SM: What is happening on the retail side? AG: Lots of interesting stuff is happening in retail, financial services, and education. One way to look at India is as a readjustment of a standard of living. Everything that goes into standard of living is in a boom phase.
SM: There was a wave in the category of mobile value-added services. What is your synthesis of that at this point? AG: The biggest challenge for most of the companies at this point is that the carriers choose to keep 85% of the revenue. They expect the startup to put in the capex to get
SM: What about entertainment? AG: There are a lot of Bollywood and music sites. They have unclear business models, but traffic continues to grow and they are able to pay for themselves. Those continue to flourish.
SM: Where are Indian entrepreneurs coming from? AG: Amazon India has produced several entrepreneurs. They were people who worked for Amazon in India. Similarly, people who worked at Yahoo! India have produced several companies.
Dr. Ashish Gupta is a co-founder of Helion and serves on the boards of Gridstone Research, Jivox, Kirusa, MuSigma, Naukri.com, and SMS Gupshup. He has co-founded Tavant Technologies and Junglee. His investments include Daksh (IBM), Odesk, Obongo (AOL), Speedera (Akamai), MakeMyTrip, Merittrac (Manipal Group), and Kaboodle (Hearst). Ashish is a Kauffman Fellow andĀ holds a Ph.D.