Building a product like WhatsApp or Facebook or Twitter is not just a question of finding engineers or the capital. There is a whole ecosystem of a thousand ideas at work. There are hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, committed technocrats in Government who have to come /1

together to make it work. European countries - France, Germany in particular - have been struggling for decades to replicate the success of the Boston and Bay Area clusters.
To begin with, the theoritical capability and the sheer volume of basic research that's available /2

to be exploited is several orders of magnitude superior.
Next, the engineering chops. If Facebook and Twitter are armies, there is a whole arms manufacturing unit behind. In the last decade alone, technologies like Kafka, Redis, Hadoop, Hive, Spark have come out of the labs /3

and engineering teams. That requires much more than armies of engineers. It requires path breaking engineering work and the ability to spot talent and nurture it.
I am sorry to say, but in my 2 decades of working in both startup and large services companies, I can safely say /4

that 5 years of a career in any run of the mill services organization will make a young engineer incapable of thinking through such problems.
We have a way out. We can go the China way, copycat and use legal talent to push things through. A large state backed Rocket Internet /5

style product factory should help us reduce tech reliance in a decade from now. /END