Reddit reviews From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

I am an angel investor in two Indian startups - one's a solar company and the other is a tech company and I'm a software engineer myself currently working in the US.

Why didn't a Google happen out of India? Oh dear god, the answer for this might as well be this book: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Google stands on the shoulders of giants; practiced VCs, angels and mentors were already floating around in the valley, flush with cash after the success of several tech giants (Xerox, IBM, DEC, Silicon Graphics) in the area over the previous two decades. Those tech giants in turn were successful because of the incredible amount of money that the US government poured into defense spending in the 60s and 70s, the consequent rise in the quality of American engineering schools and the interdisciplinary nature of working in defense back in those times.

It boils down to financing, mentorship and education. Bangalore is already seeing a bunch of cash flow its way from Mumbai, so the financing problem is abating, but these Mumbai guys AFAICT are just pure finance - they're business guys who don't know how to mentor India's tech entrepreneurs in the truly tough technical challenges they'll face. If you look at Andreesen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, they retain staff who are deeply, deeply technical and experienced in startups to help investees. Tech investors are more than just cash, they're talent that needs to be attracted by the lure of interesting problems and intelligent people to work with.

Education: I don't think there's anything that needs to be said here, just look at this Quora question:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-wrong-with-the-Indian-education-system-in-terms-of-growth

If a 'Google' somehow miraculously happens in India, it will be despite India's education system, despite the lack of mentorship from experienced tech entrepreneurs, despite the lack of cultural support for experimentation and despite the government, not at all because of it. Some of the entrepreneurs I've met in India have had to deal with annoying shit that my American startup friends never have to worry about.

EDIT:
And I totally forgot to mention Stanford. Stanford was at the heart of half of this shit. The university encouraged so much experimentation, Google got its start in a Stanford PhD lab where Larry and Sergey worked. Many of Google's first employees were drawn from Stanford (though we're doing a good job of diversifying a bit more since then). India needs more universities like Stanford that pursue both research and encourage the real-world application of that research.

I don't known what your experience was like in NYC, but each of the different startup regions do have their own flavor. Austin isn't like NYC, which isn't like Seattle or San Francisco. I wonder how many people in NYC that you knew went to Burning Man. In the Bay, it is fairly common. Flashy shows of wealth aren't really a thing in SF like they are in NYC either. Pissing matches between the two scenes are actually fairly common. See this and this.

This is something I drafted a while back, which was edited and put into some piece or another, but basically highlights my point:
>
> From its earliest precursors, the Internet has had its evangelists. And the Silicon Valley offered a unique crucible. Deliberate and unintentional interactions among military researchers, academics, and corporate scientists helped to form the technical features of the medium.

> Meanwhile, the region was the center of the countercultural movement in the 1960s, the failings of which, wrapped into a technological optimism for the power of the networked computer. Along side its topological and programmatic development, discussions of its social, cultural, political and economic potential formed the ethical undergirding. Internet policy, especially the network neutrality debate, is made in the shadows of ideals set in this early era. Prime among those ideals is a profound faith in the technology’s emancipatory potential to boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, and strengthen associational life.

Maybe this is too much for your project, but I would look at doing a rhetoric construction of the concept of Silicon Valley. I know there is enough online to do this well. And perhaps this is just my distaste from some of the work I had to grade in grad school, but I always found this work far more intriguing.

This also reminds me. You might be looking in the wrong place for this. I would suggest going into the discipline of rhetoric/communication. Check out this, this, this this, and this. You should also check out Evgeny Morozov.