BW piece on how the VC scene is hotting up in Russia: To encourage such investments, the Russian government has set up a trust that matches investments from private venture capitalists. Already, it has agreed to dispense nearly $100 million to three groups of investors. Among them: Asset Management, run by legendary Silicon Valley venture […]
Customer Fulfillment
I am going to spend a few weeks in the US in June and decided to see if I could rent a cell phone in India which would work in the US. Matrix provides such a service. The rental is $30 for the handset. This includes 400 minutes of talk time ( 150 Peak) and […]
Tinker Level Ideas
The world is madly chasing the convergence dream. I believe however the future lies in breaking some of that convergence into basic products – tinker level. The market possibilities are endless in the emerging world. Think of a GPS device that just gives you location and not mp3 and other bells and whistles. Think of […]
Perils of Forecasting
The genesis of this post is the forecasts on online media spend. I tend to agree that this may be slow to grow in India but I would want to know when it took off in USA and/or China and what triggered takeoff. I remain optimistic on advertising by persons and SME to get business. […]
Designations and mapping a startup
A few of us were discussing startups, and the point/purpose of a designation arose, and what it actually meant in a startup. So far in life I have been a Founder, Co-founder, CEO, CTO, Vice president, Chief product Officer, Chief of Business Strategy,Executive Vice president, Director, Founding member, Advisor, Board Advisor, and a few other […]
Internet bootcamp for consumer marketing professionals
Canaan and TiE are organizing an event for consumer marketing professionals in packaged goods, media, financial services, telecom and other such consumer industries – people who might be interested in entrepreneurship but don’t know where to start. Specific focus is on internet related opportunities. If you can think of people you know who might be […]
Online Media spend India
Motley fool did a write up on Rediff. The interesting items to me were Users – 53.6 million Revenues: $30MM annually ARPU annual : 0.56 cents. 10 advertisers accounted for 55% of revenues. Maybe all revenues were not advertising related. If say Rediff has 10% ( wild guess) of all online ad media spend then […]
Delighting Customers/ Time
This post builds on the Dhando Investor post which with 20 comments was getting a bit cumbersome. Deepak Nadiger made an interesting comment and I wanted to respond and decided to do it with a fresh post. The hurdle rate discussion is an opportunity to be innovative and delight customers. In the businesses I have […]
Dhandho Investor
I just finished reading “The Dhandho Investor” by Mohnish Pabrai ( the man behind Dakshana). I enjoyed it and it stimulated some new thinking. I also looked at my investing in India over the last two years. On a portfolio with 85% exposure to equities I managed a 45% CAGR(cumulative annual growth rate). I guess […]
Unrest behind the scenes in the VC world
The NYT has an article on how LPs are unhappy with US VCs – most of them, anyway – and has some interesting bits to it. Some limited partners, whose billions of dollars help fund the investments made by venture capitalists and who pay their fetching salaries, are unhappy. They say the industry is far […]
Why are startups boring…in India
At the risk of being accosted on my way home tomorrow, and also risking it all on my first post on this blog. I have a question, Why are/do people find startup’s of no interest in India? The question is probably not that straight forward, simply because they maybe of no interest because no one […]
Next Second Life Tour 5 PM May 11
Well, the first tour was, um, interesting. Hadn’t really prepared an itenerary, so the people who came had to drift around aimlessly for a bit. My bad 🙂 This time around, there are a few interesting places we’ll be visiting, as well as a couple of necessary preliminaries. We’ll begin with a (very) brief orientation […]