Recently, Rehan Yar Khan, who runs Orios Venture Partners, an early stage venture firm tweeted
Rehan Yar Khan wasn’t being sarcastic. He was, in fact, complementing the promoters of …
Startups
Kashyap Deorah’s ‘The Golden Tap’ – A Review
By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews No Comments Tags: India, Startups, Valuation
I first met Kashyap Deorah sometime late ’08 in Gloria Jeans Coffee in Bandra. We were introduced by Sudhir Sitapati, a junior of mine from IIMA, and a then-advisor to Kashyap’s Chaupaati Bazaar. I was then in the Brand Capital division of Times Group, and the conversation likely revolved around our funding model and whether it made sense for Chaupaati to access it (It didn’t).
We lost touch subsequently, though …
Why Don’t Indian VCs Write?
By Sajith Pai in Fitness 1 Comment Tags: Content Marketing, Startups, Venture Capital
Sometime in 2013, I restarted my dormant twitter account, treating it akin to a RSS reader, curating a mix of interesting people to follow and learn from. Some of these were writers, some politicians; others included philosophers, flaneurs and a few executives. Consistently I began to find that the most interesting tweets were from (Valley) VCs – Marc Andreessen, Benedict Evans, Paul Graham, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson (NYC though) etc. …
A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes – Part II
By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Higher Education, Online / Digital, Startups, Universities
In a previous post A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes I laid out EdTech investment themes into three buckets
- Lifelong education
- Unbundling of the university
- Rethinking existing education business models in light of tech and mobile
In the post, I had shared that I would go into greater detail on bucket #3 in a future post, as to which of the various business models and processes could be rethought, and …
A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes
By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Business Models, Startups
EdTech funding is hitting record levels, never seen before. A recent report by Ambient Research put edtech funding for H1’15 at $2.5b (in contrast to $2.4b funding for the whole of 2014).
In India we haven’t seen the kind of frenzy around edtech funding we have seen in China. 8 Chinese companies saw funding of $50m+ in the first half of 2015. These 8 companies raised more money than all …
A framework for startups to explore Higher Ed opportunities
By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Business Models, Education Unbundling, Startups, Strategy
Is there a structured way to look at opportunities in Higher Ed? Say, if a startup wants to enter Higher Ed, how could it systematically identify all possible opportunities and thereby map out all potential business models in this space?
Historically, there were 3 clear spaces or opportunity areas in Higher Ed space. First, there was the University. Initially there was just the non-profit research-led university, which morphed into …
A Look at the Venture Investing Arms of Gannett, Advance and Hearst
By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: Advance, Advertising Services, Advertising Tools, CareerBuilder, Classifieds, Conde Nast, Content Aggregation, Content Tools, DB Corp, Digital Media, Gannett, Hearst Ventures, Hindustan Media Ventures, Incubation, Investments, Jagran Prakashan, NYTCo, Startups, The New York Times, The Times of India, USA Newspapers, Venture Investing
In a previous blog post, wherein I had analyzed NYT’s venture investing approach, I had promised to contrast this with the approach adopted by similar prolific peers – primarily Hearst, Conde Nast / Advance and Gannett. In this post, I plan to do just that. Here you will find details on all the current ventures they have invested in, as well as a brief look at the …