September 2011
2 posts
Don't Worry, Be Happy!
Yesterday someone who knows what I am going through as a startup entrepreneur asked me a basic question. ‘You are taking all the risk, how do you make sure that the others are doing what they are supposed to do as they don’t have skin in the game’. Told him it’s a marathon; lots of people participate, few make the finish line and get recognized. Similarly as a company we...
August 2011
1 post
June 2011
2 posts
SmartCEO - Starting Up - Lending a Hand →
The Start-up Centre is an effort by a very good friend, Vijay Anand. As a board member I try to help him in whatever little way I can.
May 2011
2 posts
Swiss Cheese
Startups are like swiss cheese, full of holes with an appetizing flavor. As the company grows and starts hitting the market you end up meeting a lots of professionals; Freshly minted MBA VCs with no operational experience, large company executives who you engage with for selling/marketing your products and services, established company executives who you are building potential partnerships with...
April 2011
0 posts
2 tags
A Clean Slate
An entrepreneur’s journey starts with a clean slate and just an idea in his mind. If you are a first time entrepreneur you start making mistakes right from here. The biggest fear while starting out is to figure out if your idea solves a key problem for a target market and thereby viable. Instead of figuring this out, most of us end up trying to find co-founders.
In my mind,...
March 2011
2 posts
bijan sabet: Some thoughts about competitive... →
bijan:
At this point, between our three funds, we have over 50 startups in the Spark portfolio.
We have specific theme and we are focused on a number of categories that we are passionate about. We do our best to describe those on our website.
Given this interest and focus, it’s often that we will…
4 tags
WatchColor! With a $41 million A round for a pre-revenue startup, color is probably the startup with the highest valuation at its stage in startup history. Overlapping People and Location graphs and smart algorithms, Color promises to build a new elastic social network that could outstrip Facebook in the future.
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
7 tags
Yuri Milner - The Phenomenon
DST, founded by Yuri Milner, is popularly known for its big ticket investments in companies like Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon. At the time (Mid 2009) of Facebook investment - USD 200 million on a USD 10 billion valuation - anyone who followed this space was totally confused. In six months they followed it up with a USD 180 million in Zynga. In april 2010 they put in USD 135 million into...
December 2010
5 posts
“Smart specifically studied how such people made their most difficult decision in...”
– Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (via krisnair)
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
Lie to Me
Am addicted to ‘Lie to Me’ a show now airing on Star World. A brilliant show teaching us how to interpret body language in an entertaining way.
Its such a vital skill for everyone to pickup to better communicate, negotiate, manage etc.
As an entrepreneur I am constantly dealing with people and its very important for me to understand what they say without actually saying it.
September 2010
5 posts
4 tags
August 2010
4 posts
5 tags
Good Design
Dieter Rams is a german industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun. More importantly he has been the inspiration for Jonathan Ive of Apple.
Apple, inspite of being a closed platform, has become one of the largest technology companies in the world mainly due its products’ and services’ great design.
Here are the 10 principles of a...
4 tags
A Toast to MakeMyTrip
It was a great milestone for Indian Internet startups when makemytrip.com, a 10 year old online travel company, made a spectacular NASDAQ debut. With its market valuation almost doubling to USD 800 million, it was one of the best one day gain on NASDAQ since 2007.
Naturally was intrigued by its performance and scanned through their Balance Sheet and P&L and found the following -
Total...
July 2010
3 posts
3 tags
That's the way it's always been done!
Start with a cage containing five monkeys.
In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.
As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water.
After a while, another monkey will make an attempt with the same response - all of the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Keep...
4 tags
June 2010
11 posts
3 tags
WatchJack Dorsey: The 3 Keys to Twitter’s Success.
Jack Dorsey outlines three core takeaways from his experiences building and launching Twitter – and more recently – Square, a simple payment utility. 1) Draw: get your idea out of your head and share it, 2) Luck: assess when the time (and the market) is right to execute your idea, 3) Iterate: take in the feedback, be a rigorous editor, and...
3 tags
BWA
The recent conclusion of the 3G and BWA auctions mopped up over 1 lakh crores for the Indian government. Not only is this a benchmark for the government auctions for future release of any controlled resources, but its a whole new wave of growth in the pipeline for India.
In China, its predicted that every 10% of broadband penetration would increase its GDP by 2.5%. India...
4 tags
WatchUnderstanding Social Plugins
(via hiten)
6 tags
1 tag
May 2010
18 posts
4 tags
TV Meets Web. Web Meets TV.
Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet.
We all knew this is going to eventually happen. Many have tried in the past and many, including Google, are at it now. Its just a matter of time before this snowballs into a de facto way of consuming video content. Then TV as we know it will no longer exist....
Churchill Club's top ten tech trends ...
The industry’s leading visionaries rate and debate what technology trends will emerge during the year ahead. Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Joe Schoendorf, Ram Shriram, and Ann Winblad are among the speakers.
Found Steve’s take on how Twitter’s real-time model will triumph over Google’s centralized model for search over time to be very relevant.
3 tags
Multi-Stream ...
TweetDeck is really putting the pedal to the metal on the multi-stream, real-time web concept. I think they need to quickly change their name to something else otherwise people would always associate them with twitter.
With their announcement yesterday on support for Google Buzz, Foursquare and their existing support for Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, and Twitter, they...
3 tags
Great Videos on Entrepreneurship
Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner provides a free collection of over 1600 videos and podcasts, featuring lectures by today’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders.
Check it out!