Bangalore is unsustainable. Here is how founders are building in smaller tech cities

90,000 Hours

The episode explores the emerging shift of India's tech ecosystem from overcrowded metropolises like Bangalore and Mumbai to smaller, high-p

Key takeaways

• Rohit Bhatt's company RoboSoft Technologies was acquired by Technopro Holdings for approximately $100 million.
• Google is making a massive $15 billion investment to create an AI hub and data center in Vizag.

Main topics

• Tech decentralization in India
• The rise of the Mangalore-Udupi tech belt

Notable quotes

World-class quality at 25 % of the rate.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that sustainable tech growth in India require

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Picture this. Mumbai, actually Bombay, in 1996. Speaker 1 (0:08) Just a year before that, India's Telecom body had launched public internet in the country for the very first time. This was when a dial-up connection for quote-unquote non-commercial usage was 15,000 rupees for, wait for it, 9.6 kilobytes per second. Unimaginable now, but there was a heady sense of optimism in the air. India opened up its economy just a few years earlier. By 1996, the IT sector reached its first billion dollars. Rohit Bhatt was in his mid-twenties then and had returned after working for a couple of years in Japan. He was determined to start a software services company. And he did, from his sister's living room in Bombay. Apple had just come to the country and in his previous job, Rohit worked with the Mac operating system. It was a perfect match. He went to the small 18-member Apple sales team in India, saying that he could be their tech guy. Rohit was there at the right place at the right time in bustling Mumbai and backed the first project for his company that he called RoboSoft Technologies. After that, there was no looking back. He was coding away with two others. Slowly, the number of clients also grew. Everything was great until 1998. Speaker 1 (1:32) But something did not feel right. Bombay was crammed houses, a rushed life and people hustling around the clock. But what really bothered Rohit were the local trains, the long hours to get from one place to another. His customers were from California, Taiwan, Singapore. And he had not met anyone until this point. That was when he had his first big realisation. Speaker 4 (2:05) For me, in Bombay, I was traveling in those local trains and I would spend one and a half hours, one and a half hours up and down. And it was a bad thing. I used to enjoy it when I went to Bombay in 92. But by 97, 98, I thought there's a better way to live my life. And I said, let me not waste three hours of my time. If my customer is not bothered, where am I? Why should I be? And I decided to move to... Speaker 1 (2:38) So, Rohit packed his bags and moved back to his hometown, Udupi. On the same coast as Bombay, but anything like it. If Bombay was the cosmopolitan port city, the cooler cousin, if you will, Udupi was a quiet coastal town. But that decision to move back, it paid off in the long run. In August 2021, 25 years later, RoboSoft got acquired by Japanese company Technopro Holdings for around $100 million. Three years after RoboSoft's acquisition that made people do a double take, another Mangalore-Udupi-based tech company called Nuvego Solutions got acquired by NTT Data. Last year, one more homegrown company, Nivea Solutions, got backed by Blackstone-owned R Systems. Today, the Udupi-Mangalore belt in South Karnataka It's a booming, emerging tech hub. GCCs are coming to it. Co-working spaces are springing up everywhere. This has happened because of bets taken by founders like Rohit. If you remember, Rohit made the journey back to Udupi after frustration with the Bombay local. This frustration is the perpetual feeling of every employee in Bangalore, actually all of urban India today. Long days followed by longer commutes, water supply issues, infrastructural issues, all pointing towards growth that is frankly unsustainable. But how do we make our tech growth sustainable? By growing it beyond Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi NCR, by really promoting tech talent everywhere and by building in smaller cities and towns and villages. In this episode, I tell you stories of three founders from Udupi, Wyzak and Nagpur and the new tech ecosystem. These are stories of determination, challenges and a great sense of purpose thrown in along the way. These are also stories of many moving parts and holds lessons for how educational institutions, policy and early adopters all need to come together to build a tech city. Welcome to 90,000 Hours, a show about careers and workplaces. I'm your host, Vidhatri. Speaker 1 (5:18) So when Rohit got back, the first challenge was finding internet connection that would support RoboSoft's work. He realized that the National Institute of Technology in Suratkal, near Mangalore, had a tiny science and technology entrepreneur's park that was not in use. Rohit asked for permission to use that space and he got it, but only at night. By the way, this is a good time to tell all of you that the folks he hired in Bombay did not want to move with him to Udupi. There was no option but to start from scratch. I Speaker 4 (5:53) hired again, rehired again because the people from Bombay said they don't want to come down to this region. And I said, you know, fine, I'll restart things. Luckily for me, one of my classmates was an assistant professor at