The growing internet penetration has fuelled India’s start-up ecosystem, which is now the third biggest in the world. US-based Compass (Startup Genome), in its 2015 report, puts Bangalore as the world’s second fastest growing start-up ecosystem. There is a massive opportunity within the $2 trillion Indian economy owing to the consumption fuelled by 1.3 billion Indians and a good number of Indian...
Think about endgame, chess grandmasters do so to win. Studies point out that chess grandmasters visualize the chess board state few steps away to a ‘winning game’ and make moves based on memory pattern that can lead to that board state and thus help them win the game. Many startups however operate in a game where the rules are dynamic and change unexpectedly. An unanticipated flood of competition...
Friday 21st Oct 2016 has been billed as the first large scale cybersecurity incident from the IoT world. The widely reported attacks involved inserting malware into devices to turn them into a network of controllable bots that was directed to attack websites. One of the principal targets was Dyn the DNS provider to Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, Paypal, Spotify, Heroku, SoundCloud, Crunchbase, Netflix...
Conducting business in one’s own country is never easy, let alone conducting business overseas, where rules, regulations and business environments differ. ‘Ease of doing business’ is also an Index created by the World Bank. It ranks economies from high to low, with the former indicating easier, simpler and better conditions for business as compared to the latter, indicating difficulty in...
Note: This is a long form article. It will take time if you want to read it through the end. If you’re heady about entrepreneurship, you may be offended by a lot that’s in here. Also, if you’re looking for a listicle or an article to skim through, this isn’t it. So be warned before you start 🙂 Over the last few years, literature around entrepreneurship has increased...
I’ve seen this play out so many times over the last few years. A business leader at a services firm will sit down and talk about how they’re working on a product. S/he will quote the usual mix of arguments – services as a business is struggling; Indian firms have challenges making products but they think they can do it this time; automation/products are key to their future – and finally end by...
Starting point of a startup is an idea and it goes through a journey of product releases and pivots to reach its product market fit and further scale. Source of this idea is a brainstorming session or hot flavor of the season (foodTech, fintech etc) or even comes from past work experience of the founder, in rare some cases it is rooted in an unsolved customer pain point. For Indian software...
I see a lot of founders requesting 15min time from me for quick advice. They are clear that it is not a funding pitch, but, more to get my opinion on some of their questions – is this a right market, whether idea has legs, customer size, product feedback, etc. Based on who is requesting, I tend to allocate time for few and discuss, which usually goes for 30min+. I know that 30min is not...
The emotions of independence and freedom are flowing around in our hearts; hence it is befitting to discuss the same in a domain where most people haven’t pictured these yet. Let us talk about the product that is eating the whole world – yes, we are talking about the world of ‘Software’ after all. Even the people who are new to this part will notice the sheer amount of change that has come around...
On August 1st Uber agreed to hand over its Chinese operations to Didi, in return for a 17.7% stake in the combined company’s equity and $1 billion Didi investment in Uber. Uber, though, will get only 5.9% of the voting rights in the new entity. Investors in Uber China, including Baidu, a big Chinese Internet firm, will get a 2.3% stake. Uber CEO Kalanick will serve on Didi’s board, and Wei...
