This Way To Start Up Alley

Bandra of Bangalore, GK-I of Delhi, that’s Koramangala. This is startup universe, the hub of ideas, inspiration and all the action.

It’s half past seven on a Monday eve­ning. The ‘footfalls’ haven’t begun yet in earnest at Prost Brewpub which has five home brews on the menu. A group of three is among the handful sipping their drinks quietly. Cut to half hour later, and the place is buzzing with activity. A large group of 11 troops in for what seems a reun­ion party. The tables fill up. Some step out onto the balcony with their beer mugs for a smoke. The din throws up snatches of a conversation. “Scaling up...demand hai,” one of the trio says to her companions. “....you need that value addition,” says another, a bit sceptically. Out comes a notebook and they rum­m­age around for a pen. Then furious scribbling and lots of questions and answers. Ano­ther round of drinks. It’s been an hour, but the conversation is far from over.

The discussion is about a startup idea (not surprisingly, two of them work with startups; the other, who didn’t have much luck with his first venture, is sounding out a new idea) and it’s unfolding at a microbrewery on Koramangala’s 80 Ft Road. Why? “It’s convenient. And, you can get some beer.” It’s the sort of answer you get anywhere in Koramangala, the place many are calling India’s busiest startup locality. The building next door to Prost shelters a couple of startups and there are a few more in the street across the road. They are all over rea­lly, and no one keeps count.

Less than 50 feet away is a Costa coffee outlet where headphone-wearing youngsters keep at their laptops all day. Twenty-seven-year-old Akshay Kingar says he knows of at least 25 people who work from there. He’s one of them. His firm foOfys creates mobile apps and his team sits in an office 10 km away where he hasn’t been to in over a month. He doesn’t need to: he spends Rs 12,000 a month to collaborate with his team—with tools like Wunderlist, Slack, Trello, Mockup, AWS—to be AWOL.

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The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery

In India, a Factory Model for Hospitals Is Cutting Costs and Yielding Profits.

Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa's cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.

The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.

His model offers insights for countries worldwide that are struggling with soaring medical costs, including the U.S. as it debates major health-care overhaul.

"Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care," Dr. Shetty says. "What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."

At his flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, surgeons operate at a capacity virtually unheard of in the U.S., where the average hospital has 160 beds, according to the American Hospital Association.

Narayana's 42 cardiac surgeons performed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries in 2008, more than double the 1,367 the Cleveland Clinic, a U.S. leader, did in the same year. His surgeons operated on 2,777 pediatric patients, more than double the 1,026 surgeries performed at Children's Hospital Boston.

Read the full story by Geeta Anand appeared in the Wall Street Journal of dt. November 25, 2009.