"The Best Thing Government Can Do For A Growing Industry Is Staying Away From It!" -Sandeep Aggarwal, Droom
In early 2011, Sandeep Aggarwal moved from the Silicon Valley, USA and moved to India. He launched ShopClues with three more people on board, raised $2million and began the journey. Later he got on to start his other venture in the car purchase space called Droom.in. It is an online automobile marketplace in India headquartered in Silicon Valley.
He is all for innovation and disruption, and thus is powering a show on Indian television known as 'MTV Dropout', which will begin a search for some of the most enterprising brains around in the country. Sandeep Aggarwal also invests actively in start-ups. Aggarwal currently is the Founder & CEO at Droom Technology Private Limited.
At the event of BW Dialogue Series in held by Dheeraj Jain and BW Businessworld in Le Meridien, Gurgaon, 29th May, Sandeep spoke to us and revealed his thoughts about the recent funding scenario in India this year.
Edited Excerpts-
Which are the new trends you see in the investments when you talk about the Indian Startup industries?
"First of all, I’ll say it is very fascinating to see entrepreneurism coming in all fascists. So, it is not just one trend. Couple of years back, you’d hear a lot more Edu-tech and health-tech, or Fintech. I think, those trends still continue but there are so many opportunities, even in content creation, even in video distribution, social media, market places.
I created Shop Clues five years back, but now there is verticalization of market places and I think if there are 15,000 different categories for retail or services. I think India can have 15,000 market places too. So I feel it is quite broad-based. But, if I just generalize, I would still say that, maybe I have a bias opinion towards our digital economy. So, I would still say Fin-tech, Health-tech, Edutech, market places. You know, still internet advertisement as a percentage of total advertising is still very small, per capita ad spend is also very small in India, but it is still growing. So that is one opportunity.
Then, I would say, internet or the things variable. I know some of these are bizarre. Quite a bit of this is being discussed and written down, but I still see these things as an opportunities. You see a lot of fascinating ideas coming from all these areas."
If we talk about the Modi government, did anything concrete in terms of the support come out for the start up industries in India?
"I think the government, if they can make India as the top destination for investment, they can focus on infrastructure for example in digitization economy, the single biggest thing the government can do is to provide extremely high speed internet at a very low cost. However simple it may sound but trust me that’s the biggest thing they can do. But infrastructure, security are all those things are what we need, not the policy and just a celebration. Then also there is an old saying, the best thing government can do, in any growing industry is staying away from it!
So, I would say, really provide us the world class infrastructure. Why should the data plans or the data quality in India is 45th in the world? It should be number 1! We don’t have number 1 highways, we don’t have per capita video electricity, and clean water. But how about the highest speed internet at the lowest cost."
