# Startups need customers, not condescension

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# Startups need customers, not condescension

Restored from Instagram stories · 29 August 2026

they literally launched an industry innovation challenge today, where big industries in pondy opened up their problems and startups/innovators can solve.

if they actually solve it, the reward is an actual purchase order.

no awards, nothing else. actual business.

have been advocating this for a long time but amazing that aic-pecf has initiated this.

monsieur vishnu, the ceo of aic-pecf is pulling punches way over his size to encourage startups in pondy.

proud and proud.

as much as i diss the govt meddling into entrepreneur space,

this is way better than anything else. when i see good stuff, encourage max.

encouraging industries to give purchase orders for startups solving their problems encourages innovation and business.

beautiful.

the highlight of this event is this panel discussion.

4 boomers from old companies discussing about the missing link - building pondy’s startup industry innovation ecosystem.

i’ve so much to say. about what they spoke and the problems.

i think the most frustrating part of the entire event was the way some of the industry people spoke about startups. there was this almost ridiculous level of condescension throughout the panel - like startups are children who have never seen the real world and these established companies have arrived to educate them.

just before that, a founder had raised a genuinely good problem with the government secretary. his startup had already demonstrated technical capability, had apparently executed government work before, including election-related monitoring,

but couldn’t participate in certain tenders because the eligibility criteria effectively screened companies like his out.

the secretary’s response was actually encouraging: they’re looking at creating better windows for startups to participate in government procurement.

great. that’s exactly the kind of structural problem an ecosystem event should be discussing.

i am just getting started.

and then you have the manatec guy basically coming in with the opposite attitude and then the last guy you see on the poster - forgot that name in the midst of the rant.

startups don’t understand the real world, you don’t understand what happens inside factories, we have people sweating on factory floors, you don’t know how companies actually operate, you can’t just work with the government, form a consortium with established companies like us, etc.

what the fuck? why the heck should you ask the startups to form consortium with boomers like you when the govt wants to open it for startups?

why is the starting assumption that a startup is incompetent until an incumbent validates it?

if a startup can demonstrate the technical capability, has references, can meet the required security/reliability standards and is willing to accept the commercial risk of delivery, let them compete.

if they fail, they fail. that’s what procurement criteria, pilots, milestones, performance guarantees and contracts are for. company age shouldn’t become a proxy for competence.

and the same mentality came through when someone asked how these companies would actually work with startups.

one of the answers was basically: we have problem statements, you can solve them, and then maybe we’ll buy your IP or license it or we will buy your company

that’s not what i would call building a startup ecosystem lol.

how about becoming the startup’s first serious customer? how about giving them a paid pilot?

how about becoming a design partner and spending six months helping them understand the industry’s actual problems?

how about giving them access to a real operating environment where they can prove that what they’ve built works?

how about introducing a startup that performs well to three other companies in your industry?

and yes, access to laboratories and infrastructure can absolutely be useful. but the relationship cannot be framed as “we have infrastructure and experience, therefore you need us.”

the interesting question is what both sides bring to the table.

an established industrial company might have factories, customers, domain knowledge, capital, certifications and decades of operating experience.

a five-person startup might have absolutely none of those things and still have three engineers capable of automating a workflow in three weeks that the established company has been doing manually for fifteen years.

that’s literally why the relationship can be valuable.

and this whole “you don’t understand the real world, people are sweating inside factories” thing is particularly funny to me.

yes. that’s precisely where good technology companies should be looking. why are those people still doing repetitive work that software, computer vision, robotics or ai could eliminate or dramatically reduce?

the existence of difficult manual work isn’t evidence that technology people don’t understand industry. sometimes it’s evidence that an industry hasn’t been technologically challenged enough.

what bothered me wasn’t experienced people disagreeing with startups. they should disagree with them.

founders can be spectacularly naive. plenty of startups build useless shit, underestimate operational complexity and think a demo is equivalent to a production system.

experienced operators are incredibly valuable precisely because they can expose those blind spots.

i diss startups all the time.

you’ve been invited to an event whose entire premise is building puducherry’s startup-industry innovation ecosystem.

the startups in that room aren’t there because they need four established businessmen to explain to them that “real companies are difficult.”

they’re there because the ecosystem supposedly wants those founders to eventually build the next generation of serious companies.

the healthiest possible outcome should be that ten years from now, some 23-year-old sitting in that audience has built a company much larger than yours.

you should want that.

and if the message founders leave with instead is “come underneath us, join our consortium, solve our problem statements, sell us your IP and learn how the real world works from us,” then we’re not really building a startup ecosystem.

we’re teaching startups where they’re expected to sit in the existing hierarchy.

classism much?

and throughout all of their ego filled chest beating audacious infantilism that these boomers showed,

these guys had the audacity to say pondy doesn’t have enough engineering talent.

itho varen.

and there’s another part of this that actually pisses me off even more.

“pondy doesn’t have enough engineers.”

why does the talent leave? why isn’t there a bigger technology ecosystem here? why aren’t more startups being built here?

maybe look at the companies that have historically employed people here.

for years, what career were we actually offering a good young engineer in puducherry? what was the salary? what was the trajectory?

what technically ambitious work could they do? what was the upside for staying here instead of leaving for chennai, bangalore or hyderabad?

you cannot systematically underpay young people, give them very little career progression, barely invest in building technical talent, watch the best people leave the city and then turn around ten years later and complain that “there are no engineers here.”

you freaking boomers and your companies helped create that problem.

the funniest demonstration of this was what happened when swiggy, zomato, instamart and the gig economy started competing for the same young workforce. suddenly someone could make 25k to 35k inr doing work that didn’t require spending four years getting an engineering degree.

and what happened?

employers who had spent years saying higher salaries were impossible suddenly discovered that salaries could, in fact, go up when nobody wanted to work for them anymore.

that’s the labour market telling you something.

when we started building companies here, we encountered exactly this ecosystem. engineering salaries at the bottom of the market could be absurdly low. ₹6,000–₹7,000 for someone who had gone through an engineering degree wasn’t some theoretical thing to us. we had to deliberately push starting compensation upward 20,000 at the time (with so much external pressure), and considerably beyond that as we grew because if you want serious engineers, you have to create serious engineering careers.

and it isn’t only salary.

you have to train people. give young engineers difficult problems. give them responsibility. expose them to international customers. let them build production systems. create senior engineering roles for them to grow into. make staying in puducherry a legitimate alternative to moving to bangalore.

that’s ecosystem building.

so there’s something deeply ironic about established businesses sitting on a stage and infantilizing startups while presenting themselves as the people who are going to help build the startup ecosystem.

help us how?

by letting us join your consortium?

by giving us one of your “problem statements”?

by graciously allowing us to build some technology for you and then asking whether we’ll sell you the IP?

that’s still the old hierarchy. the established company sits at the top, and the smaller company is supposed to be grateful for whatever economic opportunity trickles downward.

a startup ecosystem requires almost the opposite mentality.

sometimes the 25-year-old founder sitting across from you knows something you don’t.

sometimes the five-person startup has better engineers than the 500-person company.

sometimes they don’t need your permission, your consortium or your infrastructure. sometimes what they need is for you to become customer number one, pay them properly, open up a real operating environment, give them a brutally difficult problem and see whether they can outperform you.

and if they can, get out of their way.

i have not seen a single boomer company among these on placements and hiring from engineering colleges.

the underlying attitude seems to be: you stay there. we’re the established industry. you’re the startup. you help us, we’ll decide what your work is worth, and we’ll teach you how the real world works.

fuck that.

if pondy genuinely wants a startup ecosystem, the objective shouldn’t be to produce startups that remain permanently subordinate to the existing industrial establishment.

the objective should be to create an environment where somebody sitting in that audience today can build the next 1000 crore company here, employ 2,000 people here, pay engineers enough that people start moving into pondy for technology careers, and eventually become more consequential than the companies represented on that stage.

that’s when you know you built an ecosystem.

not when four established businessmen tell a room full of founders how lucky they are to have access to them.

i usually never swear in my stories or in professional interactions.

but damn.

this city needs a reckoning.

these boomers should not be allowed anywhere near startup policy making. stay tf away.

repeated behaviors of hierarchy, paternalism and economic gatekeeping.

i can understand economic gatekeeping. just tell everyone that you’re serving the best interest of your company.

but don’t dare to come and lecture to startups and making it as something of a favor to startups.

the first two? inexcusable.

rabid scums.

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