A very touchy topic, I'd say, but someone has to initiate this debate. Okay, let's clarify few things before beginning. In this story we'll only discuss the Indian Startup Circuit. Also, this story might give you a new angle on the entire ecosystem, on how a startup operates! Okay so let's jump right in.

To begin with, let me just tell you that "NO", we are not living in a bubble. Why? well, for starters stop drawing similarities between Indian ecosystem and the dot com bubble, two separate phenomenon entirely. The dot com bubble actually was a failure on investors part not on entrepreneurs. Dot com bubble gave hope to a lot of investors to earn fast quick money by investing in anything that has dot com behind it. That made getting initial investment very easy for entrepreneurs, and probably companies that got trapped in dot com bubble, even if they were solving a problem, it was very difficult to get noticed because nobody was actually innovating, people were actually copying each other. So, simple logic, one problem multiple options, some had to become obsolete.

Looking at the Indian Startup Circuit, each and every startup is trying to solve a specific problem, they might have competition but it's actually perfect, startups are innovative in their approach. Let's take the example of the food delivery market. Swiggy outranked everyone 2 years back but Zomato's constant marketing strategies led to equal distribution of the market share, eventually. Also, it's not like for a particular problem we have 10s of startups, what we have is perfect and even if the number rises it ultimately goes down, thanks to mergers and acquisitions. Startups are actually happy with one or two major competitors, because this allows them to innovate. Another thing, investors have learnt from their mistake of chasing short term money during the dot com bubble. They've realized India has become the next startup hub and they do their due diligence before investing. This is 'smart investing'.

Moving on, Indians have identified even minuscule problems and have built their business on it. Let's take the example of CRED, running on a simple problem, payment of credit card bills or let's consider Licious, just serving the non veg lovers or even Zerodha, just making trading simpler. Very minute problems. It's not like Indian Entrepreneurs are copying each other, they are just finding the small problems, that actually has the potential to give huge returns. So you need to have the 'eye' of an entrepreneur, very important.

I wrote this story, because I see a lot of people comparing the dot com bubble with our ecosystem and I just can't stand it! I can continue on this topic, but I just wanted to highlight that we aren't in a bubble and I think the above stated points are sufficient to do that. Well, in case you want the next part do let me know in comments. Also, let me understand your point of view on this topic, we can have a healthy discussion on this!