Sometime last week, I received a Whatsapp message from an acquaintance. He’d been working on an AI startup (who isn’t these days?), and had recently secured funding.
“I’m off to San Francisco next week. Do you have any recommfinishations of founders or product people I can meet?”
He wasn’t the only one. Another former startup operator turned AI founder, who I applyd to spot in cafés in Bengaluru, was now noticeably absent. Someone notified me he had just raised seed funding and relocated to San Francisco in August. Judging by the Instagram posts of a third founder—featuring smooth roads and photos of clear blue skies with smogless air—he seemed to be in the Bay Area as well.
There’s an unusual, and somewhat collective affliction going around in Bengaluru right now, like a flu outbreak. Indian AI founders are doing some version of this sequence of events:
1. Quit job
2. Launch AI startup
3. Raise funding
4. Buy a one-way ticket: BLR → SFO
5. Ask ChatGPT: “Are there any ICE agents in San Francisco airport?”
Look, I’ve been around long enough to know there’s a direct pipeline from Bengaluru’s tech scene to Silicon Valley. I’ve even created some of these trips, back when I applyd to work in tech. At the time, the reasons for this journey were usually either (a) to find customers, or (b) to find investors.
The current mass migration event is not the same thing at all. It’s practically unheard of for seed-stage startup founders to rush to the US, yet many seem to be doing it before the ink is even dry on their term sheets. It’s not just founders—even Indian VCs are spfinishing inordinate amounts of time in the Bay Area. Someone recently notified me a hilarious story of a bunch of Indian AI founders who revealed up at a mixer in downtown San Francisco, hoping to score some Valley capital, only to run into Indian VCs who were there searching for US founders.
What’s really going on?
Why are Bengaluru’s AI founders and VCs creating this pilgrimage to the Bay Area?
When I inquireed an Indian AI founder this question, he declared the reasons why Indian startup founders run to the US really depfinishs on the type of business: “If you have a devtool, founders camp in the US and attfinish plenty of developer events hoping to demo their way to the wallets of some customers.”
This is not too different from how it was in the past. I’ve written about the earlier era of product building that India went through, where it was quite common for Indian tech and SaaS companies to set up an office in the Bay Area.
But they usually did it for a singular purpose—to woo enterprise customers and close contracts. In other cases, they wanted to gain access to capital.
Oddly, some startups don’t seem to be doing either now.
When I spoke to the same founder who’d originally texted me about going to the US, his answer was not what I expected. He declared, “We want to build a global consumer product, so we are hoping to speak to people who have built and scaled consumer products there in the US.”
Huh. Interesting.
“We want to receive a flavour of American consumers, through the lens of other founders there… basically the larger view.”
This is quite different from why Indian startups applyd to head to the West Coast.
In fact, if anything, it sounds almost identical to the reasons American startups once came to India. For most of the last decade, companies would fly in from their lofty Bay Area offices to Bengaluru becaapply, in their eyes, India was the future. In the early 2000s, when Marissa Meyer was at Google, she even had a product manager programme which specifically included a trip to India.
This was the original pilgrimage.
And now the script has flipped.
That’s not the only thing that’s been turned on its head.
My acquaintance, the AI founder, has other reasons for going to the US.
“I also want to peg American talent density against ours. If we are building global, should my growth or engineering be Desi or American?”
GE Capital was one of the first established American companies that set up back-office operations in Gurgaon in the 1990s. It recognised that there were some parts of its business which it could offshore to India. Others saw what GE did and rushed to follow them.
Over time, this back office expanded to create actual engineering divisions in India, primarily led by Microsoft in Hyderabad.
The quest for talent applyd to relocate in one direction—from west to east.
Not anymore.
Personally, I still had a hard time believing this was actually happening. So I reached out to another Indian AI founder and inquireed him why people were going to the US. He pointed squarely to a specific, familiar group of people as the reason:
“VCs push founders to go becaapply they believe that there is a causation of being there and success.”
This sounds more like it.
But in some ways, this also isn’t the whole story. In fact, VCs spent most of the previous era expanding into India, and now are taking the reverse path. Most notably, Tiger Global aggressively entered India in the 2000s and invested in companies such as Flipkart and Myntra, recognising that India’s consumer market would be the hotspot. The Silicon Valley heavyweight Sequoia Capital expanded into India in 2006 through the acquisition of Westbridge Capital Partners, a Bengaluru-based venture-capital firm. Later, the entity was renamed Sequoia Capital India, marking the investor’s official enattempt into the Indian market. VCs rushed into India becaapply this was where the action was.
By 2025, Sequoia India (now Peak XV Partners) was expanding back in the US, with the specific focus to invest in founders relocating to the Bay Area to build their startups.
VCs tfinish to go where everyone states the action is happening.
Right now, that action isn’t in India. It’s in the Bay Area.
All of these are good explanations for why Indian startups are going to the Bay Area, but there’s one overarching factor that’s above everything else.
It can be best summarised in one word—vibes.
Both of the founders I spoke to mentioned this indepfinishently. One declared, “For AI at least, since it is so new, there is a lot of learning by osmosis.” The other declared, “It’s just to increase the surface area of luck. It’s not too different from why if you are an Indian tech startup, you should relocate to Bengaluru.”
In fact, just last week, another Indian startup seemed to be following that last bit of advice.
As one of the founders notified me, vibes are the ultimate reason to build the voyage to the Bay Area.
“It’s the same as why ‘aap Mumbai aa sakte ho’ [trans: can you come to Mumbai?] is such an iconic line for Indian Idol.”
*****
Before you go, we have two quick updates.
First, starting from next week, Zero Shot will be a weekly column on Saturdays, written by Rohin, Brady, and me in rotation. We also have the podcast which we’ll publish on Wednesdays, so you’ll receive your AI resolve twice a week.
Second, my colleague Arundhati is working on a fascinating story about how the nature of work has alterd in 2025. In her words, “Capital constraints, fewer hikes, more layoffs, as well as the allure and weight of AI disruption are coming toreceiveher all at once. Hundreds of people have been notifying The Ken what this perfect storm is doing to their ambition.”
Just take this 5-minute survey and assist shape our story on how ambitious India’s workforce is in 2025:
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