For over five decades, Azim Hashim Premji has been one of the trailblazers of India Inc. Taking over his family business of vegetable oils at the young age of twenty-one after the untimely demise of his father, he built one of India's most successful software companies along with a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. As of 2019, he was the tenth richest person in India, with an estimated net worth of $7.2 billion. Yet, the one facet of the man which has overshadowed even his business achievements...
Nov 29, 2021•46 min
Few brands inspire the kind of devotion that an Enfield does. Its distinctive look and feel, the sound of its engine and the image that it creates of its rider have all contributed to putting the brand on the kind of pedestal that others could only dream of. But the story of how Royal Enfield became the brand it did today is filled with ups and downs, from its robust origins in the early 1950s to the rock bottom that was the 1980s to the lifestyle bike it is today trying to make a presence inter...
Nov 27, 2021•40 min
In 1956 at the Dartmouth workshop, the idea we’ve now come to know of as artificial intelligence was sown. John McCarthy of Dartmouth college named the field, Artificial Intelligence. After the initial excitement, the artificial intelligence winter set in. With the availability of large amounts of data and computing power, we’re seeing a revival in AI. Several fields are being transformed by artificial intelligence now. And that includes writing. A few months ago, I’d interviewed Paul Yacoubian,...
Aug 09, 2021•36 min
There is a saying that debt is often cheaper than equity. Our topic for today is venture debt, which has become mainstream in the Indian start-up ecosystem of late. In 2019-20, the total amounts raised by venture debt funds was about $62 million which jumped to about $85 million in 2020-21. As the pool of growth stage start-ups increase, it is fast becoming an attractive non-dilutive alternative to equity financing. Not just that. In many cases, it is a great additive to equity financing as a br...
Aug 03, 2021•52 min
Why this topic for this season’s first episode - A few days ago, one of my best friends from college got an offer from a Thrassio like set up to buy X% stake in her D2C company. Now she had bootstrapped and built this business from absolute zero to a multi-crore turnover company with ~30% margins on each sale! Yet she felt absolutely lost and helpless during the negotiations because she had no clue how pre-money and post-money valuations worked. As a builder and an operator, her primary skill se...
Jul 26, 2021•54 min
One of the most common things you hear in the world of startups is “We weren’t able to monetise.” The theme that often plays out is this - the team gets excited about an idea - they start working on it - they talk to customers and if everything works out, they build a great product with an obvious demand in the market. However, in this entire journey as engineers and product enthusiasts we first build the full product and then, almost as an afterthought, decide what to price it at and how to sel...
Apr 12, 2021•32 min
If you’re a data driven professional, in all likelihood this episode is for you. There are also some interesting analysis techniques I came across this week, that I thought I’d share. Check them out at the end of this email below !!! Do subscribe to the newsletter if such topics interest you! No Spam, ever! On the show today JPK and I got a chance to speak with Shripati Acharya , Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners on how to measure various SaaS Metrics and why valuations are a geometric ...
Mar 09, 2021•35 min
The importance of thinking in outcomes When Gaurav Munjal, the founder and CEO of Unacademy was pitching to Nexus, he was asked - how could a company offering video test prep solutions scale in a country with such poor internet bandwidth ( this was the pre Jio era )? He simply pointed the committee to the fact that the lessons were not a video - they were instead a slide deck with a pointer made to look like a video! He could have switched on mumbo jumbo mode and talked about fancy compression a...
Feb 08, 2021•32 min
Byrne Hobart called it “the Vegas Wedding Chapel of liquidity events” - quick and easy. One of the hottest trends of 2020 among late stage tech companies was to go public via a SPAC or Special Purpose Acquisition Company. SPACs are essentially blank cheque companies set up and listed with the sole purpose of merging and taking another company public in the next 2 years or so. This episode however is much more than just about SPACs. For anyone interested in Venture Capital, growth investing and t...
Jan 25, 2021•34 min
Why are Amazon, Reliance, Walmart backed Flipkart, and several others competing for a piece of the action in online grocery retailing? Consider some numbers from Redseer: ⚡️Grocery is expected to be a $790 billion market by 2024. Of this, online grocery is expected to be around $18.2 billion. ⚡️ The market, currently around $603 billion in size, is dominated by traditional retail (95.7%). ⚡️Only 0.3 % of the market is served by online retail and 4% is served by modern retail. The remaining is st...
Jan 13, 2021•43 min
Did you know that in 2020 on an incremental basis, more deposits went to private banks in India instead of Public Sector Banks for the first time in history? What is happening to the bad loan mess and NPAs that Indian banks have been forced to deal with by the RBI? Is the worst over? Forced by the rapid pace of technology, can India’s gigantic banking system rapidly evolve to meet the consumer demands? What’s stopping them? In this episode, we’re joined by Tamal Bandhopadhyay to get answers to a...
Jan 04, 2021•25 min
W elcome to yet another episode of The Use Case Podcast. I hope you've started thinking about your new year’s resolutions because if you are then you've got to listen to today's show. Believe me, it's going to change how you think about money. Our guest today is Monika Halan, the author of the best-selling book Let's Talk Money , published by Harper Collins in 2018. Monika has worked across several media organizations in India and has run many successful TV shows around personal finance in NDTV,...
Dec 28, 2020•47 min
There are very few VCs in India who have seen more than 2 Venture Capital cycles play out. Then there are those select few who have raised more than 3 funds. And then there are even fewer those who have seen their portfolio companies go all the way and IPO. Then there are the likes of Rahul Chandra who have started not one but 2 VC firms over the years apart from investing in some mega startups like MakeMyTrip and Bigbasket and companies that went all the way to do stellar IPOs like the micro fi...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 12 min
There’s no template to success. That’s for sure. But, there are traits. In this episode Chris Saad, who was previously the Head of Product for Uber Developer Platform and is presently a strategic advisor to several startups joins us to share his learnings on what leadership characteristics set our favourite CXOs apart. Chris fundamentally believes that leaders look at the world in a special way. In the episode he shares concise, pragmatic insights into how leaders think and act - their lens; and...
Dec 14, 2020•47 min
I was on my way back from a long day at work a few months ago. Went straight to bed. The next morning was busy. The day after too. And it was only a few days later that I noticed that my wallet has been missing. All these days, I did not really have to take out my wallet. Almost everyone, from the grocer to the vegetable vendor accepts mobile payments in Bangalore. But then I had to fly out a few days later to Chennai and I started to panic. How will I enter the airport without an identification...
Dec 07, 2020•38 min
Vikrama Dhiman is presently the Head of Mobility Products at Gojek and has been a builder for more than a decade across firms like Bharti Softbank, WizIQ, and Zeta- a Directi company. Vikrama says that having such becoming a Product Leader today has come at the expense of making several mistakes. He’s grown from making them, and gained an almost anticipatory sixth sense in prioritizing and responding to challenges - a critical skill for all founders, PMs and builders alike. Here’s what we talk a...
Nov 17, 2020•28 min
On this podcast in the past, we’ve talked about product-market fit, minimum viable product, jobs to be done, lean startup model, blitz scaling and several other ways startup founders approach company building. In today’s episode, Dr Ajay Sethi , venture partner at Accel talks about a new way of looking at startup building. He calls it the engagement centric model. The model tells you when the lean startup or minimum viable product just doesn’t work. In fact, it offers an improved framework to un...
Oct 26, 2020•49 min
Let’s be honest. The title is every bit deceiving. Yet, there’s truth in it. It is true because this conversation with Vindhya captures so much of what building a product for India and being a Product Manager is about. It is deceptive because hidden within it are so many elements that are relevant even if you’re not a product manager. For example, the transcript below is from a part of the episode that touched upon user privacy. It’s got 1) an interesting book recommendation, 2) some masala as t...
Oct 19, 2020•52 min
It’s not often you meet old friends and take a trip down the memory lane and wind up with a podcast decent enough (I think) for other people to listen to. I caught up with Vineet Devaiah , the co-founder of Teliportme (10 mn + downloads on Play Store) after long and had a fun talk about venture capital, startups and we even talked about GPT3, a la hype cycles. The last we met, was at the Indian Coffee House (not the one on Church Street) in Bengaluru. We were both at the crossroads. I was about ...
Aug 17, 2020•49 min
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather… …You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtain...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Some weeks ago, I asked on Twitter who are the best product managers I should have on the show. And many people said we should have Taruna Manchanda, now at LinkedIn talk about her experience. We finally made that episode happen. If you enjoyed listening to our episodes with Mona Gandhi, founder of Upraised ; Disha Chhabra, product manager at Google , and several other product managers we’ve had on the show, you’ll definitely enjoy this. Taruna has some practical advice gleaned from 4+ years of ...
Jul 28, 2020•51 min
The job of the Venture Capitalist, as has been mentioned on the show before, is in many ways to predict change and place bets that are likely to give returns. However, for an impact investor, it’s not just about predicting change but also about creating change. Bharath Visweswariah , Director of Investments at Omidyar Network is one such investor who has, by way of placing strong bets like The Ken and Newslaundry, definitely lead the frontiers to sectoral change from the forefront. After a succe...
Jul 20, 2020•37 min
We’ve been talking to some of the best product folks ever since we began this podcast. We had Deepak Abbot’s masterclass on products some time ago. Then we had Nir Eyal , Anshumani Ruddra , Sidu Ponnappa , and Mona Gandhi on the show. They all gave us a deeper understanding of what goes into building great products. Today on the Use Case podcast we have Disha Chhabra, currently a product manager at Google. In today’s episode, we talk about the importance of writing and managing stakeholder expec...
Jun 22, 2020•39 min
🔥🔥🔥 BANGER EPISODE ALERT! 🔥🔥🔥 The story goes that Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming was super inspired by Steve Jobs. So much so that the name Bytedance was derived from Jobs’ philosophy for matching technology (byte) with art (dance). Rui Ma, who is one of THE MOST RESPECTED voices on tech in China, and the host of the popular Techbuzz China podcast, doesn’t buy that fully. But then again, no one today claims to believe everything that is said by startup PR teams- except maybe the founders t...
Jun 13, 2020•1 hr 21 min
It seems surreal but we’re almost five months into 2020 already. Feels like the world, in a hurry, decided to borrow chapters from a dystopian novel. I’ve been worried about several things including the Covid19 pandemic. But I’ve also tried keeping busy during the lockdown. The book that I signed up with Harper Collins is almost complete. I’ve sent in the first draft. But I’m not celebrating yet. As Kevin Kelly says : When you are 90% done any large project the rest of the myriad details will ta...
Jun 01, 2020•52 min
The art of building big brands in an Indian context We’re here with yet another episode of the Use Case podcast. And this time we have with us Meeta Malhotra , the founder of The Hard Copy , a magazine that focuses on design, growth, and innovation in India. Meeta started her career with Infosys and was one of the partners at the famous brand design consultancy, Ray and Keshavan. Over the years, she's played a huge role in shaping several brands that you see today like Airtel, Kotak Bank, Mother...
May 25, 2020•32 min
What would have happened if Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Sairee Chahal had decided to get the license for starting Facebook in India back when it was just a college network? We wouldn’t have had two of India’s most successful startups - Paytm and Sheroes. Sairee Chahal is one of the kindest, most accomplished and successful founders who has managed to build a women’s only social network in India, Sheroes which boasts of over 15 million users. In this episode, she lays out the principles of building ...
May 11, 2020•22 min
I’m super thrilled to finally release this podcast with Nir Eyal on how you can become indistractable and reclaim your life. I read his first book Hooked: How to build habit-forming products , a couple of years ago. And ever since then I’ve followed his work. Nir’s second book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life deals with a topic that is very close to my heart. If you’ve followed this newsletter, you know that I’ve struggled with distractions all my life. This new...
Apr 27, 2020•44 min
I don’t say this lightly - this is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes on the Use Case podcast, and not one to miss! 'Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters' - Niall Ferguson begins the The Ascent of Money, a beast of a book on the world’s financial history, with this sentence. Regardless of who we are or what we do, we are constantly impacted by, IMO the best human invention since fire - money. Gaurav Sharma , has over ...
Apr 20, 2020•53 min
Sometime back while travelling in Beijing, I took this picture: The picture is a perfect tool to visualise the experiment that Anindya Ghose , who is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Director of its Masters of Business Analytics Program , and his team conducted across various cities in China. In the field experiment, they sent out ~14k mobile coupons across to ~10k users. They then tested if commuters were more likely to respond to those coupo...
Apr 13, 2020•33 min
