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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprising.

Dubai investors (Khaleeji, Indian, or Russian) are looking for a "dhandha" - not a business.

Any story that can't be easily translated into an "arbitrage" or "commodity" play just isn't going to land with them.

Abu Dhabi has fairly good growth stage investors, but that's also because they tend to let the money managers and investors remain in London, SF, NYC, etc.

You're better off remaining in the Indian market, or if you want deal flow abroad, then building relationships in the US, ASEAN, UK, or Australia unless you're a "VC" who's trying to land a Dubai Golden Visa in order to evade taxes back in India (these kinds of personas tend to overlap with the kinds who run real estate or export/import "dhandhas" back in India).

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A decade of blindly copying YC model has made people forget that businesses are messy and require lots of trust building. Just because you believe in presentations and pie in the sky numbers doesn’t mean the businesses will believe them.

I also found it funny that the article is alluding that somehow India is fast and work gets done in a single meeting.

In Tech Entrepreneurship, it is fairly fast.

The Indian tech scene is heavily intertwined with the SV scene in both capital and talent, so the same norms around running a startup in the Bay Area percolated into the Indian scene.

Accel, General Catalyst, A16Z, YC, Foundation, Bessemer Ventures, etc are extremely active in the Indian market so they do have an impact on norm setting.

What is a dhandha? Like a way of life that is a business?

The literal translation is "business". But the contextual meaning here is closer to "arrangement/understanding". In India the word sometimes refers to underhanded/corrupt practices (there's a bollywood song where the lyrics go "sab ganda hai par dhandha hai ye", which can roughly be translated as "it's shady work, but that's business")

With that said, I don't really agree with the parent comment here, but I don't know enough about business practices in Dubai so I may be wrong.

Literally it means “trade,” but in reality it means hustling.

Real life example: a petty smuggler I knew had his younger brother run the shop, while he himself ran the “dhandha.” This was in the 80s when buying original CDs and Nike shoes needed you to know the right shop in South Delhi. The elder one knew all the Hong Kong and Singapore dealers, the right customs agents while the younger just sold the goods.

My interpretation is that it's a very laid-back style of business. It's not the startup model of working 12 hours a day battling 5 competitors and trying to hyper-optimize every metric that's used to compute your margin or valuation or whatever else.

Dhandha means I want to waddle in at 10am, have some chai/coffee meetings, make some phone calls, and then waddle out at 3pm (because a couple of "chokras" (boys) who come in at 7am and go home at 7pm run the show anyway). Almost like a niche monopoly where no one can intrude or undercut you because you have long-term relationship-based exclusive arrangements with all the upstream and downstream parties involved. A ton of little businesses that make small components in big things like cars, rockets, or foods/pharmaceuticals are run like this. In fact, I've seen multiple ultra-boutique software development companies (both in the US and India) run like this.

Well, if you're a manufacturer, or a government, hospital or ... manager. Let's say you need to acquire a part. Not something as obvious as a screw, but something very simple. A steady supply of syringes in 5 different sizes, say. A "dhandha" would be when you get a friend of yours produce that part (/software/...), and only buy from them. That friend would have zero expertise making that part, but he creates a business that hires 3 guys to make the part, and the owner has nothing to do with the business other than ... let's politely call it "relationship building". In other words, they spend their time in some hotel lobby with said manager, drinking.

Very common.

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