QA Engineer I (Manual)

My rant about the Startup Ecosystem in India

The US is the land of dreams because of primarily 2 reasons: enough talented folks willing to take big risks and enough risk-capital providers. Both these pillars for India have issues. Let me explain. First, there are no true risk takers in India. Founders don't look at the bigger picture and they just want to make quick bucks. So they just end up copying what's working in the US or which idea has recently gotten funding in the US. All our so-called major success-stories are copies of Amazon, Uber, Stripe, WeWork, Paypal, Airbnb, Yelp, Instacart, Khan Academy, ClassPass, Fandango, Taskrabbit, Robinhood, Binance, Poshmark & the likes. Even if a startup takes the difficult 'path not taken' and somehows breaks the shackles and shows good growth or profitability, 10 other copies spring up. After looking at Zerodha's profits, so many similar apps jumped into the market. After looking at Dream11's growth, 10 other fantasy gaming companies jumped. If Juspay showed payment orchestrating can also be a good business model, 5 other PG companies now want to launch their own orchestrator. And now you can see copies of SpaceX, SHEIN, Revolut, etc. hitting the market. I'm 100% sure a lot of wanna-be founders are planning to start pitching for a D2C Beauty brand (after reading the Minimalist news) The only unique businesses we have built are labour based like Quick commerce, Urban Company, Swiggy/Zomato or they could grow because the govt decided to do something about the problems: UPI helped paytm, phonepe, etc. Even if a startup is able to provide exit by IPO it is done in a very flimsy manner: all other co-founders are kicked out just before listing, wholesale sales are spiked so they can show good numbers temporarily. Are your companies this fragile that you have to make such changes when you IPO? The Founders also lack conviction in their idea. Rather than hiring a good leadership team, some of them hire their cousins in critical roles (lol) and look for any opportunity to funnel out investors' money. They hire an army of 0-5 year experienced folks to make sure their control never goes away. The best startups in the US grew because they hired the best talent and gave generous ESOPs and made sure everyone is part of the journey and thus maximised their success rate. On the other hand are the investors/VCs: Copycat startups getting funded more is a reflection of their mentality - always take the easy path. For such startups PMF is kinda proven, TAM is also clear, so why not just copy and build for local consumption and we'll proudly call it the XYZ for Bharat. They prefer to back high-energy super-salesy founders with mediocre ideas rather than regular people going after moon-shot innovative ideas. They force the founders to kick out their angels by Series A/B because why should you give a spot on the captable to someone who took the maximum risk (/s). India has immense potential to create groundbreaking startups. But for that to happen, both founders and investors need to break free from their risk-averse, shortcut-driven mindset. Until then, our ecosystem will remain a reflection of global successes, with little to show in terms of original innovation.

Anybody from Poshmark ?

I have got offer from Poshmark as manual QA 2. How is the job security and work filter and salary there.