I joined Amit Varma on his acclaimed The Seen & The Unseen podcast to talk about venture valuations, the VC playbook, the evolving media sector, my productivity hacks + stack, and lots more.
It is long podcast (Amit’s signature style) but certainly the most interesting + important one I have done. Do give it a listen! Link below. (The wonderful illustration that appears on the Seen Unseen page is by …
In this long essay, in fact my longest ever at ~7k words, I set out the evolution of the Indian startup ecosystem, or ‘Indus Valley’, and the emergence of the Indus Valley playbook — a distinct set of hacks and business models that help startups win in the unique Indian market.
I have been thinking of writing this essay for a while now. Many of the individual elements of the …
TL;DR: There are 3 core jobs of a founder-CEO in a Series A+ startup. They are prioritization, hiring and fundraising; in that order. Communicating, meetings or reviews which is how the founder-CEO spends her time, are only enablers of the above jobs. They should not be confused with the 3 core jobs. The article below unpacks these 3 jobs at length. As always feedback and criticism welcome, and I would …
I have often puzzled over the relative ‘effort to create’ vs ‘time to consume’ ratios of podcasts vs an essay.
A 1,500-2000 word essay takes me nothing less than 6-8 hrs to create + publish, sometimes more if it needs background research etc. It take the reader 10-15 mins or so to consume it. Let us say, on average it takes 8 hrs to create and 15mins to consume. So …
More people would benefit if anyone could pay to get an internship where they like. I really mean the intern paying to get an internship, just like they pay for college. https://t.co/SnMpowRmHM
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 …
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 …