Shailesh Lakhani

Partner at Sequoia India, Sequoia Capital

Search every verified Shailesh Lakhani interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. At a 2016 TechSparks event, Shailesh Lakhani, a partner at Sequoia Capital India, discussed the challenges facing consumer technology startups. He noted that the cost of compute, storage, and bandwidth has fallen roughly 35% year-over-year for 25 years, and that venture funding in India had tripled in three years despite the economy not growing at the same rate. Lakhani argued that raising money alone cannot make a company defensible, and that large incumbent firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple enjoy significant profit and scale advantages that make it difficult for new entrants to compete. Lakhani advised startups to focus on building network effects, customer switching costs, and real business health rather than vanity metrics. He suggested that the best strategy for defensibility is to "play offense" by constantly reinventing the business, and that bootstrapped founders with a strong idea should keep quiet about it until they reach a scale where they can fend off funded competitors. He also observed that in machine learning and AI, acquisitions were more common than companies building their own technology, and that talent scarcity in that area was likely temporary.