I recently appeared the the 100x Entrepreneur podcast. It is a well-known one in the Indian startup world.
As you can see in the tweet, …
Venture Capital / Startups
Podcasting for visiles
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 …
Articulating my position on the ‘pay for internships you really want’ debate on twitter.
Context
Naman Sarawagi commented recently.
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
— Naman Sarawagi (@NamanSr) July 26, 2020
Twitter erupted saying how dare you think of unpaid internships.
I reacted to one post on this topic with this.
…Thought it was a well-argued thread
Does alma matter?
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 …
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 …