5 Things India Should Learn From Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is truly special. This small region in Northern California, it birthed silicon chips and the semiconductor industry, which then paved the way for the entire mass production of electronic devices. Then came Apple's personal computers and smartphones, Google's search engine and online empire, Facebook's social media revolution, and Tesla's electric cars, not to mention breakthroughs like SpaceX's reusable rockets. But after all that, even the newest revolution, artificial intelligence, was born right there in that small area. What is special about it? Why can't we replicate it in India? What is the secret source of the valley success? In this video, I will break it down for you. We'll go on a journey to finally understanding that it's a mindset thing. Yeah, I know it sounds cliche, but it is a mindset thing. There are lots of tier one entrepreneurs. non-funded family businesses and tier 2s. Capital exists in India. What holds us back is actually the business culture and the mindset we have towards companies, towards failure and towards risk. Ladies and gentlemen, let's find out what makes Silicon Valley tick.

tick. Okay, I've been running companies for 12 13 years now and creating content about business and technology for 9. I went from raising 1. 7 crores in college from investors in Chicago through a cold email to today running a 300 man bootstrapped and profitable company. I've interviewed both the top founders in India and the top CEOs and founders in the valley and I've spent enough time with both ecosystems to detail exactly what the mindset difference is. But before we begin, let's take a moment to talk about how Vibe coding could literally win you a brand new M4 MacBook Pro. Turns out there's this thing called Code Circuit that's rewarding people for building sleek, functional web apps. Here's how it works. You just pick an idea from their list and turn it into a simple, functional hosted web app. And that's it. And the prizes aren't small. Starting with a brand new 1TB M4 MacBook Pro for first place, a PlayStation 5 for second, and Apple's AirPods Pro Max for third. But here's the best part. You can use any text stack or libraries you want, even LLM powered code editors like Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf. The only rule is that your web app has to look great and actually work. And it isn't some random hackathon. It's actually being organized by Outlier AI, a team that's done real work in the AI space. They claim their contributors have earned a combined hundreds of millions of dollars by helping build the foundation of today's most advanced AI models. The deadline to submit your mini web app is Sunday, May 18th, 11:59 p. m. Pacific time. To register, hit the link in the description and start building. Now, let's get back to the video.

Silicon Valley works because of the misfits, openly welcoming crazy, unconventional thinkers who don't really fit into traditional modes. See, Silicon Valley understands that if you are someone that comes from field A and enters field B, you are very likely to be disruptive compared to a person that always has been in field B. If you are from the payment industries but enter the rockets industry, you have an advantage over insiders in the rocket industry because you probably see things very differently. In India, by contrast, social and educational systems tend to reward conformity, which is being the same as everybody else. The education system emphasizes rote learning over independent thought, which means that any person or any kind of thinking that's out of the box, you often get less support or understanding for their ideas. Silicon Valley has never been about playing safe. Silicon Valley actually really likes the concept of a contrarian which is somebody who thinks very differently from the crowd. The people who chase moonshots that sound absurd till they actually work. This willingness to pursue grand visions like flying cars or private rockets to Mars is a defining trait of the valley. In India, if you try to do the same thing, people will say first solve this and they'll you know add some small problem there as if nobody else is already working on that problem. In the valley this optimism is almost borderline delusional to outsiders. Yet, it's what actually makes the valley tick. In fact, Silicon Valley literally runs on ideas you believe, but other people don't. When I did that podcast with Sam Alman, he told me that even the idea of doing OpenAI was ridiculed by researchers and people even called them a rapper. Yet, people in the valley believed in them and invested money and see where they end up. On the other hand, when Indians build rappers, you can see in the comments, people will be saying, "Oh, it's just a rapper build. " While at the same time, now that 2 years have passed since those comments, Windsurf, which is a rapper, is selling to OpenAI for $3 billion. How many young kids did you all discouraged by saying, "Oh, it's just a rapper. " When it turns out a lot of the exit activity now is happening in rappers. In fact, anything new is discouraged. When we started using AI avatars for content in 2023, for example, I'm giving you a personal example. I had put out this video on Twitter and synced it to a Telugu YouTuber's voice for an experiment. Almost everyone told us it wouldn't work. And the argument was nobody's going to watch AI generated content. Oh, why are you making an AI influencer make a product instead? As if we already hadn't tried. Today that AI avatar makes more money than most businesses in India and I spend less than 5 minutes on it per week. But almost everyone I know told us it wouldn't work. Today we have a lot more channels when we deploy it and it's allowed us to capture a good chunk of the explore feed. Time and again, the biggest Silicon Valley successes started as ideas like that, like that experts dismissed or laughed at or said, "This is not going to commercially work. " Who thought in the 1970s that a couple of college dropouts would build a worldchanging personal computer in a garage? Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wnjak did exactly that. No, they proved it. But if you went back in time, you probably wouldn't have believed them. As investor Chris Dixon keeps saying, the next big thing starts out looking like a toy. Early PCs were dismissed as toys. Also early social networks where people just said this is like this is some game and the first electric sports car sounded like a rich man's toy. Yet these toys became the Apple, Facebook and Tesla we know today. The red pill truth here is that breakthrough innovation requires defying skepticism and ridicule. Silicon Valley's culture encourages. It whispers to the hacker working on a wild idea that he or she might be right and the entire world saying hey this sucks might be wrong. Actually it's not that the world is wrong. This all works because of saturation. If everyone believes a certain thing is correct, they might all be right. But by the time the consensus has formed, by the time everyone believes in the thing, you are late. It's too late for you to win because you are in the queue. And you might be Q contestant 15,000. There might be already 15,000 competitors to you. But if you take on ideas others don't believe in yet, you can be number one, but you can also be wrong. Your idea might also be bogus. And that brings me

to point two, which is that you may have ideas that are very different from the ideas that everybody else has, but those ideas might still be wrong. And the only way for you to find out are they wrong or are they right is for you to try many experiments. Point two is that Silicon Valley is all about experimentation. At AOS, we basically did research on what really works in the valley. And experimentation is probably the most important point. When you say things like, "Oh, I'm going to do things very differently from the masses. " There's also a big chance you're wrong. So, how do you prevent that? What's the solution? It is to run multiple experiments at once in parallel. Like look at our own path, right? We were building God in a box. We're building AlphaCTR and we were building Autocode Pro at the same time as we were doing our channels, Avatars, AOS Labs, AV and YAS. In the end, even though the apps got millions of users, moneywise, the other things did way better. No one can tell you what will do well before they try it. And we have this epidemic of people on the internet who will tell you how something will do or how something will not do. And they won't even bother trying. They just this is their opinion that comes, you know, for free. You have to have strong opinions but loosely held. I can really believe in something but then when I put it out and the evidence is not there I'm like okay I don't believe in it anymore right and that's the only way to survive by the way you need to try and experiment see if people like it if they like it do more of it if they don't like it don't do it you have to be willing to ditch old ideas if they don't work so that's the problem in India once you say something publicly you can't go against it because it's almost like you know your pride is associated with what you once said but this is a mistake Jeff Bezos says that most decisions in the world are two-way doors some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are oneway doors. But most decisions are not like that. They're not like you take the decision and then you can't change your mind. You can execute something and if you find out you're wrong, you can always walk back through the door and try a different one cuz nobody knows which of the doors is going to work. Jeff also says that most decisions can be made with 70% of the data because waiting for 90% of data will lead to slowness and anxiety and competitors will do it faster than you if you leave the opportunity open for them. And if you don't have enough data, it's better to try many things in parallel. The thing is when something works you have to double down. Okay? But before it works you cannot be a super genius who knows upfront what will work. So the only path is through experimenting and trying many things and seeing what sticks and I'll tell you why India hates experiments. We are a nation that prefers vivar to experiment. I see a lot of people in India mugging up concepts. Okay. As if someone in the street is going to come to them with a gun and then say hey hands up and then ask them to uh define unsupervised learning. For commercial success, it is better to experiment and have outputs rather than know the definition of something. I'll give you an example. Four, five years ago, I worked on the technology called OSC to do face capture for 3D avatars even before Unreal Metahuman released. If you ask me today to reimplement it, I can. I've forgotten all the concepts, but if you give me a couple of days with the computer and you allow me to go through the OSC documentation again, I can probably implement it. There are obviously better tools, but I'm just talking about how we implemented it back then, right? But if you ask me the definitions, I don't remember. It's how all the best programmers in the world do it. Their context window is limited. And you ask anyone with 5 10 years of experience, not the freshers, but you ask a programmer with 5 10 years of experience, they can tell you they remember what they're currently working on. But something they implemented 2 years ago, they don't remember perfectly. Because real life is not an exam where you have to answer it, you know, with specific text and your definition has to be exactly the textbook definition. No, it's an exam where you prove yourself by building companies, services or products. You can see how good someone is by the outputs of what they create.

The next point is that Silicon Valley is a default to optimism ecosystem. Everyone there is optimistic, default to help, right? India is a default to skepticism environment. It's a skeptical ecosystem about everything. Ideas alone of course don't build companies. It's the people and networks around them. One of Silicon Valley's greatest strengths is its ecosystem of supporting entrepreneurs and innovators. It's not just money or talent, but it's this mentality of openness. It's like this grease, right? Let's say an idea is like a wheel that's very dry. Belief by people is like a grease that makes the wheel move. Otherwise, there's too much friction. Paul Graham pointed out that if you visit Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings, but it's the people that make it. Silicon Valley is a place, not the buildings. And the people are supportive, especially to crazy ideas. India by default thinks every new idea is a scam or fraud, even if you're taking money from nobody. I'll give you a very good example from our own experience. Remember that early alpha game trailer that AOS Games put out? Remember, it's an early alpha, very, very early. We want to prove what assets we put out. Well, there was some donations on it, 30 or 40,000 rupees worth of donations from longtime fans. Then I went and saw there was a thread on Reddit about how there was so many donations. And the top voted comment there was someone saying, "Oh, they made their own employees donate. It's a form of moneyaundering. " Someone even said, "Oh, they think they can hide this marketing, this childlike marketing," or something like that. Just so you know, this is totally false. It's a totally false thing that has 1,000 upwards. My office coffee bill is 1 and a half lakhs a month and we have 300 employees today. Why would I ask my employees to send 30 or 40k as donations on the YouTube video and give 40 to 50% to YouTube? Am I stupid? And you know, I don't even blame them. It's all very young people, right? So they don't know any better. But the problem with India is we have a habit of looking at every new thing as a scam or fraud. Indians freely use this word. So far, the game that we're making is fully bootstrapped. And this money we have made from products and services at AOS, again, completely bootstrapped. We don't need any funding. But people here are default skeptical. Even when looking at an early alpha trailer, even with somebody trying with their own money, they'll go so far. I understand being a critic and saying this can be better, that can be better. That's I think good stuff. But Indians will go even so far as to outright lie and say, "Oh, there's some donation scam that's going on. " It's the exact same thing we faced when we started doing AI generated presenters. People told us, "Oh, it's not going to work. " Some creators even laughed at the idea. Like, have you guys seen God of War in early alpha? Here's what it looks like. Or here's Midjourney V1. But in Silicon Valley and even now, we tend to move very fast. We learn from our mistakes and we keep improving. In the valley, everyone gets it. This is a 0. 1. This is how 0. 2 will probably look. This is how, you know, version 0. 5 will look. This is how version one will look. Everyone has that insight. But in India, nobody does. Which is why we have an over supply of the same types of ideas like grocery delivery and the same old software as a service tools cuz you're actually less likely to get criticized. You know, even grocery delivery, quickcommerce, where today a lot of people go in and everyone understands the idea. When it first came out in India, everyone criticized it. Why do people need groceries in 10 minutes? Now look at people's usage patterns. Almost everyone uses Zeppto or a blanket. Alex Dano who is a very prominent tech commentator notes that social capital flows freely in Silicon Valley meaning knowledge connections favors they're shared generously. I'll help you with this understanding that at some point in the future you're going to help me and I've helped a lot of people without expectation in my career and like at some point they'll help and they actually do help four five years later I've been around for more than a decade and I can tell you they come back and do help you. This paid forward culture it's almost akin to a gift economy. So founders will swap war stories and tips over coffee and the experienced engineers at the same time will be mentoring newbies. The best alumni, let's say the PayPal alumni will be reinvesting their winnings and you know angel investing in startups. All of this happens as a matter of course in Silicon Valley. In the valley status comes not from what you're building, not your job title, not your pedigree. It comes when you are a young entrepreneur trying something and there are established players helping you by adding that grace and that belief. The moment you start building in the valley, everything like I said, introductions, advice, credibility, seed funding, they flow freely. Even though it started to become like this in pockets of India, it's still nowhere close to this in broader India. And in the valley, everybody knows that 90% of ideas will fail. And while that entrepreneur might fail at that specific idea, he or she might do better on the next one or the next one. So, Indian business

culture always tends to ask why would you even attempt this? Silicon Valley will ask why not and how can we help you try I'll give you another example right when we were building this game and there's so many examples from this right oh people kept saying oh why not build a 2D game don't even try to build something harder than a 2D game and they kept saying this thing which I really didn't understand which is they kept saying that oh why do Indian devs only care about graphics but when you double click and I really want you to do this exercise okay I want you to pause this video and ask yourself this question who which Indian developer has put out a game with hyperreal graphics, but we have quite a few 2D and indie titles. Nobody here wants you to attempt the hard and nobody has the belief that a version 0. 1 can snowball into something awesome. Again, there's no guarantee that any of these ideas might be commercially successful. The chance of a game working like the kind of game we are making is like 1%. But can we prove that the product is top class over time? Absolutely. But India is default skeptical to that. The next thing is the attitude to failure. If there's one specific thing that truly separates Silicon Valley from more traditional business cultures all over the world, it's the valley's relationship with risk and failure. Failure is not the end in Silicon Valley. It's almost like this badge of experience. Elon Musk once said this, right? He said, "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough. " That mindset is baked into the startup scene. Most of the successful entrepreneurs there are repeat entrepreneurs. Investors in the valley don't permanently write you off for a flop. Many will gladly fund that second time entrepreneur because they're like, "At least you learned something. As long as he or she learned something, they're willing to give them another chance. " The logic is very simple here. Big breakthroughs only come with big risks and you can't have one without the other. A culture that penalizes failures and India is a culture that hates failure. It ends up penalizing risk-taking and therefore innovation itself. And Yale once said this, right? That risk-taking in India is not ingrained and failure is usually permanent. A failed venture in India carries a stigma that haunts an entrepreneurs's entire career. Whereas in Silicon Valley, a failed venture is seen as a right of passage on the way to success. This safety net of second chances is a huge part of why Silicon Valley keeps pioneering new fields. In India, people are fighting for their first shot. And we'll come to VCs in India in a bit. But in the valley, people are if you've taken that first shot, it's much easier for you to get the second shot. It's a place where inventors feel free to try crazy things because the downside, this embarrassment, this career damage, this financial ruin is mitigated by the valley's norms and their support system. In the early days of any disruptive innovation, there are far more reasons to believe it won't work than reasons it will. If an entire culture echoes these doubts, a fragile startup will never survive. Silicon Valley instead radiates this baseline optimism. Not every idea will succeed. They know that they're not dumb, but it's worth trying. And failure doesn't exile you from the community. In India, I kind of promised myself, right? If there's a founder trying something cool and nobody's bullying the founder, I just want you to know if you're a founder trying, if you're somebody sitting at home, even giving this a real shot, if you're doing it part-time, if you're trying an app, a startup, whatever it is that you're trying, you have at least one believer, and that believer is me. I'm here. I believe in you. Even if the entire world, your family, even if everybody tells you that it's going to fail, as long as you stage that risk, don't do it stupidly and give up everything and give up five years of your life to try it if you're not sure, just to be cool. But if you are giving it a shot, even if it's part-time and you believe in it and it sounds like a crazy idea and nobody around you thinks it'll work, just know you have a believer in me. I know it might not matter to most people watching this but just know that that's there because when I was much younger and things were very hard for me I read a lot of many of these people that I look up to people like Sam Alman and a bunch of others right I would go through their blogs and then they would echo the same thoughts so don't worry other entrepreneurs are here and even if the entire world is against you entrepreneurs are there by your side this attitude in the valley it gives these innovators it gives people thinking differently fuel to attempt what other people wouldn't even dare right the people who are sitting and commenting who wouldn't even dare to try. This fuel comes from this belief comes from the ecosystem. Paul Ram put this best. Okay, he put this in a slightly complicated way which is he said that startups are marginal. They begin in unproven out of the way niches some random thing that nobody really believes in. Started by people who are supposed to be doing something else and they're incredibly fragile early on. A society that trims its margins that says let's not try crazy ideas will kill all of them. Silicon Valley crucially doesn't trim the margins. Instead, it cultivates an abundance of forgiveness for the trial and error process of innovation. The result is an explosion of creativity and yes, plenty of failures, but also the occasional worldbeating success that makes it all worth

worth it. Openai will go out there and they will say, "We are capturing the light cone of all future value in the universe. " Elon Musk will go out there and say, "I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact. " Steve Jobs would say things like, "We're here to put a dent in the universe. " You know these are all immensely audacious things to say. One life change I made is now I market things with full force. I used to be a shy engineer afraid of even running ads. Do you know that? But now when we do things we market it well and properly. The thing about Silicon Valley is that marketing is easier because people fully believe in what they're doing. Same with us. For example, when we say video editors are the next big thing is because a we see the evidence in hiring activity and salaries but b we also really believe in it. Otherwise, we wouldn't be hiring 50 video editors a month. I'll tell you one more red pill insight and this most of you will not believe but it's true and you can go and check. The best startup founders across the world and even in India that you can think of are both marketing and product geniuses rolled into one. Yes, this is a surprising red pill but good marketing folks are also very good at product especially consumer product. Like what do you think Steve Jobs is? who's great at marketing, also very good at product and deciding what customers want because in every step you're thinking is the customer getting delighted by this. In every step you're asking, is this sharable? Is this low friction to use? Marketing requires you to be able to blink inside the mind of a consumer. And a good product also requires you to do that. That's why in the valley, the best product people are also very good at marketing. And it might feel strange to ask how marketing people can be product people, but that's the most common combination of founders. In fact, you take the top five to 10 good founders from India uh in the old startup like the last gen of startups, they all have this combination. If you're a young founder focused on products, 99% of failures from now till when you eventually get success will not be a lack of product skills, it'll marketing and distribution. Even the attraction of Silicon Valley, the attraction of best talent to Silicon Valley is marketing. Why did Sundar Pay and Satya Nadella go there specifically and not any other part of the world? It is this allure this aura of this is a good place to be in and that was manufactured obviously they had lots of product successes as well and capital to repool in but also it is the marketing because there are lots of other places with capital too. The last thing is about talent and

venture capital. India is deeply neotistic with talent and VC with investors. If you know someone you can raise money or get a good job. In my first startup 12 years ago, I sent 70 cold emails. And the VC that finally invested was from Chicago, not from India. In India, if you want to raise for early stages, you actually need to know someone. Even with jobs, knowing someone will get you a job easier. Sure, it is true that your network is your net worth and networking is a skill you can learn. But in the valley, it's a lot more of a meritocracy. If you're a good founder, you can raise pretty easily if people know you're raising. The biggest VCs there are looking for new and contrarian. Like I said, different from normal ideas in India. Many promising Indian innovators without the right connections struggle to get noticed or funded. Additionally, social status signaling in India also pushes talent towards proven career paths like government or corporate jobs rather than small scrappy startups. For a lot of people, a prestigious title or affiliation with a big company is valued for status. So founding a small company might not confer social capital until it becomes wildly successful. But in the valley, it is cooler to work at some small startup trying a new thing than to work at Google. I know that sounds odd, but it is what it is. In Silicon Valley, it celebrates if you're a founder, especially if you're doing it seriously. Being a passionate entrepreneur, even if you're unproven, earns you enough respect in the community, at least to get you some intros. In India, it's different. In India, you have to prove a lot more before you before somebody starts helping you and gives you intros. You need to already have proven that you're fairly successful for everybody else to help you. You know, it's like failure. No one wants to be associated with the valley that really doesn't matter. Anyway, I hope that you see that this is a lot more cultural than people think it is. And I really do believe that India has the India absolutely has the capital. I know this for a fact, right? India absolutely has the talent, right? Many of you are watching this video. India also has the ability now to do good marketing, good distribution. There are people who can do it. Now, it's just a mindset thing. It's can we get a group of people who can provide the gre so that these new ideas can take place. That's it for me. I hope you like this one. Bye.