VC

When Nothing Is Better Than Something – Part 2

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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

When Nothing Is Better Than Something – Part 1

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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

Valuation Tax – If Tech Startups Can Disrupt, So Can Taxman

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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

Angels Or Demons Tax?

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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

Fintechs Shouldn’t Stop Chanting The Disruption Mantra

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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

Teardown Of The VC Investment Model

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This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: “We’ll disrupt uncouth taxi unions.” “We’ll kill greedy banks.” “We’ll upend shady realtors.” Startups with noble mission statements like these get billions of dollars of VC funding and enjoy unicorn – or even decacorn –  valuations. As a result, the average … Read more

Pixie Dust Sampling – Or How To Commit Harakiri By Lying With Big Data

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I recently saw the following post on LinkedIn: “95% of banks in the study have created innovation labs.” This figure seemed extremely high to me. I did a quick-and-dirty survey of three banks in my circle. Not one of them has an innovation lab. Nevertheless, I didn’t conclude that the author of the post was … Read more

Rideshare: Exhibit A For New Age Digital Business

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In How Rideshare Startups Flipped A Switch To Create A Billion Dollar Business Overnight, I shared my thoughts on how rideshare startups have gone against common wisdom in many areas and used digital – aka SMAC (Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud) –  technologies to create a billion dollar business virtually overnight. But it’s more than just technology. Before I elaborate, let … Read more

If You Think VCs Create Bubbles, Meet ICOs

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In When A Business Is VC Funded, VC Is The Business, we saw how VCs are driven by traditional business metrics like profitability and ROI although their portfolio companies are not. Contrary to common wisdom, the VC industry has a stellar track record on these conventional KPIs. First, let’s take profitability. It’s no secret that many … Read more