BENGALURU: After ping pong tables, motivational posters and casual dress codes, India’s tech start-ups are following Silicon Valley’s lead and embracing the “fail fast” culture credited with fuelling creativity and success in the United States.

Taking failure as a norm is a major cultural shift in India, where high-achieving children are typically expected to take steady jobs at recognised firms. A failed venture hurts family status and even marriage prospects.

But that nascent acceptance, fuelled by returning engineers and billions of dollars in venture fund investment, is for many observers a sign that India’s $150 billion tech industry is coming of age, moving from a back office powerhouse to a creative force.

“There is obviously increased acceptance,” said Raghunandan G, co-founder of TaxiForSure, which was sold to rival Ola this year. He is now investing in others’ early stage ventures. “My co-founder Aprameya (Radhakrishna) used to have lines of prospective brides to meet ... the moment we started our own company, all those prospective alliances disappeared. No one wanted their daughters to marry a start-up guy.”

Srikanth Chunduri returned to India after studying at Duke University in the United States, and is now working on his second venture.

“I think what’s encouraging is that acceptance of failure is increasing despite the very deep-rooted Asian culture where failure is a big no,” he said.

“IT’S OK TO FAIL”: The shift has come about, executives say, as engineers began returning from Silicon Valley to cash in on India’s own boom, as hundreds of millions of Indians go online.

“Investors too want to find the next Flipkart, and most of them come from Silicon Valley backgrounds, so they bring that culture,” said Stewart Noakes, co-founder of TechHub, a global community and workspace for tech entrepreneurs. “That’s changing the Indian norms. It’s becoming ok to fail and try again.”

Big names like Flipkart can also mean the prospect of a lucrative exit for investors, covering a multitude of failures.

To be sure, the pace of change is slow in altering a culture that has produced top software engineers for decades, but — as yet — no Google, Apple or Twitter.

ROLE MODELS: But big home-grown successes like e-tailers Flipkart and Snapdeal or mobile advertising firm InMobi, as well as the multi-billion dollar firms set up by former executives from the likes of Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google, have created role models, encouraging graduates to take risks.

“With success stories, people accept it as a legitimate exercise,” said Ryan Valles, former CEO of coupon site DealsandYou and a former executive at Accel Partners, now working on a new project.

Meanwhile, billions in investor funding have fed the sector.

An estimated 70-90 per cent of start-ups fail. But the biggest test may be the first bust after the boom.

“That will be the test: whether people come back into the market and how they treat the people who lost their money,” said Ghosh.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2015

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