The Art of Conversation with Neeraj Sinha & Ashish Kashyap

Neeraj Sinha: Tell us about your startup journey…
Ashish Kashyap: I’m very lucky to have faced all versions of the digital explosion in this country. Starting with the Times Group, I had the opportunity as somebody in his late 20’s to build the whole e-commerce stack. I then joined Google India and launched their India-facing operations and got exposed to Silicon Valley. There, I realized that India is only about tech services and nothing else. There was no innovation happening. Nobody was building a single thing or idea of value. Every engineering graduate wanted to join TCS, Satyam or Microsoft and if you’d say ‘startup’, it was something that was looked down upon. When I used to go to Mountain View during my Google stint, I realized everybody wants to build. Every 20, 25,30-year-old wanted to build something. That's when I decided to build Ibibo back in 2007. And that’s when I left my job at Google. It was then that I realised - this was the time to “Make in India.”