Submission #82

I started an IT firm, but it fizzled out within two months. I shortly left the country, and am currently working in San Francisco. Here are the reasons why it didn't work out, and probably never will:

1) Over-demanding yet non-competent talent pool. Bad work ethics. So many graduates, but none employable. In contrast, in Phillipines, you have technically qualified people with no degrees who have tons of freelance work to show as their experience.

2) One employee stole our circuit designs and disappears. Another faked his qualifications. Another got run over while transporting one of our items, we gave compensation to his family but couldn't find the culprit. Installed cameras in trucks where between each state- the police ended up demanding something from truckers!

3) Accounting is really confusing and messy. Border between legal and illegal is very very thin. One of my over enthusiastic employee bribed the customs official and later asked for compensation from the company - imagine what kind of accounting magics you can employ to cover it up among extremely ambiguous and contradictory laws ? Most accountants are part time money launderers. If you are an honest soul, this country isn't for you- sorry, no other way to put it!

4) We imported materials. Customs took items worth double digit lakhs as hostage for stupid reasons. Not much problems in Phillipines or Indonesia. Don't even want to begin talking about the pain we had to go through to export stuff!

5) Clients (read: Scammers) who don't pay, drying up our cash flow. Our clients were renowned businesses in India.

6) Suppliers who take money upfront and don't deliver (read: scammers 2.0). Also renowned businesses in India.

7) Government tenders - bribes, very short notice, unrealistic conditions, money hold up. They expect us to maintain their servers when they don't even have electricity, and blame us for the results of this power outage despite giving recommendations to buy a backup generator. When will babus know the difference between IT and power companies ?

9) Insurance guys who had weird clauses only found in this country. Never trust them - this includes government insurance companies who expect something for validating claims

10) Regulations, Licenses, Permits, Certificates (read: babudom and bribery). Documentation and paperwork is cumbersome and demotivating.

11) Venture Capitalists don't have much funds (compared to Singapore or Canada), inexperienced and hate anything about hardware or technology based businesses (probably they are aware of how risky it was to start in India) - will only prefer e-commerce intermediaries and IIT mafias. The amounts they are willing to invest was less than what I saved working for 3 months in the West.