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October 20, 2013 12:00 am GMT

The Key To Entrepreneurial Success In South Asia

SRI LANKA-TAMIL-VOTEThe combination of skinny jeans, hipster glasses and confident personalities like Dave McClure or Steve Blank, it seems, is irresistible.But this style has nothing to do with building a great company. Solving important problems does, and for anyone not in Silicon Valley, that means focusing on their own markets and not what seems to be cool. Countries like Sri Lanka and India have what it takes to be uniquely brilliant and entrepreneurial. South Asian entrepreneurs need to know and believe this. If they do not, South Asia will never become a center for innovation, creating the game-changing products and services their local economy demands and our global economy could benefit from. I say this having spent the last couple of years traveling across India and Sri Lanka connecting with the startup community, recruiting local talent for my own venture, and listening to more than 200 pitches. I recently spent three weeks visiting with accelerators, incubators, and institutes on behalf of the State Departments Specialist Speaker Programand discovered thatfounders’ obsessions with the Valley prevents them from solving local problems. The paradox Im seeing is this: The bulk of the worlds economic growth will come from regions like India and China, and although they may have cyclical slowdowns, these markets are necessary to the world economy. In India, the story is not just about tech support and engineering offices. Product startups have been developing through accelerators like TLabsor Startup Villageandincubators like IIT Bombays SINEand Startup Weekend. And various business communities are developing their own nationwide programs to support fledgling companies. For instance,NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) has undergone efforts to get India more product-focused. To this end, the organization has devised goals to create events and programming to help inspire 10,000 product companies by 2022.Even Uber, in some ways a symbol of developed cities getting even more sophisticated, just launched in Bangalore. But if the best entrepreneurial minds here are trying to copy the next Snapchat, they probably won’t be building products that the market truly demands in India. And the region wont live up to the hype. “Solving large local problems is one easy way for Asian startups to differentiate and sustain a competitive edge,” saysMukund Mohan, director of Microsoft Ventures. “Since customers are also local, the ability to get quick feedback and iterate rapidly will help them grow faster to achieve scale.” One example of this is

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