Apurv Mehra | Portfolio

Bangalore has a way of doing this to you.

You show up to a mixer with no particular agenda, end up in a corner talking to someone you've just met, and thirty minutes later you're walking home with a mental model that reframes everything. It's one of those cities where the talent density is so high that serendipity stops feeling like luck and starts feeling almost structural. That's probably part of why certain hubs (Bangalore, SF, London) punch so far above their weight in producing ideas and companies. Proximity to sharp minds creates compounding collisions.

This particular collision was with a founder who had a couple of successful exits under his belt. The kind of person who's earned the right to be blunt and exercises that right liberally.

I was telling him about an AI product I'd been thinking about in the education space. I'd barely gotten through the setup when he held up a hand.

I've grown to appreciate this kind of feedback. There's a version of feedback that wraps every sharp edge in cotton wool until you can't find the point anymore. This wasn't that. Straight, unvarnished, no chaser. I'll take bitter truths over sweet nothings every time. What can I say, I like it bitter and straight.

"If you're set on this idea," he said, "you should build it from SF."

I'd heard versions of this before. Usually it irritates me. This time, I was curious enough to push back.

"I get that SF has the ecosystem," I said. "But Bangalore has world-class engineers. We've been producing serious product companies out of India over the last decade. Why does geography matter that much for what I'm building?"

He glanced at his watch, clearly somewhere else to be, and said something I haven't stopped thinking about since.

"In India, we don't build successful product companies for people. We build product companies of the people."

He let that sit for a second, then continued.

Look at the Indian startups that have genuinely scaled: Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto, Blinkit, Snabbit, Porter, Urban Company. What's the actual product? In almost every case it's a thin software layer on top of a massive pool of cheap human labor. The real asset isn't the app. It's the ability to mobilize thousands of delivery riders, plumbers, drivers, and domestic workers at a price point that no Western market could replicate.

The unit economics only work because the labor differential is enormous. In India, the cost of a human being running across the city to deliver your groceries in under ten minutes is less than the cost of a single feature request made to an AI coding tool. Often significantly less. Human effort, at scale, in real time, is cheaper here than software.

That's not a criticism. That's just where the real leverage lives in this market.

The pool of people willing to pay for software itself (not for the outcome it delivers via cheap humans underneath) is still relatively thin in India. Growing, sure. But not yet large enough to build the kinds of companies that scale purely on subscription or usage revenue.

If you're building something where the value is entirely in the product, no labor arbitrage underneath, no gig economy flywheel, then your GTM almost certainly needs a foot in the US. That's where the density of buyers who'll actually pay for pure software lives.

He pointed to companies like Emergent as proof that building in India is absolutely viable. The engineering talent is here, the cost structure is favorable, and going remote first has made location far less relevant than it used to be. But selling in India, unless your model rides the cheap labor dynamic in some way, is a harder road than most founders want to admit.

I don't think this is a permanent truth. Markets evolve. India's subscription paying class is real and it's growing. The next decade will almost certainly look different.

But as a mental model for right now, it's clarifying. I walked home that night slightly more unsettled than I'd arrived. Not in a bad way. More the kind of unsettled where a conversation has moved something and you're not quite sure yet what it means for you.

Bangalore does that to you sometimes.