Lessons from Made in India success stories

Domestic entrepreneurs, and not returnees, have led the country’s economic transformation. Policy must prioritise nurturing domestic talent by enabling better access to capital, regulatory clarity, and stronger research-industry links

- Vivek Wadhwa

In 2009, I moved to Silicon Valley to study immigrant entrepreneurship. As an immigrant myself, I wanted to understand why people like me were so successful at building technology companies in the US, and what the rest of the world could learn from this. At the time, Silicon Valley was still the centre of the technology universe.

I was building on the work of UC Berkeley professor AnnaLee Saxenian, whose research fundamentally changed how scholars and policymakers understood global talent flows. Her research showed that immigrants founded roughly a quarter of Silicon Valley startups, led at the time by Taiwanese entrepreneurs, with Indians close behind. When I updated her work, I found that what began in Silicon Valley had become a nationwide phenomenon. Immigrants were founding about 25% of technology startups across the US, while their share in Silicon Valley had risen to 52%, with Indian entrepreneurs overtaking the Taiwanese and founding about 15% of the Valley's startups.

All of this was happening as US immigration policy grew increasingly hostile and incoherent. Visas became harder to secure, green cards dragged on for decades, and the message to immigrant entrepreneurs was clear enough: Contribute, but do not expect to stay. I documented how these brain-dead policies were driving founders away and predicted that India and China would begin to rival the US in technology and innovation. The assumption was that returnees would lead this shift, a process Saxenian called brain circulation.