I saw this tweet recently from Anmol Maini, a keen observer of the Indian startup scene.
It is yes, funny.
Is it right? Hmm….I must confess the joke has a point, but I am not sure it is …
Venture Capital / Startups
Social-as-a-service
“There are only two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” – Jim Barksdale, former CEO and President of Netscape.
“There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Time machine
A metaphor that I have found useful to view the impact of COVID on tech and business, is view …
So, what kind of a venture investor are you?
A frequent question that comes up in VC (venture capitalist) interviews / podcasts is around how VCs decide on investments, or rather, how they evaluate a startup or pitch.
The inevitable answer to that is that you quickly determine how the startup stacks up on three broad criteria: the team, or the quality of the founders, then the product or tech being used here, and finally the market or the …
Early notes on the Jio-Facebook deal: implications and second-order effects.
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 …
COVID-19 as a forcing function
I attended a virtual edtech summit recently; an online version of a global summit that happens in the U.S. this time every year, but had to be cancelled due to COVID-19.
One of the panels had edtech ‘startup’ founders and CXOs. Of course, these were all well-funded global startups. And they were having the best growth periods of their existence.
- The CEO of Proctorio, an online proctoring firm was at
Podcast highlights: Gavin Baker on ‘Invest Like the Best’ (April, 2020)
Patrick O’Shaughnessy runs the popular Invest Like the Best podcast. A recent episode had Gavin Baker, founder & CIO of Atreides Management LLP, a growth PE investor specializing in tech and consumer plays, as guest. Both Patrick and Gavin are wellknown on investing twitter and run their own investing shops too.
The podcast was titled ‘Investing Through a Bear Market’ and covered how Gavin views investing in a fast-dropping market …
Singular, social and streamed. Welcome to a post-Covid world!
This article was first published in the Sunday Times of India, 22nd March, 2020.
I work in an early stage venture fund. As the Covid-19 crisis took hold, we reached out to our portfolio to check on how the virus was impacting them. We saw an interesting pattern emerge. Naturally, purely digital businesses, the ones that move ‘bits’ around, were doing well, such as edtech or content plays. But …
What is the Superhuman of Calendars?
Thoughts on productivity tools, and about rethinking them for better outcomes.
If you end up subscribing to the Superhuman email service, you are clearly in the subset of busy people with a lot of emails. One thing busy people have apart from emails is meetings, and to dos. Tonnes of them. So inevitably you think of, what is the superhuman equivalent for to do lists? Or calendars? And that is …
Postcards from the future
I often tell friends that the single best thing about working in early stage investing is the number of startup decks you get to see daily, each describing a specific vision of the future. People eating meal replacements or renting clothes instead of buying, printing a toy than ordering one, and so on. These ‘postcards from the future’ are not always right. Well, they all clearly can’t be. But that …
Some more recent writings
Links to recent writings of mine. As usual, they happen on LinkedIn or other publications. My website seems to have become an archives list. That wasn’t the original plan when I started this website nearly a decade ago, though. Sigh!
- I wrote for online publisher Scroll about how Hindi is gradually but inevitably emerging as the Lingua Franca of South India. Shudder!
- Why Blume invested in Classplus?
- Why