Last week I had the opportunity to spend time with startups and tech companies in New York, aka Silicon Alley. The excitement in the startup and venture circles in the city was impressive. Previously where finance used to dominate all conversations, now its about ad tech, social/mobile and Pinterest clones. VC’s seems to around each corner – […]
How much revenue does it take to be a billion dollar company?
Techcrunch has a good article on the subject – in essence, emphasizing on quality of revenue. The mantra suggested is recurring revenue, low churn, high LTV and operating leverage. For consumer companies equally, the notion of high lifetime value, repeat behavior, and margin structure are the key. A CapitalIQ analysis shows a strong correlation of […]
Real stories of Startup Failure
Readwriteweb has a review of The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup . Based on extensive research of 10,000 startup founders, this book draws upon the reasons of successes and failures. Top reasons for failure – people issues, equity issues, and investor relations. Seems like a promising read.
India Expansion – Acquire & Manage Culture not just the Business
In recent months I have had the great opportunity to work  with organisations from around the world who have expanded their global footprint  through Joint Ventures/strategic Buyouts or Acquisitions.  I am happy to share, based on my experiences, some of the key elements/experiences which are important steps in business success in these types of situations […]
Missing Link – the HR plan
Having managed HR departments for over 110 companies in last 5 years, I am amazed to see the consistent absence of comprehensive HR plan inside or even alongside the annual business plan. And this remains the top reason why goal alignments, reviews and resource agility remains perpetual challenge. Most managers end up reacting to situations […]
A Different VC Model
Having made a number of investments in very young technology companies in India over the years I came to the somewhat obvious conclusion that it is relatively easy for startups  here to become ‘ramen profitable‘, but relatively difficult for them to exit. Making equity based investments in this scenario is problematic for the obvious reason […]
Indian Microfinance – Infographic from Legatum
Interesting infographic from Legatum on impact of AP ordinance on Indian microfinance industry. 20120313 infographic indian microfinance View more presentations from Alok Mittal. Apart from effective blacklisting of millions of poor women in AP from access to private credit, the ordinance has impacted availability of credit across the country. All in name of protecting the […]
The New Model of ecommerce (is the old model of business) – Profitable
 (This post was triggered by Alok’ s recent post about  new capital efficient, profitable models of ecommerce) The current crop of poster boys of ecommerce ventures in India – FK, Snapdeal, FnY etc are all horizontal – sell everything to everybody. They have built a business which has scaled – they have served millions of […]
Brave new world…
Think about what role the mobile operator has been playing to-date: They own a pipe to transmit information (voice + data) They own a touch point to the customer (and hence impact the choices I make) They own a mechanism to charge the customer – either stored value or monthly billing Long-term which of these […]
Steve Jobs – Book Review
Just finished reading Steve Jobs’ Biography by Walter Isaacson — Great account of a genius. As someone whose only impressions of Steve Jobs are formed by this book, it is an amazing story of personal passion and entrepreneurial possibilities. At a more sublime level, its a story of a person who almost everyone would have […]
Visiting India
Folks: I run Tandem Entrepreneurs, a mobile accelerator in San Francisco Bay Area. I am visiting India and will be in Pune from Tuesday 7th Feb for about 10 days. I would be happy to meet with a few entrepreneurs if you want to use me as a sounding board. At Tandem we work with […]
Will the record high VC investments, catalyzed by E-Commerce deals, su...
Hi All, The following data points from the Venture Intelligence India Venture Capital Report-2011 report quantifies the resurgence of VC investments in India catalyzed by the well known excitement for the E-Commerce segment: Venture Capital firms invested about $1.09 billion over 209 deals in India during the twelve months ended December 2011 to touch all […]