Business and Markets

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Startup India: Government’s role is to help build a start-up culture, not a start-up itself

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Source: Governance Now;
Illustration: Ashish Asthana
Start-ups thrive best on innovation—that free-wheeling creativity which strives for value creation and doesn’t put monetization first. The core guiding principle of start-ups is: Create value; money will follow.

Let’s acknowledge it—the birthplace of start-ups as we know them today is the Silicon Valley, and the norm for a start-up there is to focus on innovation, not on monetization, at least during the build-up process. The entrepreneurial norm in India has traditionally been the reverse—to do the monetization bit first and then build things up. (That start-ups become greedy when they grow into corporations is a subject for another discussion some other time.)

There is a need to build a start-up culture as opposed to the profit-making culture that exists in today’s business environment. There should be a focus on IP creation, and solving India’s real problems—not only growth problems faced by the businesses and industries but also the economic, social and environmental issues facing the people at large.

To read more, click here....

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Seven wonders of a resurgent Google world

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Source: David Ball - www.davidball.net
Google’s holding company Alphabet just confirmed yet another one-billion-users service under its hood—Gmail. The other six Google services to have already achieved one billion users or more are Search, Chrome, Android, Google Play, Maps, and YouTube. 

That’s not all the good news for Google and its investors—its fourth-quarter earnings seem to have surprised them rather pleasantly, while beating consensus analyst estimates by a notch.

Moreover, Google’s upbeat results happen to come at a time when the hitherto darling of tech markets—Apple—has been taking some beating at the bourses after its quarterly results, despite clocking record profits by any company ever. The Cupertino-based iPhone maker has seen slowing iPhone sales and also warned revenues would fall next quarter, for the first time since 2007.

On the contrary, Google continues to show growth in revenue and profits, though its net income for the quarter at $4.92 billion is nearly one-fourth of Apple’s whopping $18.4 billion.

The news sent Alphabet shares up, which is still listed as GOOG on Nasdaq, by as much as five percent at the time of writing this post. That enabled the GOOG stock to surpass Apple’s AAPL in market capitalization for the first time since 2010, making Alphabet the world’s most valuable company in the process.


Google’s Alpha bets seem to be paying off well indeed!

Thursday, June 18, 2015

So, is there really no tech bubble at work?

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This VC firm has posted quite interesting and compelling arguments to counter the perception that VCs may be falling for another tech bubble.
I'm yet to come across data points that could effectively challenge these slides. Have you? Do share your comments. 
Here's the link to the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state-of-49390473