India Internet Fund

26/09/2016

One of the better pieces on entrepreneurship, from the perspective of our portfolio company CEO, Shivani Siroya

And she's doing it one meeting at a time.

30/08/2016

Only 15% of rural consumers use Internet to research or purchase products online, or register satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a purchased product , while compared with 30% of urban consumers.

More than half of new Internet users in India will be from rural communities, and rural users will constitute almost half (48%) of connected users in India by 2020, a report ''The Rising Connected Consumer in Rural India" (pdf) by The Boston Consulting Group suggests. The repor

24/08/2016

For anyone who wants their company to be flexible and nimble on its feet, this is a must read.

Over the last 5 years, Jonathan Golden has watched Airbnb explode in size and productivity. Here's what that journey looked like on the product team that powered it.

22/08/2016

A new wave of affordable smartphones has brought hundreds of millions of Indians online for the first time, giving them access to better education, jobs and entertainment. But there is one sector that isn't thrilled with this development.

The affordable-smartphone revolution that is delivering a world of education and entertainment to hundreds of millions of Indians may be delivering a world of hurt to consumer-product makers.

17/08/2016

It has penned in the country’s biggest and most innovative internet companies. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have grown to be some of the world’s largest internet companies, but they rely almost entirely on domestic businesses. Their ventures abroad have been mostly desultory, and prognostications that they will challenge American giants internationally have not materialized.

The internet filters that keep foreign companies out have created an environment that pens China’s tech firms inside their home country.

16/08/2016

Spend your calories on things you do well and the things that make you and your business valuable — and outsource things that aren’t core to that mission. Sure, your developer can build the corporate website over the weekend or set up GitLab on your own server instead of buying a small monthly plan, but the long-term management and ownership headaches far outweigh the short-term economics. It’s just not worth it.

Also: "Burn less." "Monetize early." And "you can’t improve what you don’t measure."

12/08/2016

This news will stun many in startup-land because, in some ways, it’s unfair — a negative gross-margin business with a huge capital raise could’ve been a symbol of tech and startup excess — and yet, here we are, counting the ways in which the cap table will get paid off for their risk.

Tweet +1 Share ShareJet.com, once laughed at — or, should I say, often laughed at — will now have the final laugh. Walmart will announce tomorrow that it has acquired Jet.com, which has raised upwards of $300M of venture capital from some of the best funds in the […]

12/08/2016

Startups need to shift their mindset away from paying down debt toward building technical wealth, and away from tearing down old code toward thoughtfully remodeling it.

Andrea Goulet runs a software SWAT Team — parachuting in to help companies fix bad code that's holding them back. Here's what she's learned on the job.

10/08/2016

Meanwhile, Apple's competitors seem to be jetting ahead. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have dazzled the press with announcements of upcoming products that will use artificial intelligence, or AI. Some, like Microsoft’s Cortana, are software applications that promise to anticipate customers’ needs in useful, personalized ways.

iPhone sales have slumped, stock is down, and pundits insist Apple is a tech laggard. But the company may be stronger than ever.

09/08/2016

At a time when startups across the world are struggling with weak investor sentiment, Uber has managed to raise funds by selling its Chinese business. The American company could use these funds for organic or inorganic expansion in any of its other key markets.

Taxi wars in India set to get fiercer.

09/08/2016

At the heart of the bitter, under-the-radar dispute between China’s online shopping powerhouse and Quixey, whose tech enables users to search within apps, is a culture clash — one that is emblematic of both the promises and the perils involved in Silicon ­Valley’s relationship with China.

The companies are happy to get cash infusions, but they can come with confusion, too.

08/08/2016

“I run incubated companies and also oversee all our investments globally. Being an entrepreneur keeps me exposed to the day-to-day realities of running a startup in India, and this really informs my investing style and evaluation of startups. On the other hand, being an investor also really informs my work and thinking as an entrepreneur.” says Anirudh Suri , Founding Partner, India Internet Fund

Incredibly excited to have , as speaker! Limited Seats Left!
Register here: https://goo.gl/h5gVkc
Ashish Jhalani

08/08/2016

Aside from a few relatively simple uses of the camera to position a Pokémon character in the environment, the main enabler of Pokémon Go is GPS positioning of the mobile device. In fact, Pokémon Go can be played without enabling the camera. Pokémon Go is geo-caching with better mechanics.

Pokémon Go, by Niantic Labs and Nintendo, has been a huge success so far, showing the potential for augmented reality gaming on mobile, GPS…

02/08/2016

Entrepreneurs have come to believe that more industries could be disrupted using Blockchain. There are plenty of business use cases for transactions that are verified and organized by a decentralized platform that requires no central supervision, even as it remains resistant to fraud.

Banking and payments aren't the only industries that could be affected by blockchain tech. Cybersecurity, music, and auto also could be transformed.

01/08/2016

While everyone wants to do what’s best for the lifeblood of the company. Employees who have vested their hard-earned options should not have to forfeit their stock simply because they don’t have the financial resources to exercise their options and pay the resulting taxes.

HR Recommendations for Startup Employee Option Plans by Scott Kupor career HR management compensation This post presents our current recommendation for how tech startups should structure employee stock incentive programs. I recently wrote a post about the potential issues associated with switching f...

27/07/2016

The reliance on notes and coins in India is likely to diminish, as spending habits change and financial services reach more people. Cash-based consumer payments are expected to fall to 40% to 45% by 2025.

Cash is set to lose currency in India, as an explosion in smartphone usage drives a digital payments boom, according to a new report.

26/07/2016

How did WeChat resolve their “chicken-egg problem” — getting more users or more merchants on both sides of the marketplace without there being critical mass on either side at first?

payments Money as Message How WeChat got users to adopt payments as a way to grow its network by Connie Chan China messaging payments marketplaces network effects credit: Connie Chan/ a16zNetwork effects — where a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it — are one…

22/07/2016

Research provider PwC predicts by 2019, about 800 million people in India will have access to e-payment platforms, and the adoption of e-payments is set to soar with the advent of Aadhaar. According to PwC estimates, mobile banking transactions tripled between 2012 and 2014, reaching 150 million in 2014.

It's betting on a changing habit

20/07/2016

Your onboarding process should be defined by one theme: Showing users exactly how valuable your product will be for them. What’s important for them to know to recognize this value? Put it front and center.

Sophie-Charlotte Moatti has built mobile products at one flagship name after another — including running notifications for Facebook. Here are her must haves for mobile apps.

18/07/2016

If you look at all aspects of the game loop — engagement, retention, virality and monetization — it nails pretty much everything on the head. Niantic managed to hit a very rare, exceptional home run on every textbook point of the game’s development.

If you haven't seen it already, you will soon when you are walking down the street. Every person you pass who is fervently looking at their phone is likely..

15/07/2016

While retaining control and leverage in the company are good reasons to bootstrap, there’s a much more compelling reason: there is no better way to develop the resourcefulness and resilience, the scrappiness, required for a founder to be able to grow with the company.

The virtues of bootstrapping explained.

15/07/2016

Our own personal thoughts and opinions don’t drive our choices as much as we think. Influence often works invisibly, but it can be understood and managed by increment. That may mean bringing a product to market as a blend of the futuristic and familiar or motivating others to perform better by benchmarking with their proximal peers.

Wharton professor and bestselling author Jonah Berger shines a light on the hidden forces that shape our behavior. Here he explains why it's best to influence — and be influenced — by increment.

12/07/2016

While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail.

The technical potential for automation differs dramatically across sectors and activities.

12/07/2016

Amazon is great at selling you what's on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it's not very good at showing you what's on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It's not so good at selling the mid-list - things that you didn't know existed, or didn't know you wanted, before you saw them.

As we all know, the internet changed how we chose what to read. It removed the old bundles and aggregation systems and created new ones, and those new systems result in different things being read in different amounts and from different kinds of publishers. It seems to me that much of this is going…

08/07/2016

Many startups understand the value of A/B testing as a tool to grow a product, but it’s also a built-in mechanism to better develop a product team. Universal A/B testing not only resolves the tension between different product manager types, but it also does so while giving them autonomy and acknowledgement of their personal style.

Instacart VP of Product Elliot Shmukler shares how he uses A/B testing as a management framework to not only accelerate product decisions, but also empower product teams.

07/07/2016

Startups usually have a group of passionate people pursuing a common objective. But if drive and passion are the key ingredients for a startups to taste success, why then do 90 percent of them fail?

Muhammad Ali was probably the most significant and celebrated sportsman of the 20th century, not because of his punches, but rather his timing. Good at ant

01/07/2016

In economics, higher risks are often associated with higher profits. Business leaders who accept difficult challenges view every one of them as an opportunity. They make efforts to convert risks into potential business concepts while losers prefer to take a U-turn.

It doesn't matter where you began; what's important is whether you’ve finalised the destination or not. In 1945, Sam Walton borrowed a sum of US$20,000 to

28/06/2016

The key to understanding why “social VR” will be important is to think about virtual (and augmented) reality as a computing platform, rather than as a PC peripheral for gaming. Looking at previous generations of computing platforms like the web or mobile, social networks have always proven to be one of the strongest drivers of adoption and engagement, making the underlying platforms vastly more valuable.

virtual & augmented reality Why Virtual Reality Will Be the Most Social Computing Platform Yet by Kyle Russell virtual & augmented reality full stack startups future of work new platforms & new mediums telepresence The future of immersive virtual reality is often depicted as a dystopian view of mill...

28/06/2016

First, companies bought into the false premise that they exist to maximize shareholder value – which said “keep the stock price high.” As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency. These metrics make it difficult for a company that wants to invest in long-term innovation.

In the 21st century it’s harder for large corporations to create disruptive breakthroughs. Disruptive innovations are coming from startups – Tesla for automobiles, Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotel …

23/06/2016

Meaningful exits of any kind in startups are rare. They often get reported when they occur, and there are so many startups and news sites to cover them, so it appears to be more common than they really are.

The first notification which caught my bleary eyes Monday morning — Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26 billion. Much has been written about why this may make sense for Microsoft. What’s less clear is: What motivated LinkedIn to take this path? I’ll attempt to answer this at the […]