VC

Angels Or Demons Tax?

by

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

by

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 Playbook

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

Small Conversion Can Create A Large Business

by

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. This famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the US businessman who is often considered to be the father of the department store. We use the slide at the bottom to explain the impact of our go … Read more