Tandon's claim is that India's foreign corporate accelerators failed for a reason nobody says out loud: most were launched in the 2012-13 startup frenzy to attract talent and generate headlines, without the dedicated budgets, internal processes or innovation culture to deploy anything they found. He then splits the foreign players in two: global corporates that actually have Indian consumers, like Google, Amazon, Honeywell and Intel, which do invest and acquire here, and capability centres, which cannot. With no local consumer, a GCC outsources insight to a consumer-insights team already skewed towards top line and bottom line, when the first lens should be the consumer's and not the business's; and even when it does find something worth buying, headquarters asks why an Indian asset shouldn't cost a tenth as much. He calls that perception ridiculous, and points at Zoho. What an Indian conglomerate fixes, on his account, is exactly those three things: decisions taken where the head office is, no glass ceiling by ethnicity, colour or location, and a dealership close enough to walk to. Around the argument sit his other positions: the enabler as a 'clog', part cog and part lightning rod; a syndicate built on three capitals rather than one; and an unfashionable line on burn, which he insists no serious investor ever advised. Cut the business-class flight to CES and seven of your ten conferences, he says, not your people.
Worth your time if you are
Corporate innovation leads inside Indian capability centres
Founders pitching into a corporate accelerator
First-time angels assembling a syndicate
Operators told to cut burn without cutting headcount
India leaders arguing for a seat at the global table
