Watch: 14 years in US and currently on Sabbatical Leave in India as Startup Founder | NRI | back to india

2:49 Maybe we can dive a little bit into your experience of building a startup in Bangalore and how has it been going you know especially there lot of people who are thinking about you know doing their own startup so it would be definitely be very helpful to get your journey and your insights and your experience doing a startup setting it up and trying to build the team and so on yeah yeah certainly I think it's a very very fascinating question so my wife is a a small business owner in Columbus Ohio she runs her own company called chaib back.com so I have seen her struggle firstand and with respect to both customer acquisition as a as a new company how exactly do you acquire customers and how exactly do you engage with customers and sort of gamify the process of buying items from her so I've seen it firsthand seen her struggle firsthand and so I thought that maybe within the small business phace there is a lot of

3:50 Opportunity to build a company which is serving as a way for businesses to small businesses to both interact with their customers and try to communicate what value they are bringing in their life in their customers life somewhat easily and that's what our startup is about so so that's the background on where we where I found the inspiration for doing for starting my company later on when I thought that I wanted to do a startup the whole idea is you need to be where the customers are so I'm very fascinated by the Indian markets as such in Indian markets the way the selling happens right now is completely offline and as India is moving towards becoming A5 trillion doll and 10 trillion doll economy a lot of the these some of the offline businesses that are happening we'll have to move online we've already seen that in the restaurant space so so that's why I feel

4:52 That even though US market is predominantly online already Indian markets will be moving online from the offline space so right now if I want to make an appointment with a with a spa I have to call them up and then they will tell me okay these are the time slots which are available and you know then I'll book an appointment and then all that H I'll show up and all that now a lot of those things can be done online but they have not yet gotten online so I'm trying to tap into that particular opportunity and because most of the new businesses are opening up in India I felt that India is the right Market to enter whereas us is a fairly mature Market everyone has their own systems in place in order to run their business so therefore I didn't feel that the US market would be the right Market to enter so that's why I'm here in India of course I I hired some of the software engineers and so on early on like last year so before I came here for about a year I already had software

5:54 Engineers and so on working on building the product so we went through multiple iterations and so on on before I arrived in Bangalore but now we have a stable product that is already out there on app store so yeah so my development team is also in India where it's distributed and then my Market is also like we are targeting Indian markets because I feel that this is a growing market and hopefully people will be more open to using software for improving their workflow that's

6:27 Great so that great abishek so sounds like I think you have the market which is India and you know this is something that has started about an Year back so are there some Logistics that you can explain like I don't know the ease of administrative process of opening or starting a company like even like hiring the team anything that you can share I think that would be valuable in terms of the bureaucracy right I think that's another question that people have in mind how easy to do like business in India and anything changed and so on right right I think the way you should so if if if anyone is trying to start a company in India being in the US I think it's a fairly uphill battle even though there's all this talk about the ease of doing business and so on it's actually not that easy if you are a foreign resident trying to start company in India to to be precise as if even as a Indian citizen residing abroad you

7:27 Become a non-resident Indian because you are a non-resident for for tax purposes you really have to have an Indian co-founder someone who's resident of India as a co-founder if you want to start an Indian company now as soon as you start a company you need to have an office location so I'm assuming that people will be opening private limited which is equivalent to C corporation in the US so they need an Indian co-founder and Indian resident co-founder because that's how they will create a private Limited company and then they need to have an office address in India and then they need to file for GST then they need to go to all the Telecom department and whatnot and try to get registrations to get their OTP functional and so on and so forth so there's a lot of requirements in India that that are hidden requirements in the sense that you cannot find it written anywhere on the on on a website but as you start

8:29 Doing like step one you realize that there is a Step Zero that you haven't completed so you go back and start doing Step Zero which will take you one month then you come to step one then you will realize that there is some Step 1 a that you had missed and so now Step 1 a needs to be done and so on and so forth so that's the process in India and therefore I did not like I've been trying to form my own company in India but it has as I've mentioned it's a difficult challenge for me to start a company in India so what I did was I already have a US company so in US it's very easy you start a company and then after that you can just get a EIN number from IRS fairly quickly and then if you want to onboard Merchant you can apply to stripe stripe.com and you can get access to their payment Gateway like within a day or two so all in all you know the entire process in US is like a three four day long process whereas in India you can continue to

9:29 Keep doing things for several months and still not make much progress if you are a foreign resident trying to start company in India on the other hand if you're an Indian resident trying to start company in India the thing is fairly straightforward and there isn't much problem as such in order to do that so nonetheless if you want to get access to the payment gateways like Razer pay or PTM and so on and so forth it really takes a lot of effort for you to get through their customer customer success team or whatever that team is called so anyways that's been my experience so far we still don't have access to a payment Gateway by the way despite having all the paperwork done and everything so you know that's the State of Affairs as far as the trying to start a company in India is concerned but once you're able to get through the initial hurdle I hope that the process after that is moved but I can come to that maybe like six seven months later

10:29 Okay yeah again thanks for sharing your experience thus far and especially like you know starting the company living abroad and some of the challenges there and also some of the things that you have experienced right so I'm also

10:44 Assuming that you have chosen Bangalore for a specific reason when you are trying to do I mean compared to like you know maybe living close to the family or maybe anything that you can share some insights in terms of like when you are selecting a particular City in India how did you go about it and and anything that you can share there yeah yeah definitely so my my parents live in Patna now Patna doesn't really have a tech ecosystem as such so therefore I didn't want to be in Patna I wanted to be close to where a lot of the tech companies are located so that that brings me to goodgo Mumbai and Bangalore those are the three places and Hyderabad four places with predominantly with a lot of tech companies Chennai is sort of also upcoming Tech hub in India now if you look at all these five places Bangalore has happens to have the best air quality besides also have a have a very thriving Tech ecosystem and so on so that's predominantly the reason the air quality was like the highest the

11:46 Most important reason for choosing Bangalore as our base rather than any of the other cities I was more inclined towards going to Mumbai but my wife didn't want to be in Mumbai due to the High Cost of Living as well as low air quality so that's how we ended up being in Bangalore but I don't regret being in Bangalore at all the real estate is comparatively cheaper in comparison to Mumbai the tech ecosystem is very very strong here and people are extremely collaborative although I I would say that for all the cities in the country but certainly people in Bangalore are very collaborative so that has also been a big big boom but we didn't go to Patna because Patna really doesn't have a tech ecosystem as such so that's why we didn't want to be there great so maybe

12:32 Just switching the gears a little bit from a startup to the other one so now that you have chosen the Bangalore and so in terms of the logistics even for the sabatical move anything that you want to highlight maybe because it's a like a sabatical so maybe the logistics a little bit different and how did you go about it yeah so I wouldn't say the logistics are any different we had to leave our home and rent it out for to someone else in the US so for that we had to empty our whole house put most of our stuff in storage and then we needed to come to India as far as signing a lease is concerned we signed the lease remotely in the sense that when we were in the US that's when we signed the lease that happened to be a good experience it turns out that you know in the US it's generally said that do not sign a remote lease you have to go and physically inspect the property and this and that before you sign the Lee we didn't really follow that particular procedure for India because

13:33 Technically in India not much cheating happens at the time of signing the leas so you can watch the things remotely and the the real estate agent will take care of a lot of the signing signing part of it so once we came here there is a little bit of challenge in trying to use your us card on amazon.in and and some of the other websites so we faced a few like fraud Det detection and all those things that gets raised if you're using your card in India but after we informed all our credit card companies several times so I'm talking about credit card companies in the us when we informed them several times that we are in India and we did a lot of transactions failed transaction several times then eventually now none of my transaction gets cancelled because I'm using a US card so so now I'm able to use most of the US my us card for most of the things including for buying gasoline in my car or for buying

14:33 Things on Amazon so I've not faced any issues with respect to using my us card for running transaction so I think overall I think the whole process was fairly smooth and we didn't really have any Adventure negative Adventure through the whole process I don't know if you have any other specific questions related to our move then I can maybe expand on I think I was maybe more curious because in somebody who is already like made a decision moving permanently it's a little bit of other logistics such as like selling their items you know permanently closing accounts or consolidating and there other aspects that come in the case of a sabatical it's just going to be a long vacation you know which is you look in a different perspective no no actually no okay so maybe I should add a little bit here so last year we had come to India for a a few months a couple of months in 2022 and that's when we did a lot of the dirty things that needs to be done before you enter India so for instance

15:34 We got a phone number on a postpaid account using my mother-in-law as a family owner family account owner or something like that so once I got the phone number then I also opened a bank account in India NR nro NRE account in India and then on the nro account I could I could do UPI transaction so I connected my Indian phone number to my nro account and then through that I was able to do UPI transaction so overall I did all of this stuff before I came to before I came to India this time so I already had my UPI setup I already had an Indian phone number setup but if you are moving to India and you think that you will get a phone number in the first week itself it's going to be a big uphill battle and once you get your phone number then getting a bank account and getting it linked to your you your phone number so that you can do UPI transaction that's another hurdle that you need to pass through so once all of

16:34 This happens which we did last year so therefore we didn't have to do it this year but I think that's a hurdle that you should probably pass before you plan on moving permanently to India because I think those are sort of important fintech stuff one needs to do before they come to India otherwise it'll become a challenge for sure I mean I think it's almost like you're starting your own own Journey right I mean your own life you know which has it a different mechanism such as the UPI the payments and all that stuff so yeah but maybe I was more talking about some of the things that you wind up in us or in foreign you didn't have to wind up any anything because you it's the situation is different right right right and

17:17 Maybe I know I don't know if you mentioned about like you your kids right and how old they are and then maybe you know how did you go about finding a school and how are they adapting in India so far definitely so I have two daughters 5ye old and threeyear old so my three-year-old daughter goes to Nursery here at okid International School and my 5-year-old daughter is in the early years program one eyp 1 at again oage International School so they actually settled down in India fairly quickly again because they had they remember their previous visit a year ago so they they knew what they were expecting they came here we got them admitted to the school the school admission process was fairly straightforward and yeah and now they are going to school on a school bus school bus is their best time of the day they really look forward to going into the school bus in the morning and coming back from school bus in the

18:19 Afternoon so that has certainly worked out for us very well yeah and other than that I think they they have also had a lot of friends within the society so in us you know you want to find a person of your age you have to walk half a mile to have the next door which has a kid of your age but in India you know you just have to go down the elevator and you have like 500 kids of your age so so they have really found a very vibrant friend Circle here in in Bangalore within our apartment complex and we keep going to each other's Place the kids also Al we're able to sign up for a lot of classes after coming to Bangalore so we live in a society where we have a swimming pool where we have a basketball court we have a skating ring and so on and so forth so they got themselves into drawing class dancing class skating class swimming class so they got we got themselves admitted into all

19:19 These different classes some of which run once a week some of which runs twice a week or Thrice a week so we we know what the frequencies are and so we take them to appropriate classes and and and so on so they are really having a very very good time here in India in comparison to in the US in US it was so difficult to get them into classes it used to be very expensive but relatively speaking like coming from the US to India suddenly the classes become very cheap and and you would want to send them to as many classes and learn from the experts on on how to do things so my older daughter has learned a lot of the swimming aspects and she's also able to skate now fairly easily so we are very excited about some of these newel developments that we could not see in the US because it's so difficult but here it's it's very easy to get them started on some of these things looks

20:16 Like a lot of progress in like three to four months so seems like they're having so many friends which is very close by and you know with lot of options to explore their yes yes yeah so we tried we explored about 20 classes for each of each of the girls and then finally we found like three four classes that were very aligned with their interests and what they wanted to learn so you know that's how but the fact that you can actually try 20 classes and figure out like the four that works best for you within your budget I think it's a big deal living in the US I can tell you that it's really a big deal so so we are very excited about that aspect living in bangal that's great and how has the

21:01 Social life been you know living in India for you for your wife and in general in in Bangalore yeah yeah so one of the things one would expect being in the US that India is somewhat different and that people are more outgoing and so on and so forth we haven't found that to be very true so there are some there are some nuances to it so for instance within our society we have a lot of festivals like the festival organization is at a really next level where there is a dance and there is a stage and there are performers and there are like all the society people are also performing so that aspect is that that social aspect is very very strong and very very good like much much better than what we had expected on the other hand if you are expecting people to meet you on day-to-day basis I think that's the part where it's a bit more challenging primarily because people who are earning at a certain stage of their career they are required to be on

22:03 Call for significant chunk of time as a result of which you cannot really have an evening tea time which you know our parents would have with their colleagues and so on here it seems less likely to be able to just call someone on a weekday evening and have some have a chat with them primarily because some of them are working in US company so their work timings are actually in the evening or some some of them are working in Indian company but those Indian companies are working with us companies so by default you report to work at 10:00 a.m. but you still have us client meetings in the evening so during the weekday it's been difficult during the weekend you can always find time to go out and socialize in in in a restaurant or some other place and then we have had a few people with whom we have had like dinners together or we have had ch time together on weekends so those are also things that happens but it's not as common as one would imagine

23:04 Sitting in the US yeah and as you said rightly said I think it's just different stages of the life and it also depends on the society the community the kind of you know the profile of the people in the sense like the business like you know work culture and all that stuff that's right that's right yeah exactly cool maybe is there anything you know

23:26 From before like taking the sabatical leave to be in India like is there some expectations that you have versus the reality right I mean on any broad spectrum like you know anything that you can share like from your expectation to the reality you know from this three to four months of living here yeah I think the I mean the only major expectations we had was that when we come to India people will have a lot of time to spend and you know you can socialize a lot outside turns out that that particular is the only expectation that wasn't met but other than that I think all the other expectations are met some expectations are of course met Beyond expectations like I said about the festival season right so yeah I mean my wife is extremely happy she's going out for different kinds of dancing events within our society like there was a Durga Puja event then there is a Diwali event and so on and so forth so we'll keep going out for some

24:27 Of these events she she she goes out for a lot of those cultural events my daughters have started participating in cultural events also I didn't really expect them to start participating at such an early stage but actually you know within like three or four months they are ready to participate on on on stages and so on so I'm really like that that's something we would not have expected in the US but certainly it turns out to be the case in in India on the other hand of course we do miss some of the things about the us such as being able to like at least in Columbus everything is 20 minutes away like in 20 minutes you can literally go to the outskirts of the city so the fact that you can just pick up your car and be anywhere anytime because there isn't much traffic on the road and and the air quality is really very good that's something you we definitely miss in Bangalore but certainly the fact that we can have help at home and we can have D drivers if we don't want to

25:28 Drive our own car we can just hire a driver to do it for us and India is a very very deep into the gig economy thing so you can really hire drivers for four hours if you need them only for four hours and you don't want to do the driving so all of those facilities are there in India now a lot of it by the way is OTP driven so you really need to have an Indian SIM card and an Indian working number on day one before you enter India so I would I would suggest that people who are planning to come to India for long term they should definitely at least get a bank account number link it with their Indian phone number and get their UPI thing sorted out I think those three things once you do it then you can literally do anything in India and and you wouldn't have to have any any problem but but anyways yeah I what I was saying is that it's really very easy to get all kinds of help in India so certainly that has been a very very good thing for us specifically now that

26:30 We are starting our own company and we need to be on call 247 for various activities related to clients so okay

26:38 Yeah great thanks for sharing your thoughts there so are there any topics that we haven't covered that you would like to you know bring up or you know or talk about not really I think as far as the travel is concerned travel within India is concerned we haven't really done a lot of travel yet so we don't know we don't have any recommendations as to what are good places to travel versus not so good places to travel but once we'll have I mean once we settle down in India and we have like set set up our business I think we'll have more time to travel and we'll be able to give feedback on that as well but other than that I think you know for other aspects of life I I think the we have already covered everything that I wanted to discuss okay that's great I

27:34 Know this might be an unusual question feel free to say like you know you don't want to answer or we can punt it off just curious because you are in the academics you know area right I think maybe is there anything that you can compare and contrast especially maybe for the families who have kids growing up and they're thinking about living in US versus in India maybe not in like a primary like you know education but maybe in the secondary or like when they get to you know bachelors and so on so again if you have information and if you would like to you know share your insights or your knowledge I think it it could be something that could be helpful just curious because you are in that domain I thought I wanted to get your thoughts there yeah I think you know so let me tell you so I do have some thoughts on that but certainly you are asking so so depending on at what stage of career people are moving from us to India they will have different

28:34 Requirements so for instance if they want to send their kids to undergraduate right away so I can talk about undergraduate and above because at University that's the part that I see and maybe just to maybe potion that question also like even though some people might be moving here while they while the kids are still in the early stage right I mean they're still in the third grade fourth grade or in the primary education but just because they're going through this IB curriculum or you know the the different curriculums which is much more International so they're designed more to like kind of doing the undergrad internationally than locally because they're not like so it could also apply for them so it's just more of a train of a thought in terms of what curriculum they might want to put the kid in right cbsc versus igc versus IB so again you know just wondering again maybe primarily from a university perspective got it got it okay understood so I think the international curriculum certainly prepares you very well for

29:35 Building your resume to get into one of the international univ I mean one of the best universities internationally so whether it's n Us in Singapore or whether it's universities in Europe or in the US they actually structure their whole academic program in a way that you get a lot of brownie points that are needed so that when you apply you have all those brownie points like for instance you have done some service you have done some nonprofit activities you have raised some funding this and that like a lot of those things are needed cbsc schools will not really get into all that integrities ICC schools will also be just focusing more on academic side of things but International curriculum will try to sort of give you a lot more exposure I mean not you but the kids a lot more exposure about some of these things which will prepare them for univers admissions in the US and internationally but you know the the the question is whether doing 15 10 15 20 years later would a

30:40 US University education would the Indian University education be as good as a US University education I think the answer to that question is as far as engineering is concerned they are actually at par already so there's no difference not much difference between Indian education in engineering and US education in engineering as far as the undergraduate is concerned even if you go for Masters or PhD I think iits and iasc's also have very similar standards as the US universities have the real problem comes when it comes to getting a job so in us there are a lot more high-tech jobs where in your skill sets are actually needed to deliver on the job whereas in India that's actually not the case a lot of the times you have to learn things on the fly to carry out your jobs and some of those high-tech jobs are missing at the moment now what is true is a lot of us companies are setting up their R&D

31:42 Centers in India so if that starts happening in Greater proportion 5 10 15 years down the line then I think even if you want to get your undergraduate and PhD from India and want to continue working in in some of those companies I think that would be an excellent opportunity however of course us is known to be a world leader in the tech space so if you are doing your undergraduate from a US University and a masters of PhD from us University then the rest of the world opens up for you but I will tell you that not many jobs are there in in the high-tech space so I come from the AI and data science area that's my core research area and there is a huge glut of very high highly talented data science students in in the US right now and it's very difficult for them to find a job in the US so a lot of people who went from India to the US thinking that they'll do an MERS in data science

32:43 And then they'll get a job in the US they're not able to do that right now because there is just too many data science people in the US and not much demand from the industry so those kind of Market realities can hit at some point of time but you know that's why I I'm not able to make a projection over the next 15 20 years but as far as the schooling is concerned I think International curriculum prepares you to apply for some of these universities in the US and Europe so hopefully that will be helpful I think you answered that question it's more on this school curriculum and you know how well the the student is prepared to take on that right I mean whether the opportunities are going to be there or not it Just when it's like 15 years depending on you know the new technology because it's just growing at such a rapid Pace things are evolving so that's right and a lot of things are getting commoditized I think that's the other problem 10 years ago if you wanted to train a model you really needed a data scientist to

33:45 Come and you know set up the whole experiment now you know it's a matter of a few seconds you download tensor flow and you can start doing all kinds of data science stuff like within a few seconds so it's just you know things have been commoditized to an extent that you don't really need a lot of specialized skill set and that's going to continue happening and that's going to continue to change the job market quite significantly yeah yeah cool so

34:12 Thanks a lot abishek on that so is there anything that you want to advise or suggest people who are thinking about relocating you know either for doing the startup or even trying to test the water or anything right I mean anything from your perspective that you want to share with the audience here yeah I think the the startup ecosystem so let me divide my answers into two parts so one is set of people who want to come to India and work in India I think in those situations most of the people that I have found who have moved to India from us or from other countries including European countries they tend to stick to their original employers and they just move their office from us office they moved to Indian office or from European office they moved to Indian office so that seems to be the easiest way to for people to move and that is tried and tested in the sense that a lot of people are doing that like our society is full of people who are doing that kind of stuff the second type of people who

35:14 Might be coming for startups then of course you're not looking at the work culture in India you literally are setting up the work culture for your own company so you can set up howsoever way you want to set up and I think there is amount of talent to hire for your own startup how you get funding to run that startup is certainly something you need to think about and how would you reach out to your customers is something that you would have to think about very carefully if you're coming to the Indian market the the only problem comes if you're coming from us to India but you need to take up a position in an Indian company then you really have to be very careful about who your managers are what kind of work culture does that company have and and things like that like you have to do your due diligence before you take up a position in India because without doing due diligence I think a lot of people who are coming from the US who have been in the US work culture which is very 9 to5 oriented or 8 to five oriented they find it very difficult to

36:16 Get accustomed to the Indian work culture which is which flows all the way into the evening and night and sometimes even on evenings and weekends so so anyways that's something I think people will have to think about but I believe yeah most of the people would be just transferring their own position from a US company to an Indian comp to their Indian subsidiary and that's not that difficult then life is fairly straightforward and easy okay great so I think that's all I have from my side so thank you very much abishek for taking the time and sharing your thoughts especially the points on the startup and how the kids are getting settled and your insights in terms of the education system you know the schooling at both here in India as well as in us I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your insights and good luck with everything with your company and with you know whatever the decision you make so really appreciate you taking the time and talking to us thank you aage thank

37:17 You very much for your time that's great sure thank you all for joining us on this insightful journey of Dy return if you enjoyed this episode and want to explore more stories and expert advice make sure to subscribe and hit the notification Bell don't forget to leave a comment below with your thoughts and experiences by the way check out the links in the description below for our Facebook group and social media for updates and engaging discussions as well as connecting with fellow the wrers thank you once again and until next time may your the journey be filled with joy growth and endless possible it is