- Dhruv Suyamprakasam launched a telemedicine startup and initially moved to Bengaluru.
- Bengaluru’s fast-paced culture clashed with the healthcare industry’s needs and the team moved back.
- He says that Bengaluru has its own merits and should not be compared to the Silicon Valley.
This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Dhruv Suyamprakasam, a founder who launched his startup in Bengaluru but later moved out. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
My father was a first-generation entrepreneur and ran a thriving business in the early 1990s in Coimbatore, a small city in Southern India. I would follow him on business trips, and growing up, I spent a lot of time in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, two of India’s biggest business hubs in the south.
I studied mechanical engineering. During college, I became fascinated with entrepreneurship and building something of my own.
I first considered entering manufacturing, but I’d have to focus on making one product at a time. I decided building software was the answer, but I still didn’t have an idea of exactly what I wanted to use software for.
Around this time, I met my now-co-founder, a medical doctor, who was also my relative, at a wedding. We kept in touch and came up with the idea of our startup — a telemedicine company that would allow people to access doctors virtually and across local and international borders.
I was a recent graduate with a good job offer. My cofounder was worried about how our family would react to me quitting to venture out on my own. But I absconded the job offer and began working on our idea full time.
Moving to Bengaluru
We brought on another cofounder who lived in Bengaluru at the time. I had read about the city being the center of the mainstream startup ecosystem. In 2010, moving to Bengaluru felt like the best decision for me as a founder.
But it wasn’t the best place for us. It’s a place that expects companies to grow fast and fail fast. I didn’t think it was the right pressure to put on a healthcare startup, which has no margin for errors and requires a lot of trust from people. We met investors who had expectations like getting 100 paid consultations in a day.
Around 12 years back, I also felt like there was a lot of bias from investors. I felt excluded because I didn’t speak Hindi, which is the most spoken language in India, and I did not go to college at the Indian Institute of Technology, the most coveted engineering school in the country. I also got some judgment for being from a small town many people had not heard of.
A combination of those factors helped us decide to move back to my hometown after around 16 months in Bengaluru.
There were challenges back home, too. We faced issues with our internet connection, which we never had in Bengaluru, and there was no established startup community. But it gave us the space to grow at our own pace.
Since then, we have onboarded about 4,500 doctors to the platform and have patients from all over the world. The company has grown to around 200 employees, and we have expanded to include health content on the platform, too.
Heart of India’s startup scene
We even moved back to Bengaluru for a second time in 2016 because we had grown a lot more as a company and thought things might be different this time around.
We thought that maybe the first time around, we hadn’t understood how Bengaluru worked and how things were done. We were ready to give it a second chance.
The inclusivity had improved because of the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but not much had changed for the healthcare industry like the speed at which we were expected to show results. We ended up coming back to my hometown after a year and a half.
The city has tons of advantages, like proximity to venture capital, a massive pool of tech talent, and more opportunities for networking, which can be helpful in the early days.
But building a business outside the tech hub is also a good option, especially because of lower costs. While employee salaries are usually on par, founders can save a lot on office space and home rent if they build from smaller cities and travel to Bengaluru as needed. I also think we need more tech hubs in India outside Bengaluru.
It’s no Silicon Valley
I don’t think Bengaluru should be compared to Silicon Valley at all. Since 2018, I have also spent time in the Bay Area growing our business. Now, our company is headquartered in the US, and I spend four to five months of the year in the US.
Bengaluru has an amazing tech crowd, but Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley for a reason — people are far more open-minded and inclusive about giving opportunities to those from different backgrounds, which has allowed it to become a sponge. The city just sucks up anyone with talent from across the globe.
It would have made me incredibly happy if the first large language model came from India, but it didn’t. It came from OpenAI and Silicon Valley, where Sam Altman’s team was allowed to burn cash for years before ChatGPT came to fruition.
It would be easier for anyone trying to build a software company that aims to have global customers move to the Bay Area for better access to funding and talent.
We call Bengaluru the Silicon Valley of India, but that is just another way Indians are comparing themselves to the West.
I think the way to go is to be great on our own account. One step in that direction is to be more inclusive and start seeing people for their talents rather than their educational or cultural backgrounds.
