What hinders India from building large-scale open-source SaaS companies, compared to the US?

No, not so much. I think the main reason why there weren't so many open source companies—I can think of Hasura as being one which is quite popular and ubiquitous—was that people in India didn't have an understanding of open source business models. 

In fact, we had trouble raising our seed round in India because we were raising it in India. People just didn't get it. It took a long time for people to understand it. Now of course you see a lot of open source players actually emerge mostly because of Hasura, Appsmith succeeding. 

But the other thing that has always been true is that India has had a large base of open source contributors. There've been a lot of engineers who've been contributing to PostgreSQL, MySQL, and those large open source projects for a long time. 

There's also this language called Julia Lang, which is a competitor to R that actually began in Bangalore because it was created by somebody who was a CTO of the UIDAI project. That person ended up creating Julia Lang. When you look at it, you won't even know that that was started in Bellandur in Bangalore because it's such a popular and ubiquitous project like that. 

India has always had contributors, but when it came to financing, that was difficult. When it came to understanding the business model, that was difficult for local go-to-market people. That's something that is changing. 

That, I would say, was our biggest hurdle but because of that, a lot of our go-to-market folks are either based in Europe or in the US where there is more awareness of these open source business models.