More Vim from Hyderabad: Scaling Innovation and Lessons from India’s Tech Revolution

India is home to arguably the biggest per capita number of competent cost-effective software engineers and techies. In April 2005, I visited India for the very first time thanks to my involvement with the World Summit Awards (WSA). For the 2024 cycle, in an unprecedented showing, 3 of the 40 winners globally were from Ghana. They were the Achieve Investment App by Petra, Chango by IT Consortium and Khaya AI —by the Ghana NLP Project. I leveraged this visit to confirm what I knew before, learn more about India, network with folks, etc. A lot of us have heard about Bangalore, being the main IT city in a country that houses the most techies worldwide, amongst its population of 1 billion. While at MIT, I learnt about the multiple India Institute of Technology (IIT) institutions. They are amongst the most competitive academic environments in the world. I would not call you an idiot if you have not watched the 3 Idiots movie, but if you have not, go and watch it right away! The movie and other things show how rigorous the academic environments are, ensuring a great per capita of great techies in India’s huge population. Its alumni are not just chopping dollars from India in remote work, they are all over the globe, from San Francisco to Sydney to Berlin to Beijing. Hyderabad is taking over. I found out that it was home to large campuses for the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Google in India

Visiting the Google Hyderabad office on April 10 was a highlight for me. Mohit and I shared lunch and discussed the local ecosystem. The lunch time reminded me of the Googleplex in MV, CA, bringing great lunch memories from my Google days. The office/campus has more than 3000 employees, the majority of whom are Indians who studied and grew up in India. They work in various teams including: Engineering & Cloud, Ads, AI Research, Sales, YouTube, etc. That day, the office was buzzing with an AI Day for Startups. I inquired about the event to see who was eligible to attend. It was mostly for developers who had registered beforehand and had come prepared with their laptops, etc. Interestingly, one guy I had met at the T-Hub recognized me and we got to know ourselves better. I also networked with a few of the developers while wiling away time at the reception.

Google currently has major offices in other Indian cities. Yes, there is one in Bangalore aka Bengaluru. They focus on core engineering, software development, product upgrades, and artificial intelligence research. The office in the home of Bollywood, Mumbai aka Bombay, handles business and advertising partnerships. Gurgaon aka Gurugram is near the capital New Delhi. I understand this office has the most Googleyness. It made me think of the GooglePlex in Mountain View, California. They focus on sales, marketing, government affairs, policy, and partnership development. The Pune office focuses on Google Cloud operations. Connectivity Free Wi-Fi is key for travelers. There are multiple connections at the airports I used, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai. Once, I had to scan my passport at Wi-Fi kiosks, generating a small slip with a unique Wi-Fi voucher code. The Wi-Fi was fast, which I expected. I was able to get free Wi-Fi at the hotel, T-Hub, the Google office, Red Rhino, etc. I asked the folks at Berlin Club to also be a hotspot for me to communicate with friends during nightlife. The Telangana Government The most impressive award for and about my trip goes to the Telangana State government. It has gone beyond traditional policy-making and lack of implementation of good policies to being a massive ecosystem builder, especially for the tech sector. What other sector were they going to choose in this country? In this case, the development is rooted in the herd but the buck starts with leadership. N. Chandrababu Naidu was the Chief Minister who is mostly credited with putting Hyderabad on the global tech map. He famously persuaded Bill Gates to open Microsoft’s first development center outside the U.S. in Hyderabad in 1998. He pioneered the development of HITEC City, a dedicated IT corridor that attracted giants like Google, Oracle, and IBM. He coined the slogan "Bye Bye Bangalore, Hello Hyderabad". Unfortunately, he was still criticized for ignoring rural farmers and a lot of other popular trades in India, leading to his 2004 electoral defeat. Hindsight is 91%. K. Chandrashekar Rao continued his good work, aggressively scaling the tech ecosystem. He attracted other big tech like Google and Amazon to build colossal campuses. He inaugurated T-Hub, which is the world’s biggest innovation campus, which is a key cog in this tech city. T-Works followed in the grand scheme of total transition into a tech town! T for Telangana, T for Tech, T for Transformation. Today, Hyderabad is #takingover. The police force in Hyderabad is following the lead of the authorities above them. There is the Cyberabad enclave. Imagine how folks drive in this colossal city, and the number of cops being cut. They have one of the most sophisticated surveillance and command infrastructures in the world. A fast and furious group of drivers need Third Eye Drones. Cyberabad has implemented high-end traffic monitoring drones specifically for the IT Corridor. This helps with real-time aerial shots of traffic jams, towards solving them. Every patrol vehicle is GPS-tracked, and officers carry smartphones, communicating through apps and servers. Other Major Places Stephen Moore and I also visited T-Works, which made me think about the Kosmos Innovation Center (KIC) Center of Excellence (CoE) we are building in Kumasi, around hardware, maker labs, etc. It is India’s largest prototyping center, providing hardware startups with over 25 advanced labs for product development. Telangana is also home to WE-Hub, India’s first state-led incubator exclusively for women entrepreneurs, offering mentorship and credit access. The WE-Hub was a major partner for the WSA Global Congress, and I met a number of their entrepreneurs exhibiting at the ceremony held at the WE Hub, Amphitheater (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University. Diaspora Driving Development

I think you know that Whatsapp’s biggest market is India. I thought being in India would help finally get better customer service out of Meta AI, but nope. You must have seen the Whatsapp message going around talking about how Indians have taken over Silicon Valley’s giants. Let’s start with our very own Google (who else?). Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google/Alphabet). He is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur, and has led Google’s expansion into AI and cloud computing. While I was at Davos in 2015, I met Satya Nadella, who has been leading Microsoft, which has grown greatly focusing on the cloud. I watched a lot of YouTube in Hyderabad because I couldn’t watch much of the sports highlights, etc on local Indian TV. That behemoth is also led by Neal Mohan. Indians are also at the helm of other businesses like Adobe, IBM, etc. As you would expect, a growing number of the Indian diaspora—equipped with experience from Google, Amazon, Meta, etc —have been returning to India. First, these same companies are in India to hire them and the Indian tech giants are also competing for such talent, and able to pay rich rupees. These returnees bring the "Silicon Valley mindset" (one that I have not blogged about enough), comfort with high-risk venture capital, product-led and adaptable growth, and experience in scaling global platforms. Indian startups have clearly benefitted from that, building innovations that keep out some startups from elsewhere. #InGhana, we know about Tata. They are not just about vehicles anymore, thanks to Tata Consultancy Services. Infosys has become a big digital transformation partner for big tech firms, amongst other services and products. If you have followed the Whatsapp conversations around India, you would know about Reliance Jio which arguably provides the world’s cheapest data. There is still a huge number of people in India who need to be brought online, but hundreds of millions of Indians online rely on this company to drive an app economy.

Indigenous Solutions India is no longer just a consumer of Western apps; it builds its own, often with better functionality for local conditions. I was really impressed with the UPI (Unified Payments Interface): that is being used all over India. It is some sort of a QR Code payment platform. I tried to use Google Pay while in India for some payments but that did not work. Good old PayPal saved the day many times, together with my Visa and Mastercard cards. It runs on government-backed infrastructure, and is very advanced. It powers apps like PhonePe and Paytm, which have made cash obsolete in even the smallest Indian villages, where tech and digital literacy issues exist just like in Ghana. I had heard about Zomato before, which shows it is a very popular app in India. I learnt about Swiggy while in Hyderabad.  These food delivery and quick-commerce giants have mastered the logistics of India’s dense urban centers. I used Uber Auto for transport, riding the three-wheelers. I had a blast in IN. I connected with a few entrepreneurs who are building solutions that can be used in Ghana as well. I hope to help some of them scale. Branch (Kenya-born) is in the Indian market. Nigerian-born Boomplay has ridden the Afrobeats wave to see good usage in India. Basically, I would like to see more African solutions like Khaya AI or Chango to not just win awards but to eventually find users in the bustling streets of Hyderabad and beyond. Respond by saying, “More Vim!”.