This episode of The Nutgraf was first published on 5 April. Unlock immediate access to the latest episodes and all of The Ken’s audio offerings. Subscribe to The Ken’s Premium plan at the-ken.com/pricing/, or purchase a monthly audio subscription for The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts (Rs 299 in India).

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Earlier this month, Piyush Goyal, India's commerce minister, kicked the hornet's nest with his comments on the country's startups.

Essentially, Goyal’s main complaint was… “why are Indian startups like this? Just look at China."

As the minister’s remarks went viral, India’s startup leaders, executives, and thought leaders took a break from making Studio Ghibli-style AI images and decided to hop on the next trend—posting their thoughts on Goyal’s comments on Linkedin and X.

Most of them were variants of—“Don’t blame startups, look at how many jobs we created”, or “China also started with food delivery before they built deep-tech companies”, or the more aggressive version: “Maybe you should help startups instead of blaming them.” A few leaders, quite predictably, even agreed with the minister and exhorted startups to take it as “constructive criticism”.

These were all valid points of view, but they don't answer the most intriguing part of it all—why did Goyal say what he said?

Praveen Gopal Krishnan explains why in this episode of The Nutgraf. Tune in.

P.S.: You can also read this edition here: India is the mark