HIGHLIGHTS

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Bengaluru :

India’s Silicon Valley – Bengaluru -has been ranked first, ahead of San Francisco, for the confidence of businesses in their ability to do digital transformations based on the skills and infrastructure  available in their immediate environment.

According to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit, three Indian cities bagged top 4 ranks. San Francisco is ranked at No. 2, followed by Mumbai and New Delhi. Business leaders in Bengaluru expressed the highest confidence in their digital environment based on innovation and entrepreneurship, people and skills, development of new technologies, financial environment, and ICT infrastructure. In each of these categories, the city ranked No. 1.

“Indian cities may suffer more from infrastructure deficits, pollution, poverty and other ills, but when it comes to the environment for digital transformation, their executives are remarkably optimistic. This is particularly true of Bengaluru, where business leaders express the highest levels of confidence in their digital environment than in any other city in the study,” the report authored by Denis McCauley says.

It goes on to say: “Their compatriots in Mumbai and New Delhi are only slightly less bullish, and they are not alone in the emerging world: seven of the 10 highest confidence levels in the survey are recorded in emerging Asian cities. Among rich-world cities, only San Francisco (2nd) registers in the top five and two others (London, 9th, and Madrid, 10th) made it to top 10. By contrast, developed cities account for eight of the 10 lowest readings in the barometer, with executives in Berlin, Yokohama, Tokyo and Taipei the least confident of all.”

The report notes that across geographies and industries, businesses are embarking on, or preparing for, a mission to put digital technology at the heart of everything they do, an exercise that has come to be known as digital transformation. It can be an enormously difficult and complex un dertaking, requiring not just the deployment of advanced technologies but also the overhauling of business processes and a large degree of cultural change.In most cases, firms’ existing internal resources will not be enough to pull transformation off, and they need to look outside their own four walls for additional support,” the report says.

For this reason, EIU decided to check which cities provide the best environment for their businesses.The analysis in the report is based on a survey of 2,620 executives in 45 cities conducted in June and July this year.

Almost half of surveyed executives (48%) say their firm has considered relocating operations to a city with a more favourable external environment.

Alpesh Shah, senior partner in Boston Consulting Group India, is quoted as saying he is only slightly surprised at the bullishness that executives in Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi display toward their local digital environments.

He notes that these cities’ educational institutions consistently churn out large numbers of quality technology graduates. The report says the three cities also boast a multitude of formal and informal networks, forums and communities where digital entrepreneurs, technology managers and others come together almost daily.

Shah, the report says, reserves particular enthusiasm for Bengaluru’s digital entrepreneurship environment. It is the “closest thing to Silicon Valley” in Asia, he is quoted as saying.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Bangalore News / TNN / November 09th, 2017

San Francisco :

Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, an IIT-Delhi graduate who sold his company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion earlier this year has floated a startup incubator BIG Labs which will research ideas and spin off a select few into full fledged companies. Bansal is committing $50 million to his new venture and is also setting up an R&D centre for BIG Labs in Bengaluru, he told TOI in an exclusive interaction.

The first company to come out of BIG Labs is Harness, a delivery-as-a-service platform leveraging artificial intelligence which has received $20 million in Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures and BIG Labs. Bansal, will head the company as its CEO along with co-founder Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple, who is the CTO.

“After selling AppDynamics I could have opted to be a passive investor in companies but that didn’t appeal to me. I like to build companies. With BIG Labs, the aim is to build multiple billion dollar companies along with co-founders, what you call parallel entrepreneurship,” Bansal, 38, told TOI at the BIG Labs office situated in San Francisco’s Financial District.
While Bansal himself pocketed about $500 million from the sale of AppDynamics, he said as many as 350 employees (out of the 1100 workforce) at his nine-year-old firm scooped up $1 million and more emphasizing the role played by ESOPs in distributing wealth. Building startups is very hard, you have to let employees reap the rewards when liquidity events happen. If you want to build a successful and sustainable company, as founders one has to make all of the employees, shareholders and draw up a mission together, he said.

Having already invested in two Indian startups Leadsquared and Funds Tiger, Bansal said he will look to back more local founders in his personal capacity going forward, along with holding mentoring sessions with the local community there on his forthcoming India trip. As for Indian startups, Bansal said he wants to get more involved with them but has found it difficult to get the real picture of the ecosystem being in the Valley.

“There is still a lot of noise in India. Some companies don’t seem like they are real businesses and may not have a path to getting there,” he said.

Bansal wants to help bring about the natural convergence between India and Silicon Valley especially in B2B businesses where his expertise lie. “I would love to share my experiences on how to build a sales force. Selling products globally is a hard skill but as important, if not more, than just building a product,” Bansal said. Because of companies like Flipkart, Indian talent has been able to gain experience around product development but that’s not the case when it comes to selling products in global markets. This is where I can help along with talking about how to build your startup’s culture, which is another important issue.

AppDynamics, which develops application performance management solutions, had raised $250 million from the likes of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins, among others, and was slated to go public before the last minute decision to sell to Cisco was finalised. “I’m a big believer in IPOs as it brings transparency and the right business rigour despite having to produce quarterly results and targets publicly. We decided to accept Cisco’s acquisition call as it was better for all shareholders coming at a higher price compared to what the company was being valued in its IPO. This was a far better outcome for everyone including the employees,” he said.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> Startups> People / by Samidha Sharma / TNN / October 25th, 2017