‘Entrepreneurship comes naturally to Indians’

We talk about India being a land of jugaad. It’s actually entrepreneurship in one sense or another. I think starting own business comes very naturally to us. There are people who are now second- time or third-time entrepreneurs and they are also helping build the ecosystem. What start-ups are essentially doing is wherever there is a lot of fragmentation in the market, they bring technology to the forefront to bridge that fragmentation. That is what companies like Udaan and Flipkart have done. Microsoft’s portfolio pretty much addresses the entire landscape of what we can provide from a technology perspective, be it the core IP which sits on a tech stack addressing the customers of the start-up or security or solutions or productivity tools for the employees. For example, in the case of Makemytrip, we power their  bot services. Right now, the voice-assisted booking is live in Hindi and we are going to bring it up in different Indian languages and this is all built on Microsoft Azure Open AI Service and Azure Cognitive Services. The other sort of example of the work that we have done in the B2B space is with a unicorn called Darwinbox. They provide end-to-end HRMS solution for all sizes of enterprises. Now, HRMS itself is a very, very crowded space.  Darwinbox has literally disrupted this space by creating a solution which is very millennial-friendly. Their entire tech stack is powered by Microsoft and they are basically integrating their product into different offerings of Microsoft, which will also enhance the Microsoft portfolio.

A lot of the funding winter is still very much there, but if the start-ups have the right business model and they’re built on the right sort of tech stack, they can actually overcome some of these headwinds. How are we supporting these start-ups from a technology perspective? We have two ends of the spectrum. One, for early stage start-ups, we have a programme called Founders Hub. The thesis of the programme is that when a start-up is basically setting up its business, conserving cost is supremely important. We don’t use funding as a criteria. If the start-up basically has a MVP [minimum viable product], there are certain benefits that we provide. So across the spectrum of early stage start-ups, we offer the entire Microsoft tech stack, be it the productivity suite or Azure or GitHub or LinkedIn or any other platform. All of these are provided free of cost and the cumulative benefits that we provide  to a start-up in the form of credits amount to about $3,00,000 to $3,50,000. This helps the start-up conserve cost for about two years. And that’s not all. Start-ups need to scale their business. So we are saying, “Hey start-up, don’t spend anything on technology. Microsoft will invest and help you set the business.” That is one form of optimisation that we are providing through technology. You also need right kind of mentors both on the business side and on the technology side. So this programme provides a network and a pool of expert mentors. Most of the start-ups build their tech stack on on a public cloud. Now what happens is that as the business grows, the cloud costs should not be growing. Specific cloud solution architects from Microsoft work with these start-ups, sit with them and help them model their tech architecture. We also take specific B2B start-ups which sell to enterprises to the market and help them grow their top line. Microsoft has this massive sales machinery as we operate in 192 countries. I’ll take the Darwinbox example. Their HRMS solution is a horizontal solution. They sell to a specific category of enterprise customers and Microsoft also has sales people who sell to these enterprise customers. So we do the matchmaking and we get Darwinbox sales team to work with Microsoft sales team and sell to those enterprise customers. Now, you might ask what’s the incentive for Microsoft to do this? We’ve also structured our sales programmes such that the Microsoft sales people are able to retire their targets and quota by selling a start-up solution. 

Start-ups are basically far ahead in terms of tech adoption. They look at what is the disruption that they can bring either in an existing category or create a [new] category. Three-four years ago, in the enterprises space, everybody was talking about conversational bots and conversational AI. It was just starting to take off. We used to be partner with yellow.ai and we took them to some of the BFSI customers or wherever there are enterprises which ran large contact support centres. It was a very manual process about 5-6 years ago; but today, most of this is hybrid. A part of it is automated  through these conversational AIs and then the handover happens to a human. The other one is, we’ve  been talking about low-code, no-code platforms. We are saying why should coding be restricted only to developers? There is an interesting start-up called builder.ai. They are saying even if you don’t know coding, you do drag and drop, and you create applications. What if I just want to order applications just like how I order a pizza or I do online shopping? Can I do online shopping for applications? So very interesting, very disruptive. Now a lot of organisations that do not have capacity are talking about partnering with some of these start-ups to create a shadow IT team and literally order applications quickly for internal use.

Microsoft is pivoting around creating solutions for the entire Microsoft Cloud stack and we have our own bunch of services called Azure Orbital Ground. We provide ground stations as a service. We have brought together all the engineering assets that we have as part of this programme. As part of this, we have partnered with ISRO and we provide support for the space tech start-ups via the founders programme that I mentioned about. Over and above that, expert engineers and domain experts from Microsoft also become mentors of the  start-ups. For instance, our engineering teams are working directly with Pixxel, helping it to build its entire tech stack on Microsoft. Also, many of these start-ups have a B2B model. So we take them to the right government departments both in India and in the US since they need those credentials, credibility and all of that. Once we find the right connect between Microsoft’s priorities and the start-ups’ priority, we help them to scale quickly. Maybe about a year or two ago, this was a growing space. So we invested ahead. We said there is a great connect between what Microsoft can bring to the table in terms of the engineering assets and the space that we are operating in. And we identified about 15 to 20 start-ups in India. We are now going deep with them in partnership.