
Productivity in Indian Startups - vijayanands
India is the third largest startup hub in the world.<p>A good metric to measure productivity is the size of the team that it takes to build the company around, and the revenue per employee as a metric.<p>Skype had a team of 27 when they got acquired. Instagram had 13. Whatsapp had 32 Engineers and 55 employees when they were acquired by Facebook and had a whopping 900mn people using the service (and was doing approx $30mn in revenue). Gmail for eg, is still managed by a team of 100 (engineers).<p>Salesforce a 6.6$bn revenue company has 19,000 people working for it. Zoho has revenues of approx $300mn and Freshdesk has a revenue of about $60mn.<p>If we do a Revenue per employee extrapolation, Freshdesk would have approx 90,000 people when it does the revenue that SalesForce does. Zoho will have 100,000 people.<p>On the Pureplay product front, Hike for eg, has 250+ employees (and aims to double it this year), while its counterpart Whatsapp still has the original approximately 55 strong team. Snapchat is however a 1000+ member team and posts 400mn in revenues (and plan to reach 1bn+ this year). Reports suggest that Hike posted a revenue of 100K USD last year.<p>Most startups have a target of a million dollars of revenue per employee. The same number in India looks abysmally low - even though the salaries are more or less starting to look the same (with adjustments to PPP).<p>Q: Is there even a difference between Indian Startups and the Outsourced Servicesof the past era?<p>Cognizant (which does services) has approx 266,000 employees and posts revenues of 13.49billion - approximately double that of salesforce. Our Indian &quot;product&quot; startups would have approximately the same size of workforce of services companies to attain that revenue numbers.<p>Bottomline : Something has to change.<p>PS : We have started a premium newsletter to talk abt and share insights like these on the Indian Startup Ecosystem - http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2pndTdq
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nnn1234
Per your Question,Yes there is a difference.Ownership and Control of direction
are controlled by the startup and not a service providers "client".

Here is a better metric( which you hinted at ) compare number of users per
employee and proximity to the employee.

something does have to change, we need to build AOL,PAYPAL and Nokia ( there
are analogues with Reliance,eztap,Micromax )

I would say let the top line solve topline problems, we need better bottom
line solutions if we are to do any country by country comp

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ankurdhama
I just don't get the idea of using the word "productivity" in technology and
innovation. Tech and innovation are about solving problems and creating a
sustainable business model around those solutions and it is not like a factory
where you are following a predefined procedure to produce stuff, like TV, cars
etc.

