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’, as well as the distinct set of hacks and business models that have evolved to help Indian startups win, which I term as the Indus Valley playbook.
The essay has three sections
Origin and evolution of the India startup ecosystem or Indus Valley as I
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 …
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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 …
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