Why India could not produce an entrepreneur like Elon Musk?

Oops, sorry. India has produced a legion of entrepreneurs better than Elon Musk. It’s only that you need to suitably change the frame of reference while evaluating people.

Sitting in the heart of the developed Western world is very different from succeeding as an entrepreneur in India. Let me list just five problems that any entrepreneur faces in India even today which you don’t in the USA. These are the real game-changers. Here goes -

• Massive bureaucratic red-tapism - Companies sink in it.
• A defunct higher education system that drains kids of all imagination & originality - So a Tech-company needs to train engineers from ground zero again at its own cost
• A society that criminalises failure as much as it glorifies success - So you need to steel yourself against perpetual barbs
• Minimal patriotism and pride in creating anything indigenously, and a mad urge to praise everything foreign and white/pink
• The stark failure of the Intellectual Property Rights protection regime, and a judicial system that fails to implement rights real quick. So where’s the incentive to radically develop something new?

In the middle of all this, when you have many shining gems like Narayana Murthy, you wonder where they get this drive from.

When India had no computers worth the name and practically no internet, this man (these men) thought of a global delivery model (GDM) in which people sitting in India would charge their American clients Dollars for the high-quality work. This is audacity at its best. His GDM became stuff of legend later on [Global Delivery Model, Business Delivery Model, IT Delivery Model]. The phenomenon was studied by many, including Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat. I consider him a very audacious entrepreneur and totally in a class of his own. God bless him for showing what we are capable of. So for me, Murthy > Musk.

Yes, things are slowly changing now, but it’ll be at least another generation before we achieve a systemic smoothness that throws up gems like Musk routinely. For the fanboys out there, reserve some adulation for our desi superstars too! Thanks.

Source:https://www.quora.com/Why-India-could-not-produce-an-entrepreneur-like-Elon-Musk/answer/Sandeep-Manudhane