Link to podcast. 19th November 2020.
Sajith: One of the best podcast episodes I ‘read’ this year. It is not new, but after it was referred in a Colossus annual wrap as one of their best episodes, i decided to give it a go. Any one who is a restaurateur (esp offering mid to high priced food) or in strategy will enjoy and learn from this podcast. One of …
Thinking that there are native models for each ecommerce category.
Let us start w this useful framework (via Niraj Shah of Wayfair from his podcast on Colossus).
Amazon cracked #1 through marketplace. This is the native model for internet ecommerce, but in reality it is the native model for a certain kind of good. One that fits into cartons and can be loaded into vans. See Benedict Evans’ clever …
I read a 2009 book by journalist Stacy Perman on cult burger brand In-N-Out Burger. It is an enjoyable read. I shared a brief review of the book + what I found interesting from the book on LinkedIn as an article and Twitter as a tweet thread. I broadly lump what I find interesting into three buckets – car commerce, food tech and finally, franchising as the accompanying …
Last week, Facebook announced a $5.7b investment for a 9.9% stake in Jio Platforms (an entity which owns Jio’s mobile service, the broadband internet service and a slew of apps and products, the largest being the JioSaavn music app). Context: Jio is India’s largest mobile telco with 388m subscribers; it reached market dominance in the short span of 3+ years and has reshaped the Indian digital sphere with its superlow …
It is now just over 20 years since Amazon had its IPO, setting it off on the path to e-commerce dominance and well over $500b in market cap. In these 20 years, Amazon, and its peers expanded across categories, from books and electronics to fashion and even grocery. And in parallel, a ruthless focus on shaving off delivery times and cost ensued, helping reduce buying friction and making online buying …
On starting a bookstore
Imagine that you have decided to set up a bookstore. It may be that that you are retiring and now you have some time and money to pursue your dream. Or you have won a lottery allowing you to quit your boring job and give in to that urge, that you have been nurturing since childhood. Either way, you are ready now to start looking …
Benedict Evans, tech blogger and VC with a16z, recently had an interesting series of tweets, polling his followers about their perception of various industry facts, such as android devices vs iOS devices, in an attempt to contrast the polled results with reality. One of the polls was about perceptions of Amazon’s share of the U.S. Consumer print book market.
…Perception: the correct answer is around a third, depending on definitions
Earlier this month, Amazon’s opening of a physical store created a fair bit of buzz online. Most observers found it puzzling. Why, after disrupting and demolishing the physical bookstore – as evidenced by the closing of Borders, and crippling of Barnes & Noble – would Amazon want to launch a physical bookstore themselves?
Now, Amazon is an extraordinary company, and its founder Jeff Bezos, is known for thinking really long-term …
“The decline of physical bookshops…affects which books have a chance of breaking out : bestsellers flourish, but midlist books that might have been discovered while browsing a bookstore are worse off, because consumers cannot easily stumble upon them while shopping on the internet.” – The Future of the Book, The Economist Oct 11, ’14
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“Amazon is ideal for finding the book you know you want. But it is …