Startup Ecosystem in Kolkata: No Products, Only Services

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Kolkata doesn’t have many product startups. True.

Most startups are services based. True.

There is nothing wrong with services companies. Technical skill development in India has happened at scale in the services companies. It would be tremendously helpful to have large scale skill development happen in Eastern India. Entrepreneurs won’t build tech #startups without tech skilled people. An ecosystem has many dimensions. Also Bootstrapping tech product startups using services is a tried and true technique.

In Kolkata, Abhishek Rungta has built a very successful services company, is an active angel investor, etc. In Pune, Anand Deshpande has built a tremendously successful services company and has also been active in building the startup ecosystem in Pune and in India at large.

New technologies are coming into the forefront rapidly and continuously. Generative AI is only one of the more recent ones. 

Microsoft and Google are enhancing their cloud platforms to include Generative AI capabilities. Expertise in these domains is of immense contemporary value.

Think about the entire domain of Cyber Security. There is a worldwide scarcity in Cyber Security expertise.  

The entire continent of Africa has barely 600,000 software developers. The need for technical expertise is immense. Can Eastern India become a partner to fulfill this need? To secure African companies? To enhance African companies with AI and ML?

As a matter of fact, India itself faces a tremendous shortage of Cyber Security and AI/ML expertise. Centers of excellence and a thriving ecosystem of skilled people in either field or both could go a long way in meeting this skill gap for the entire country.

A very large portion of the Indian IT industry is still services based. And a lot of entrepreneurs have found access to the problems they have eventually built startups around at these services companies.

So, please, let us not diss Services companies.

Let us encourage both product ventures and services ventures.

And, let us build sustainable, profitable businesses.

Photo Credit: photobom/Flickr.com

This segment is a part in the series : Startup Ecosystem in Kolkata