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
Patrick O’Shaughnessy runs the popular Invest Like the Best podcast. A recent episode had Gavin Baker, founder & CIO ofAtreides 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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!
One morning in October 2017, and I forget the exact date
now, I came back from my crossfit workout to see a series of whatsapp messages
from Karthik Reddy. Karthik, briefly an ex-boss of mine at The Times of India
Group, had gone on to cofound Blume Ventures, a seed fund, which had evolved to
emerge as a much-loved and well-regarded player in the Indian startup …
I haven’t been updating this website as frequently as I have hoped to. But those who follow me on twitter or linkedin, would know that I have been writing regularly, with all of it being published on other websites or publishing platforms.
Here are links to some recent writings of mine, in order of recency.
Reflections on one year in venture capital – I completed a year at Blume Ventures,
I wrote a post, well over a couple of months back (mid-Feb ’19), on the challenges of becoming a universal app or product in India. The nature of the Indian market meant few startups would attain product-market fit (PMF) across the country. Increasingly, startups would strive to attain PMF in India1 Alpha, India1 or India2.
The article also covered a broad approach to move across different layers of the stack, …
I wrote an article in Dec’18 for the online tech + business site factordaily.com called ‘Vernacular Apps, English Premium, and Monetizing the Next 200m Users”. The link is below.
In the article, which I am not posting in full here, I argued for why the slew of vernacular apps that have been launching of late, catering to the emerging …