Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO of Kovai.co, compares software engineering labor costs between London and India.
Opinion
Founders cannot build a bootstrapped software company in Western Europe
“You cannot build a product company, especially a bootstrap company from London or anywhere from Europe.”
Insight
Kumar: Founders should avoid flat organizations and build hierarchy quickly
“And don't build a flat structure. Because what typically happens is when you're in the early stages, like, you know, 10 people, 20 people, et cetera, you try to build a flat structure, right? Everybody reports to you. And it's fine. But once you start scaling,…”
Insight
Kumar: Building multiple $20M-$30M products is easier than one $100M business
“It's harder to build a single product, hundred million dollar business. Then, you know, like, it's fairly, comparatively easy to build, like, a 20, thirty million dollar businesses.”
Insight
Sourcing elite product developers in India is difficult despite massive talent pools
“I think in India, the challenge is the quantity is there. If you want, say for example, tomorrow you want 1000 developers, you can go to one of those TCS and Wipros and say, tomorrow I need a team of 1000 developers. It's not a problem. But if you wanted to ge…”
Insight
Indian software engineers value cash and bonuses over startup equity
“I think it would be very difficult to convince on a equity basis because, you know, it's a paper money for them, right? Like I think it's you will be better off paying them a good salary and maybe some kind of a bonus rather than explaining equity”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Kumar: Kovai.co targets $100M run rate by 2030
“And the objective for us is to build a hundred million dollar run rate business by 2030, like, sooner, sooner if possible.”