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 …
Startups
Some more recent writings
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!
- Why Blume invested in Classplus?
- Why
An article on the challenges of finding product-market fit in India
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, …
The Rise of Hyperlocal Vernacular Video News Apps
(This was published in Mint, 19th November 2018, albeit in an abbreviated form due to space constraints. This is the complete piece.)
The latest and hottest startup sector is presently invisible to ‘People Like Us’ living in metros. Over the past year, several young founders boasting impeccable academic credentials and work experience have been moving to small town India, launching hyperlocal news apps, viz., LocalPlay, Lokal, Awaaz, Circle etc. These …
India2, English Tax and Building for the Next Billion Users
Recently, Rehan Yar Khan, who runs Orios Venture Partners, an early stage venture firm tweeted
Starting with Zomato, then Ola in Australia and now Oyo in China, looks like Indian start-ups have found the answer to beating India's 50M only "real consumers" market: Get out of the box
— Rehan Yar Khan (@rehanyarkhan) May 24, 2018
Rehan Yar Khan wasn’t being sarcastic. He was, in fact, complementing the promoters of …
Kashyap Deorah’s ‘The Golden Tap’ – A Review
I first met Kashyap Deorah sometime late ’08 in Gloria Jeans Coffee in Bandra. We were introduced by Sudhir Sitapati, a junior of mine from IIMA, and a then-advisor to Kashyap’s Chaupaati Bazaar. I was then in the Brand Capital division of Times Group, and the conversation likely revolved around our funding model and whether it made sense for Chaupaati to access it (It didn’t).
We lost touch subsequently, though …
Why Don’t Indian VCs Write?
Sometime in 2013, I restarted my dormant twitter account, treating it akin to a RSS reader, curating a mix of interesting people to follow and learn from. Some of these were writers, some politicians; others included philosophers, flaneurs and a few executives. Consistently I began to find that the most interesting tweets were from (Valley) VCs – Marc Andreessen, Benedict Evans, Paul Graham, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson (NYC though) etc. …
A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes – Part II
In a previous post A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes I laid out EdTech investment themes into three buckets
- Lifelong education
- Unbundling of the university
- Rethinking existing education business models in light of tech and mobile
In the post, I had shared that I would go into greater detail on bucket #3 in a future post, as to which of the various business models and processes could be rethought, and …
A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes
EdTech funding is hitting record levels, never seen before. A recent report by Ambient Research put edtech funding for H1’15 at $2.5b (in contrast to $2.4b funding for the whole of 2014).
In India we haven’t seen the kind of frenzy around edtech funding we have seen in China. 8 Chinese companies saw funding of $50m+ in the first half of 2015. These 8 companies raised more money than all …
A framework for startups to explore Higher Ed opportunities
Is there a structured way to look at opportunities in Higher Ed? Say, if a startup wants to enter Higher Ed, how could it systematically identify all possible opportunities and thereby map out all potential business models in this space?
Historically, there were 3 clear spaces or opportunity areas in Higher Ed space. First, there was the University. Initially there was just the non-profit research-led university, which morphed into …