India Has 115 Unicorns. Hong Kong Has One Very Persistent Rumor That Someone, Somewhere, Should Start One.

🇮🇳 India · 🇭🇰 Hong Kong

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

India has produced 115 unicorns worth a combined $350 billion and is now the world's third-largest startup ecosystem, with new ones appearing in districts that had none five years ago. Hong Kong, by contrast, has a Randstad survey showing 37 percent of its workforce — nearly half of everyone under 25 — actively considering starting their own business, and a long-standing estimate that roughly 90 percent of startups fail anyway, which keeps most of that ambition exactly where it's safest: considered, not attempted.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇭🇰 Hong Kong

India

The scale is genuinely new. The Economic Survey counted more than 62,000 recognized startups across 636 districts as of 2021-22, up from a handful of hubs just years earlier, and total startup funding grew sevenfold between 2015 and 2021 while the number of incubators grew by the same multiple. Unicorns, once a once-a-year event before 2017-18, have since arrived at a 66 percent year-on-year growth rate; Flipkart, BYJU'S, Paytm, and Swiggy have each crossed the $10 billion mark, and the fastest company to reach unicorn status did it in six months.

The culture inside that boom is contested in a way the funding numbers don't capture. A widely discussed Blind thread asked plainly why Indian startups have a reputation for toxic work culture, and the most pointed replies weren't really about hours — one poster called certain companies' sales practices "fundamentally broken" and "a blot on our Indian ecosystem," while others flagged routine ESOP misrepresentation, employees sold on equity that turns out to be worth far less than advertised once vesting and strike prices are actually disclosed. The same thread's more measured voices made a fair distinction: a startup building from zero isn't going to offer a scaled multinational's work-life balance, and several Mumbai-based companies were cited as noticeably better run than the Delhi-NCR names making headlines for the opposite reason. Geography itself has become a loose but real signal: Delhi recently overtook Bangalore by sheer number of new startups registered, yet Bangalore keeps its reputation as the more mature, engineering-led scene, while Delhi-NCR's faster, sales-driven growth is more often the backdrop to the toxicity complaints circulating online.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong's problem isn't capital, intention, or appetite — it's conversion. Randstad's workforce survey found 37 percent of respondents considering starting their own business, rising to nearly half among 18-to-24-year-olds, citing bureaucracy, slow approval processes, unmet salary expectations, and a desire among younger workers to actually drive change rather than maintain a system. Set against that stated appetite is a culture that has, for a generation, rewarded the opposite instinct: the standard success story is a graduate landing a role at a major bank or developer, with pay packages reported in the high six figures annually, pursued partly because it earns family approval that founding an unproven company simply doesn't.

Simon Squibb of venture firm Nest.vc has argued publicly that Hong Kong needs to shift from a service economy to a knowledge one, framing startups as the answer — but the city's own commentators point out that the usual excuse, sky-high commercial rents, doesn't fully hold up next to the number of famous companies elsewhere that started in a garage or a dorm room. Even Li Ka-shing, long held up as the city's own entrepreneurial icon, has become what one critic called a "counter-productive" symbol, as public attention shifted from his early risk-taking to the property fortune that followed it. The property point cuts both ways: Hong Kong's own fintech sector has grown briskly in recent years, but a large share of that activity sits inside bank-backed units and joint ventures rather than independent founder-led companies, which lets the city claim innovation headlines while the underlying risk, and the underlying ownership, mostly stays where it always was.

The Reckoning

Flip the two cultures around and the irony is almost too neat. India has built the actual infrastructure of a startup economy — capital, unicorns, a pipeline of new companies in places that had none before — and is now wrestling with whether that infrastructure has also produced a culture of overpromising and underdelivering to the employees inside it. Hong Kong has built almost none of that infrastructure, and has instead produced a population that says, in survey after survey, that it badly wants to.

Neither gap closes on its own. India's challenge is a maturing one: proving its unicorns can be good employers, not just good valuations, now that the ESOP-misrepresentation story has become common enough to be a punchline rather than a scandal. Hong Kong's challenge is a starting one: converting a stated preference into an actual headcount, in a city where the safest, most socially rewarded career path still runs directly through the corporate towers the startup scene is supposed to be disrupting. On Hofstede's framework, India scores notably high on power distance alongside a strong long-term orientation, consistent with ambitious ventures still being built inside hierarchical, founder-led structures rather than flat ones; Hong Kong's lower power distance and higher individualism should, on paper, make it the more natural startup culture of the two — which is exactly what makes its actual conversion rate the more interesting failure. Call it the paradox of the two cities: the one with the harder structural excuse keeps producing founders anyway, and the one with the easier structural path keeps producing surveys instead.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind (teamblind.com) — The original poster of a widely read thread on Indian startup culture asked bluntly why toxicity seemed so common; one reply put the blame squarely on specific companies' sales tactics rather than the ecosystem as a whole, calling them "a blot on our Indian ecosystem" while noting their own experience at a Mumbai-based startup had been fine.

Blind (teamblind.com) — A separate commenter on the same thread offered the piece of advice new joiners most wish they'd had earlier: get the actual vesting schedule and strike price in writing before counting on advertised stock options, since ESOP misrepresentation came up as a recurring, not isolated, complaint.

South China Morning Post, industry commentary — One Hong Kong entrepreneurship advocate's pointed rebuttal to the city's favorite excuse doubled as a cultural diagnosis: plenty of famous companies elsewhere started in a garage or dorm room, so the real obstacle isn't rent, "the mindset needs to change" first.

e27.co, Southeast Asian tech-industry commentary — One assessment of Hong Kong's results-oriented corporate culture noted a structural mismatch rarely said out loud: a city built to reward quarterly performance in finance and property is not naturally built to reward the years of patient, uncertain building a startup actually requires.

Conclusion

If you're moving from Hong Kong to India, expect genuine energy and real capital, but do the ESOP math before you believe the valuation — a strong funding round and a fair employee stock plan are two different questions, and only one of them is public information. If you're moving from India to Hong Kong, don't mistake the city's loud, survey-measured appetite for entrepreneurship as a sign the ecosystem is actually there yet; the corporate path remains the one with the salary, the social approval, and the family dinner that doesn't end in an argument.

Both places, in their own way, have convinced a generation that building something of your own is the dream. India's generation is busy discovering what that dream costs in practice. Hong Kong's is still mostly filling out the survey.