India’s digital startups have an analog problem. They face a kagaz ka pahad. Literally. Many of them are designing for the digital desh of Bunty, the 37-yearold Udaipur shoe-seller who gets 40% of his business on his smartphone. Or, Chaitanya Bharti, Guntur’s 30-year-old single-room school teacher who gets remittances on her basic phone. But every time they collect and store paper records...
Progressive steps taken by the Union Government for the Startup Community in its Start-up India initiative are encouraging. We hope the Union budget will reflect a similar sentiment and introduce policies around tax relaxations and process simplifications. The structure of taxation and corporate laws in India is not very conducive for startups and early stage companies. A lot of these issues were...
UPI Platform is Cheap, Secure, Reliable mobile first, inter operable/ open source, instantaneous settlement, both pull and push. One major disadvantage of pre paid wallets is in a given month they can’t do more then 10,000 worth of transaction with out KYC, while UPI enabled platform bank accounts can do a transfer upto Rs 1 lakh instantaneously. Since Money sits in your bank account, you...
I recently attended a Playbook Roundtable organised by iSPIRT on “Culture Design” discussing how to preserve culture of a company that it started with? Reading so much strife because of culture conflict globally or in India or how MNCs should imbibe the “Transparency Culture” & “Accountability Culture” has made me wonder Isn’t “Culture” a...
Ever wondered if a Software could help business chart the next growth curve?. The marketplace is changing and the competition is catching up. Organisations need a new concept to break out to create the next growth curve and they depend on functions like Strategy, NPD ( New product development ), R&D Teams internally. Some of these organizations also use external consulting firms, crowdsource...
And…we’re ready to accept applications into the third batch of our accelerator program (time flies!). As before, the 100 day program helps founders in the early stages of their startup do these things: Build products their customers will love Accelerate their progress; and Become investible faster. If you’re a startup building a technology enabled startup in one of the areas we like, and want to...
Two libraries. One charges you based on the number of books that you pick, while for the other, the rental period forms the basis of its prices. Now, which one would you prefer to get your books from? There’s no right or wrong answer in this scenario. What matters here is how you were able to make your choice, with a single criteria. Both libraries cater to the same audience, with the same...
On Saturday, I was going to attend 3rd year anniversary event of iSPIRT On the way on my bus to meeting, my mind was filled with varied thoughts about 2010 or earlier, when I was outsourced product start-up employee. Looks like little time ago, 6 years has passed from 2010 when I met the volunteers of NPC. Sharing comments to volunteers (Avinash, Rajan, Vijay, Manju, Suresh) on lack of “Made in...
Every company in its inception is a start-up. However, excelling and remaining relevant in an ever changing, competitive market eventually transforms ‘start-ups’ into enterprises that follow a set of conventional/’safe’ methods of doing business in order for them to become profitable and remain so in the long run. Conversely, the current start-up buzz is posing fundamental questions to the...
Seven years ago a band of volunteers came together to move the Indian software product ecosystem into the next orbit. Three years ago this movement became a think tank, iSPIRT. We pioneered the idea of building public goods without public money in India. Today, India has many software product Unicorns and many more are in the making. We are doing one M&A a month. India Stack is reshaping many...
