The Indian startup ecosystem’s real problem isn’t funding. It’s taste.

(And I promise I'm making a different point than the 283847 'taste' critiques you've read.)

It's super easy to make funding the story, you know? It has villains and heroes and numbers you can screenshot. “Capital winter.” “Risk appetite.” “Dry powder.” You can sound serious without saying anything personally incriminating.

But if you’ve sat through enough pitch decks, brand presentations, product walkthroughs, and founder demos, you eventually notice the same pattern: most of what gets built here is just… mid. Not because founders are dumb. They aren’t. Not because people are lazy. They’re not. It’s mid because the room is full of optimisation and short on insistence. Everyone is trying to win. Almost nobody is trying to be good.

Taste isn’t “design.” Taste isn’t a colour palette or a clever font or hiring a studio two weeks before launch and asking them to “make it premium.” Taste is judgment, restraint, and coherence. It’s the muscle that lets you kill a feature that technically works because it feels wrong. It’s the ability to say no to the version that tested well because the version that tested well is ugly, cluttered, dead-eyed, and built like a compromise. Taste is the difference between a product that feels like it was made by a person and a product that feels like it was assembled by a team that’s been trained to confuse motion with meaning.

A lot of Indian startups and products feel 'assembled'. They’re functional. They load. They deliver the thing. They have the features. They have the app. They don’t feel desired. They don’t feel inevitable. They feel like they exist because a spreadsheet somewhere said they should.

And every time someone says, “Indian consumers don’t care about design,” my eyes roll back into my head. People care. People care so much it’s embarrassing. They pick one food delivery app over another. They choose the electronics brand that looks like it belongs on their desk. They check into the hotel that promises aspiration and check out furious when the reality is grimy sheets and fluorescent lighting. They can’t always articulate it in a survey, sure. They can’t describe it in the language of a PRD. But they feel it! In Seconds! And because it’s hard to quantify, product teams pretend it doesn’t exist.

This is how you get an ecosystem full of companies that work and still feel dead. The founders who do have taste are obvious, even early. Not because they’re “design founders,” but because they’re willing to make choices other people wouldn’t make. Their product has a spine. Their brand has a voice. Their hiring has an opinion. Their “no” is clear. They aren’t building for an abstract user they’ve never inhabited; they’re building for a real human experience they actually understand. They aren’t optimising for the market. They have a point of view about what should exist in it.

Most founders, though, have a spreadsheet. TAM/SAM/SOM. Competitor grids. Feature parity. “We’ll do what they do but cheaper.” They can explain why the market is big and still can’t answer the only question that matters: why should your version exist? You’d be shocked how many decks are essentially what I think of as product cosplay- copying the moves without understanding the taste that made the original good.

And yes, founders are responsible for a PART that. But this is not just a founder problem. The ecosystem trains people out of taste, and then acts confused when nothing that emerges from it feels world-class.

Because VCs say we want conviction, but often don’t behave as if they can tolerate it. Taste is messy and hard to benchmark. Taste doesn’t come with clean comps. Taste doesn’t always sound “sellable” in an IC memo. So founders learn the actual rule very quickly: shave the edges, make it 'legible' to the lowest common denominator, add the obvious features, look like what got funded last quarter. We didn’t accidentally build a culture of mediocrity. We incentivised it professionally, one “can you make it more massy” and one “this is interesting but…” at a time.

And then we add a second, very Indian layer of damage: the mai-baap framing.

(Most) founders walk into investor meetings like they’re entering a temple. Grateful. Small. Apologetic. Negotiating against themselves. Asking for permission. It comes from a real place. We are a capital-constrained society, generationally. Money used to be the bottleneck. The person with the cheque had the power. So we built a culture where the founder is a supplicant and the investor is a patron.

But that’s not what Indian VC looks like right now AT ALL! On the inside, a lot of funds are not spoiled for choice. There is dry powder that needs deploying. There are partners taking thirty meetings a week hoping someone walks in with something that isn’t a clone of a clone. There are more decks than there are genuinely opinionated companies. The power dynamic has shifted. Which means when a founder shows up acting like the investor is doing them a favour, it isn’t humility. It’s a tell. It says: I don’t believe I’m scarce. I don’t believe my judgment is special. I’m here to be picked.

And if you don’t believe you’re the rare thing in the room, why would anyone else?

The VCs who actually know what they’re doing are hunting for founders with a point of view. The rest are pattern-matching and praying. They fund what looks fundable. They reward what I've come to think of as 'legibility theatre'. They confuse resemblance with quality. They end up building a graveyard of perfectly functional, aesthetically dead companies, and then everyone writes the same post about how India needs more “product innovation."

I’ve watched investors get actively uncomfortable around founders with strong opinions. Conviction gets misread as stubbornness. Attention to detail becomes “slow.” Saying no to a feature gets framed as lack of ambition. Meanwhile, the generalist operator who’ll build whatever the market demands will often raise faster and ship something forgettable at scale. That’s the incentive structure. That’s the selection pressure.

Why are we always so surprised when the ecosystem builds exactly what it's been incentivizing from day 0?

This is also why “X for India” is such a curse. We love it because it lets us outsource taste. Someone else already decided what good looks like. You just port the category, localise pricing, add WhatsApp, and call it building. But it isn’t building. It’s transcription. The rarer, harder thing is building something that actually emerges from how people here live, how they do family, status, safety, aspiration, convenience, without turning “Indian” into a motif. Not a temple graphic. Not a heritage print. Not a cringe Bharat-first landing page. A real interpretation. A real take. That requires taste.

Taste, by the way, isn’t premium. It isn’t expensive. It isn’t even aesthetic. Some of the best taste is knowing what to leave out. Knowing the difference between cheap and affordable. Knowing when simplicity is the point and when it’s just laziness. Taste is restraint, and restraint is hard when you’re insecure. Taste is giving a shit in a way that can’t be faked.

Most founders don’t avoid taste because they can’t do it. They avoid it because taste is a reputational risk. Optimisation is basically insurance at this point. If you build the spreadsheet company and it fails, you can blame the market, timing, unit economics, whatever. If you build something specific and it fails, it’s your judgment on trial. Your point of view. Your taste. Being generic lets you fail without being exposed. So people pick plausible mediocrity because it comes with cover.

The ecosystem won’t change until founders realise they have more power than they think and start acting like it. Walk into the room like you’re choosing, too. Have opinions that cost you something. Be willing to get a no that’s actually about the product, not a soft maybe because you sound like everyone else. Build something so particular that the wrong investor doesn’t get it. If everyone understands you immediately, you probably built something replaceable.

The real nightmare for the Indian startup ecosystem isn’t that most startups will fail. Most won’t. They’ll raise. They’ll hire. They’ll ship. They’ll even grow. And ten years later, nobody will remember them, because nothing about them was inevitable. They’ll succeed just enough to prove nothing.

The only Indian companies that will matter in ten years will be the ones where someone insisted, where taste survived the meeting, and where a founder didn’t trade their point of view for fundability.