The Shortcut Economy

India is in a hurry. It always has been.

The instinct runs through everything. The coaching centre that promises IIT in two years. The bribe that moves a file in two days. The fantasy gaming app that delivers the feeling of winning without the inconvenience of actually playing. We want the outcome without the journey. Indians have not invented the shortcut, but we have elevated it to a civilisational preference.

This would be fine if the things worth building could be built quickly. They cannot.

The deeptech startup is the natural enemy of the shortcut economy. It does not yield to hustle. A serious AI research lab, a defence systems company, a semiconductor firm — these are built over decades by people for whom the work itself is sufficient justification for the time spent. People who are constitutionally incapable of asking whether there is a faster route, because the route is the point. The shortcut economy has no mental model for such people. It calls them inefficient. Possibly delusional.

India produces them. It just does not retain or reward them.

Every incentive structure works against the patient builder. Investors want venture returns, not research institution timelines. Talent wants salaries that pre-revenue deeptech cannot offer. And the founders themselves, formed by the same environment as everyone else, carry the shortcut instinct inside them too. It surfaces as the pivot that comes too early. The feature that was supposed to be temporary but became the product.

This is why we build Dream11 and not DeepMind. Both require intelligence. Only one requires patience.

The world that is coming will not be kind to this preference. The problems worth solving are getting harder, longer, and more unforgiving of impatience. The innovations that will define the next fifty years — in energy, in materials, in intelligence itself — will not be cracked by people optimising for the exit. They will be cracked by people who forgot to look for one. Countries that have cultivated that kind of builder, that tolerance for the long road and the genuine appetite for hard problems, will shape the future. Countries that haven’t will consume it.

India has a choice in this, though the window is not permanent. The shortcut was always a response to scarcity — of time, of resources, of room for error. Understandable. Even admirable, in its way. But scarcity is no longer the binding constraint it once was. What binds us now is imagination. The willingness to conceive of something that does not exist and commit to the years it will take to make it real. To treat a grand idea not as a risk to be hedged but as a responsibility to be seen through.

That is a different kind of ambition from what we have been practising. It is slower, lonelier, and considerably less guaranteed. It is also the only kind that builds something worth having.

The shortcut gets you there faster. The question is whether there is anything at the other end.