Sajith Pai
Writings on VC, Tech & Culture
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MERIT colleges, national track India, & privilege blindness

August 19, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Education 1 Comment Tags: Caste, Higher Education, IITs, Indo-Anglians

In this rather extended essay (~4,500 words), I suggest the term MERIT (Metro-based / Residential, English-speaking, All-India intake, Tough to get into) Colleges as a moniker to replace the IIT / IIM tag we use for elite Indian colleges.

I then use MERIT as a framework to explore facets of privilege in India – national consciousness, rise of subjective merit, and finally blindness to our own privilege.

I tried to …

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I appeared on a podcast.

August 12, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Interview, Podcasting

I recently appeared the the 100x Entrepreneur podcast. It is a well-known one in the Indian startup world.

In our new ep @sajithpai, Director, @BlumeVentures talks about

🏗️Building Personal Brand
🚀Unacademy’s growth journey
🧐Vacuums in markets during COVID
👩‍🏫Edtech portfolio of Blume
💪Moats in Early-stage startups
🤯Unlearning to succeed as VC
& much more!https://t.co/mZzlzTDt0h

— 100x Entrepreneur (@100xEntr) July 20, 2020

As you can see in the tweet, …

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Podcasting for visiles

August 11, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: Content, Podcasting

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 …

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Work Time, Impact Time, Machine Learning & the Future of Jobs

August 6, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Miscellany 1 Comment Tags: Future of Work, Machine Learning, Time

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 …

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Articulating my position on the ‘pay for internships you really want’ debate on twitter.

July 27, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Internship, Startups

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

…

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COVID-19 and the Flattening of Time

July 7, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Miscellany 2 Comments Tags: COVID-19, Time

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., …

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Does alma matter?

May 30, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: IITs, Startups, Venture Capital

I saw this tweet recently from Anmol Maini, a keen observer of the Indian startup scene.

VC pitch meetings when the founder isn't from IIT/IIM/BITS

▶ 🔘──────── 00:04

VC pitch meetings when the founder is from IIT/IIM/BITS

▶ 🔘──────── 1:56:68 https://t.co/1qmx0gD2CG

— Anmol मैनी (@anmolm_) May 23, 2020

It is yes, funny.

Is it right? Hmm….I must confess the joke has a point, but I am not sure it is …

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Social-as-a-service

May 24, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 1 Comment Tags: Social, Unbundling

“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 …

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So, what kind of a venture investor are you?

May 15, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Venture Capital / Startups 4 Comments Tags: Venture Capital, Venture Investing

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 …

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Early notes on the Jio-Facebook deal: implications and second-order effects.

April 25, 2020 By Sajith Pai in Retail, Venture Capital / Startups No Comments Tags: Facebook, Online Retail

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 …

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