At the beginning of the year when we wrote down our thoughts in the 2016 Annual Letter about aspects such as break away from copy paste entrepreneurship, innovation bridge with Silicon Valley, progress on open market policies, etc. we thought we will score a few wins in the year. The pace of progress has surprised us. In many areas we have exceeded our best expectations. The last few months...
‘Omwana ni wa bhone’ – a famous African proverb meaning: “ Regardless of a child’s biological parents, its upbringing belongs to the community” A cold November morning, we drove down to Devanhalli on the outskirts of Bangalore, having blocked three days to be a part of PNGrowth2016. Reading about the previous version of PNGrowth & the regular updates coming in from...
Last month, for the first time, I witnessed something really special. Even for someone like me, whose very job and calling is to evangelise this nascent software ecosystem of ours, this was something extraordinary. I’ve been doing this a while, and what happened last month was one of the best feelings I’ve had in this journey. This is what happened: Some of the leading B2B enterprise startups in...
It was all about #GoodScale at #PNGrowth2016 !! Pitching to Peers in Gurukul Style I participated as a volunteer this time around and missed the keynote in day one since I was busy in printing #MindFlip worksheets for 50 odd entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs were handpicked by a very credible set of people who knows what #Scale means to B2B products. Pallav and Shankar Maruwada did the priming...
Most of our iSPIRT volunteers have demanding day jobs and yet they jump in to build public goods. They are animated by a cause and a sense of community. Some of them take their commitment to the cause so seriously that they let no task, however unsexy and mundane, get in the way of progress. Their do-what-it-takes approach is what, ultimately, turns ideas and intentions into reality. These unsung...
We’ve done this for two years. It has been successful. But we still felt that it could be improved. We went back to the drawing board. We thought hard about how we could do this better. And we’ve come back with something that will be more powerful, and even more demanding from our product entrepreneurs. #PNgrowth2016 will feature only 50 startups, giving each startup more facetime with the...
On Independence Day, we at Product Nation have an important announcement to make. This one was a long time coming, as we tried to classify, clear up, and target our efforts for the product ecosystem better. This update is mainly focused on the Playbook pillar, one of iSPIRT’s key initiatives, and will have effects on other fronts as well. We are reviving some of the initiatives; to others we have...
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...
Getting up at 4am in the morning and discovering 200 founders lined up at Madiwala, to catch the bus before the scheduled departure, instantly reminded me of the huge line of techies in front of the American Consulate at Annasalai for my H1B visa, two decades ago 🙂 Super pune gang @PNgrowth – @SarangLakare @amitdmishra @aballabh @vinaynathan @99sachins pic.twitter.com/fcfx6KCqxf — Abhijit...
Dear iSPIRT Family, I wanted to follow up with an update from the PNgrowth team at iSPIRT. A little less than a year ago, a small group of iSPIRT volunteers proposed something unconventional: We would run a bootcamp to jolt 200 growth stage entrepreneurs from India to aspire to category leadership. The bootcamp would combine learnings from strategy courses taught at Duke and Stanford with...
