Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: How is it that Amazon doesn’t make a profit, yet Jeff Bezos’ net worth is in the billions? The question is temporally flawed since Amazon does make profits today. But there was a time when Amazon made losses and still Jeff … Read more
This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: I had a similar experience recently. I scanned the Merchant’s QR code at a restaurant with my PayTM app. PayTM asked me to link my bank account to complete the payment via UPI. I refused to do so because I wanted … Read more
One or the other startup founder regularly asks on social media whether angel investors can steal their ideas. This question on Quora is a recent example. Yes, angel investors can steal ideas. Whether they actually do is a trade secret and you’re unlikely to find any mea culpas in an open forum! What you’re likely … Read more
Entrepreneurs are driven by idea, originality, product, problem solved, team, technology, and so on. But, for VCs, they’re merely means to an end. As we saw in Teardown Of The VC Investment Model, the goal for venture capital is to earn multibagger returns in the short-to-medium term. While the exact numbers could vary from one … Read more
In continuation of Part 1, here are three more situations in which the old adage, “something is better than nothing” is critically flawed. #3. DARK STORE INVENTORY The way ecommerce works, you place an order on the website of an ecommerce company (e.g. Amazon) and the company ships the ordered good(s) from a central warehouse. … Read more
According to the old adage, “something is better than nothing”. This has become common wisdom because it’s often true. But there are a few critical situations where it’s fatally flawed. In this post, I’ll give a few examples. #1. CACHE MEMORY Back in the day, the IT hardware company I worked for launched two models … Read more
I made the case for taxing digital companies on the basis of gain in their valuation in Valuation Tax – If Tech Startups Can Disrupt, So Can Taxman. Since then, I’ve heard many objections to the notion of Valuation Tax. I’m giving my rebuttals below. Valuation Tax is a tax on the growth in valuation, … Read more
In his op-ed entitled Tech What One Deserves in The Economic Times dated 17 July 2019, author Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar (@swaminomics) supports the move by governments of various countries to change the basis of corporate tax for tech startups from profits to sales. According to @swaminomics, France has already taken the lead by levying a … Read more
In the past few days, several startups in India have received notices from the Income Tax Department threatening penal taxes on the angel investments (“Angel Tax”) raised by them during the past few years. Angel tax demon is back! Number of entrepreneurs have received I-T notices over Angel funding. This even as FM @ArunJaitley & … Read more
Direct-to-Consumer financial technology startups are new age companies that sell bank accounts, loans and other financial products directly to end users. In this post, we’ll use the term “Fintechs” to refer to these D2C firms and “Fintech” to refer to the industry as a whole. Fintechs are different from “Fincumbents”, which is a term I’ve … Read more