The desi garage startup redux
by Santosh
Kreeda, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary (and survived the ceiling of its garage headquarters falling and destroying one of its founders’ laptops), is getting VC funding.
The company now plans to move out of the garage.
Someone wrote earlier that what programmers need most are hygiene and motivation :). Perhaps we ought to add safety, no?
India tech entrepreneurs, though, face numerous obstacles, such as a lack of infrastructure — something as simple as well-equipped offices — and attracting top talent.
“They want to make a lot of money,” Manish Agrawal, co-founder of Bangalore-based Picsquare, an Internet photo sharing site, said of job candidates. “They can easily get a job at a big company and make three or four times what we can pay them.”
Even when an engineer wants to join his start-up, his or her parents, who value a stable job over everything else, might object.
“In India, parents have influence over which college you go to, which girl you marry — and which job you take,” Agrawal said. “The parents aren’t risk-takers.”
Added Picsquare co-founder Kartik Jain: “You don’t hire the candidate. You hire the parents.”
I would like to add “You hire the parents and the wives/girlfriends (please change gender as applicable) “.
tinker on 
TrackBack @ http://codeword.blogspot.com/2006/12/trackbackstartups-in-india.html
They forgot another motivational factor – Free Beer (as in cost not freedom)
Ok, maybe girlfriends matter. But in my experience it IS usually the parents who are the stumbling block.
Any girlfriend of a geek is likely to understand a startup’s allure. But try explaining to the parents why it’s better to work for a startup than for InfoSys!
Fate it seems is not without irony 🙂
Jonathan – I admit, girlfriends can be easily convinced 🙂 but their parents greater sway – so back to square one.
Thanks for linking here Rahul. There will continue to be plenty gratis beer (as in cost) at BookEazy!