San Francisco: Over the last few years, India's enterprise software industry has outgrown its own origin story. Where the early generations earned their global reputation by competing on cost and delivery, the current generation is competing on the product itself and, in several cases, winning on those terms against the best in the world. The apple has fallen far from the tree.
Understanding why this is happening requires looking at what changed upstream. India has now lived through a full generation of company-building. The winners from that phase spanning founders who built the first SaaS companies through the 2010s, the operators who scaled them, and the engineers who spent years at frontier technology companies abroad have all re-entered the system in a different capacity.
