The Next Trillion-Dollar Bet

India’s greatest export might finally stop being engineers.

It might be the things engineers build.

I finished A Billion Bets recently, and this is probably the most excited I’ve been about a book in a while. I’ve been shamelessly fangirling over Aviral’s writing for years, so I was predisposed to love it. Still, the book left me thinking about what the next billion bets look like.

We’ve spent decades being the world’s engineering workforce.

BPOs. Services. Outsourcing. Global R&D centres.

And honestly, we’ve gotten very, very good at it.

But something has changed.

Look at where Big Tech is putting its hardest engineering problems. Look at the size of R&D organisations being built in India. Look at the number of engineers who have spent the last decade working on systems used by hundreds of millions of people.

Even my current company is a US entity with most of its R&D in India.

That’s a weirdly important transition.

We’re accumulating deep technical expertise at ridiculous scale.

And I think that matters more than whether India has an OpenAI today.

Yes, we don’t have frontier LLMs.

Yes, we don’t have Nvidia.

Yes, a lot of our startup ecosystem still looks like Flipkart, D2C, fintech and quick commerce.

So what?

Flipkart was never supposed to be the final form of Indian entrepreneurship.

It was proof that we could build.

Now I want to see what happens when that same engineering force goes after things that are genuinely hard.

Semiconductors.

Robotics.

Defence.

Energy.

Industrial automation.

AI infrastructure.

Manufacturing.

I am extremely bullish on India having a China-like manufacturing moment, but with a different starting point.

Not cheap labour → factory.

More like engineering talent → technology → manufacturing → global companies.

The Nth Zoho.

The Nth Flipkart.

Except the product might be a chip, a robot, a machine, or something we haven’t invented a category for yet.

That’s why A Billion Bets hit differently for me.

It’s a story about what happens when enough people make bets before the outcome is obvious.

I think we’re entering a phase where the biggest bet isn’t on the next startup.

It’s on what happens when an absurd number of very good engineers finally get to build things that are much harder than software.

I’m very, very bullish on that.