ended or at least on pause right now. Bengaluru has tried the same thing but with "any talent from anywhere in India" and we have not yet created huge companies. India needs its Huawei and Xiaomi and BYD and these companies are Chinese to the core, built by patriotic Chinese. Indian talent, staying in India, rooted in India, is going to have to build companies like them. Enough said.

To aspiring young entrepreneurs: if I were starting out, I would go to towns in central/eastern UP, all the way to Bihar. Over 100 million people, large youth population hungry for opportunity, good law and order. I am learning Hindi because I want to be there. नमस्ते! 🙏