I recently came across the concepts of clock time and calendar time in an essay by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11 on twitter).
Clock time is the actual time it takes for you to do an action (send a mail, draft an article and hit publish, code a change and set up an A/B test etc.). Calendar time is the period in which the impact / consequences / results of the above …
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
Given that I help hire for Blume, and also given my presence in the startup-VC ecosystem, I get a lot of requests from friends, friends of friends, acquaintances and even strangers reaching out for chats, advice, answers to queries etc.
In the pre-COVID days, I had a solution for the ones I couldn’t convert into an email / whatsapp exchange – give them a slot during my travel time, i.e., …
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 …
“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 …
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.
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 …
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 …