As someone who has lived in Bangalore for the last decade (and also in the USA for a while) and knows the local tech scene pretty well, I find the idea of putting Bangalore up as a candidate for "Best startup city outside the USA" amusing. There are a lot of people talking about startups, reading and quoting PG's essays, attending meetups and "networking events" and so on - but not too many companies with world beating tech or validated and scalable business models - which is what one would expect from a "best startup city outside the US". (Notion Ink is something of an exception in that they are at least trying to build something world class, but the jury is still out on their eventual success, but I thought they were based in Hyderabad not Bangalore. I could be wrong).

Sure, the programmers are cheaper than in the USA (I could say the same thing about say Rio De Janeiro or Beijing). There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in Bangalore but the majority are numbingly incompetent and work for body shoppers of various kinds. The good ones are rare and expensive and already have very well paying jobs. Good luck persuading them to work on your unfunded startup ;-) Nutshell: The entrepreneurial and technically competent hacker is very much a rarity in Indian society.

If you don't already know the devs you are going to work with in your startup before you come here I for one would not recomend that you try to build a company here and hope to hire good people after you land.

Also, there are no government incentives or tax breaks for startups (vs yet another bodyshop/outsourcing centre/ call centre).

Minor factual error: C42 (quoted in the post above) for example is a Rails consultancy (Yes I know the people who work there too. Ex ThoughtWorkers mostly). They might be a software startup (as the term is understood on HN) some day, but they are not one today.

There aren't any universities doing pioneering/cutting edge research (no not even the IISc, their research quality is at best mediocre) which might form the basis of a successful startup.

"There are tons more" (startups)

No there aren't. At least not as startups are understood on HN. There are a few startups and a lot of frothy talk. The number of people attending "startups meets" are not a good metric for "best city for startups outside the USA". Successful startups that have changed the world/been acquired for large sums of money, extensive angel funding and VC funding networks, top class universities doing cutting edge research etc, are. Bangalore lacks most of these or have only rudimentary stubs of all the above.

That said, the parent post makes some good points. Bangalore is cheaper than the USA (hardly surprising) and it has the potential for some good startups to emerge. That potential is, as of today, deeply buried. Vancouver or London or Tel Aviv or even Vienna blows Bangalore out of the water as a "city for startups". Things are changing in Bangalore but (a)very slowly and(b) under the radar of such things as "startup meetups"

My 2 cents. I write this to add a bit of counterpoint to the rosy picture presented above.

YMMV. As always Caveat Emptor.

EDIT: A blog entry written by one of the founders of Riya.com when he wound up his Bangalore operations - http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2007/04/episode_... .

I am not saying his observations are valid. I think Munjal did everything wrong about trying to operate in Bangalore, ("We tend to only hire folks from IIT or other top schools." is almost guaranteed to ensure that you end up with a mediocre dev team for e.g.) but that is a post for another day.