Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India.

I'd argue it's one of several pieces that show an issue of insular pigheadedness American institutions have.

This was fine when the rest of the world was much poorer than the US, but that delta has shrunk massively.

> American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them

I agree to a certain extent, but there have been plenty of major fumbles in markets with large TAMs (Uber in ASEAN, Ford in India) that if there was a bit more localized market research done, they would have done decently well.

Korean, Chinese, Indian, etc companies are increasingly becoming competitive, and American companies cannot rest on their laurels.

This is really is opening too many arguments.

Sure American institutions have insular pigheadedness. Indian/Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean institutions are filled with corruptions and nepotism.

We don’t know for sure Zoho would have been an American company, I would almost argue that their success is because they are in India and can most likely build their product at drastically lower costs than in the US. This is probably one of the reasons they can target SMB, including emerging markets in local currencies.

No doubt localization would have helped but it’s again one of those things where there are too many angles to really accept what is the correct or incorrect path. Uber, perhaps it was that insular pigheadedness you like to mention or perhaps they were really dedicated on having a single app, with a familiar process globally. Grab is indeed hyper local but also drastically different depending on the region your in and is a much different experience than what Uber provides.

I could not speak on the Ford in India but on the flip side Tata could never make it in more developed markets probably with the lack of safety.

The thing is that with India - for example - it is a relatively cheap market and those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway.

Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

> those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway

Western, sure. American, not really.

There's a reason American brands like Harley-Davidson and Ford quit India, but Western (NATO+) brands like Toyota and Hyundai thrive in India, and Indian conglomerates like Tata acquired prestige western brands like Jaguar Land Rover.

Same thing with China and the acquisition of MG, Volvo, Lotus, etc.

> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.

America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.

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Both these points are examples of the insular mindset that is going to doom the US. There is this assumption that we have always been the best and always will be the best.

It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.

Already, a lot of my Chinese and Indian friends who did their PhDs in EE or CS at programs like Stanford or MIT have started returning to China and India because they find the visa process demeaning and very backlogged.

> It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.

You’re not wrong, but America won’t accept it. The middle class has been gutted, and everyone is scrambling over the ruins of it to try to land in the upper class instead of the lower.

People perceive those immigrants as “taking a spot” in the upper class, as if there were a deity determining how many rich people we can have at some inflexible level.

I think people pervasively underestimate the value of education, in literal dollar terms. The US spends a crazy amount just getting someone through high school, much less college and a PhD. I would be pretty okay with a visa process for anyone that has a PhD from a reputable institution (where reputable only means “not a degree farm”).

Having someone with a PhD immigrate here is like their government donating a half million dollars to the US in the form of paying for the immigrants education instead of us. Their home country bears the costs, we reap the benefits. I don’t even really care if they speak English; they’ll learn, or use a translate app, or marry someone that can translate or whatever. They got a PhD, I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

The only real risk is crashing wages, but in a globalized labor market I don’t know if immigration is even relevant. Even if wages did crash, that might be a good thing if the crash wasn’t permanent. Cheap research sounds like the kind of thing that might drive us into new technologies.

> Western, sure. American, not really.

The thing is that I am not sure what american - that is not software services and some PC hardware - is even sold outside of USA. Coca Cola and McDonalds? But aside that I haven't see much american stuff even in Europe. It is usually german home appliances, local food, nestle (swiss) etc.

> True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.

The problem is that even 5% is a lot. Like Indian's population is probably 2-3 times bigger than the whole europe. My own country has less than 9m people and my friend got his USA passport after 5 years only...

> America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.

One of the reason for western stagnation is just the amount of regulations. That's why heavily regulated industries are usually quite successful in Europe (like pharmaceutical companies), but garage startups? Not really. Sweden is basically the only exception. And UK (every 10 years lol).

> Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann

People like this are exceptions really. Though there are always trends over the years when some countries produce more talents than the other. It is like there is a beacon shining at one point and a lot of talents are born close to each other.

> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.

I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.

> I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.

It really depends on how well off you are and the reasons for that. Let's take my home country as an example.

We have IT people earning like 3-5x times more than the regular people (like you get salary 2000$ while the rent will be 200$ at worst, with average salary being below 500$. New apartments cost 100k in the capital but outside the capital even 40k is considered an expensive apartment). And we have police and military earning similar (and more money. Not to mention corruption). Both IT and police can afford buying expensive goods and stuff, can afford apartments, good food and so on.

Both can live like kings, but at the same time people are limited to what they can get and find in their country. It is like to be a king of the village - you are the king, sure, but in the city you have more opportunities, more advancements, more access to resources.

When I was leaving the country we did not even have Spotify, for example. And I was earning like 5x times of the average. But there was no point in that. And that's just a software service - there are issues with medication, education etc. So even if you earn more, it might not be worth it.

However in case of IT, it is not a problem for me to get a relatively decent salary in a foreign country while as a military person or a police officer it will become close to impossible to reach the same level without a lot of things attached to that. So for people like this, being a king of a village is worth more than being an average in some foreign country. But, each and every time, they are trying to send their children to a foreign country to live or to study.

And that's without people who have no opportunities or cannot learn foreign language and thus cannot leave.

In India you have extremely rich and extremely poor, coming from various developed and underdeveloped countries and all know English most of the time and often has IT education - with their much bigger population just sheer amount of people leaving will be a lot. A lot.

Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.

The problem I've been seeing in Canada is that we have A TON of new people coming from India. Aside from all our services being unable to handle things. The other problem is that people from these cultures tend to stick together, rather than assimilate. When the rates of immigration are kept lower and the people being brought in are more diverse, the problem isn't really present. But when about 90-95% of new people are coming from one country, the problem really surfaces.

People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true. Many continue to operate the same way as where they came from. Especially since they can stay within their Indian communities and rarely need to interact with the existing population. Canada has now began shifting towards a more low trust society. Even things like food banks aren't save from many new immigrants as they are viewing them as places for them to keep more of their salary rather than as places for people really struggling.

And I think this is part of the reason many people start to become against immigration. When they see their own countries culture/norms/values start to get degraded. Many people even start to feel real hatred and racist feelings towards groups because of it.

To me, leaving a country for betterment makes sense in a way. But leaving to another country to copy your own countries practices just seems odd to me.

> Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.

Most of the time the improvements are coming from the top. So what usually happens - and we observe it over the course of history - countries reach peak, then decline and decline until they collapse or fall, and then again rise by using some external means (finding cheap resources etc). Every time you need the government that actually does things (forces/gives morale boost to the people) - or a revolution. Any other time it will be endless bureaucracy in democratic societies (nothing is getting done or takes too much time) or nepotism and corruption (with authoritarian flavor) in less democratic societies.

> People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true

It is not true for sure. Especially with many people coming at once or forming their own small communities. When you are alone - you are forced to adapt. But when you are not alone you can keep your own culture and traditions without changes, while having benefits of a developed society.

I see it all the time - if you are used to throw away trash outside of trash box in your home country, then by coming here you will continue doing that sooner or later with more people from your countries coming here. Same with public transportation - in my country in order to travel from one region to another region, we used to have a train once per day. Per day. Here you get trains once every 10-15 minutes. So even if the public transportation will decline (fall apart, more delays and cancellations) I will feel ok (and a lot of people will feel ok) because I am used to such conditions and with bigger populations coming from the same culture and gaining rights to vote and so on - nobody will care about such things because we are just used to have it worse.

Or another example - in my country we are used to have fully crowded buses, coming every 30 minutes. Here if they cancelled a couple of buses and it would start arriving crowded, I would feel "at home" and it would not be a shock me and I would less likely to care about that because I simply used to it in my home country. It would be a minor issue for me. And you can imagine that with more people coming with the same mentality, it will just degrade the quality of living.

That's why adaptation and supporting the habits, rules and laws of your new country is important - because you came here due to them. You wanted to live in that "clean and nice country". Don't bring your bad habits with you.