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A Reply To HSBC & Media From Deepinder Goyal (Founder of Zomato)

9May By No Comments

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A Reply To HSBC & Media From Deepinder Goyal (Founder of Zomato)

An HSBC analyst report marked down our valuation from $1b to $500m. For starters, this is very different from all the markdowns so far where investors have marked down their own investments. But given all the media reports, I got a lot of questions from people at Zomato about what’s going on. Here’s an email I sent to everybody at Zomato (2100 people currently across the world) to allay their concerns and answer their questions. Read on. Hello all, You must have woken up today to Google Alerts with mentions of Zomato’s valuation being marked down by HSBC. As you already know, the media is all over it, and we are trending on Twitter. Since the report isn’t public, and we all get troubled by where we are and where we are heading, here’s some context and detail around the HSBC ...

Problem & Solution of India’s Next Unicorn

23Apr By No Comments

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Problem & Solution of India’s Next Unicorn

Recent Global News Highlights Report: TutorGroup, a Shanghai-based online language learning provider, raised nearly $200M in Series C round, led by Singaporean sovereign fund, GIC and Goldman Sachs bringing its valuation to over $1B Varsity Tutors, an online platform connecting students with tutors for in-person and online sessions, raised $50M in Series B round led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Instructure, a cloud-based learning management system provider, went public on 13 Dec, 2015. Apple acquired Education Startup LearnSprout Is EdTech today an increasingly attractive business for venture funding? According to Tracxn global EdTech report (Mar 2016), over $9.9B has been invested in the sector in the last 10 years with more than one third of the amount invested ...

When We Trended on Twitter By Spending Rs. 200!

13Apr By No Comments

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When We Trended on Twitter By Spending Rs. 200!

I suffer from all sorts of mania — often conflicting, always annoying for others: Chai-o-mania: drinking chai to the point that my stomach cries of acidity. Fitbit-o-mania: completing my daily 8k steps even if that means that I have to run clumsily at 11:45 pm on my arguably fragile terrace. Passion-o-mania: keep talking about that one idea so passionately that everyone around me starts believing in it. List-o-mania: writing everything in the form of lists. And the list goes on! Some maniacs are short-lived, some last for a few months and some have been there since forever. One such mania is my obsession with lists and striking off an item from the list is my equivalent to the big O. So, it is only right if I say that the bucket list of our one-year-...

The Story Behind Siri and The Man Who Made Her

3Apr By NitishNo Comments

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The Story Behind Siri and The Man Who Made Her

“If I were to anthropomorphize Siri, I would imagine that it would think of me somewhat like a father: someone who wants the best for them, who teaches them, who is occasionally demanding, annoying, or embarrassing, but who loves them and is proud when they do well.” A pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Adam Cheyer has spent most of his life living by what he calls “Verbally Stated Goals” — that is, continuously striving to do and achieve more each year. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a magician and, in many ways, he did just that: in 2008, as inventor, computer scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur, he co-created the world’s first intelligent personal assistant, Siri, with Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber. Siri, Inc. was a technology company borne out of SRI International, a nonpro...

Decoding: Word of Mouth Publicity of Indian Candy “Pulse”

5Mar By NitishNo Comments

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Decoding: Word of Mouth Publicity of Indian Candy “Pulse”

Pulse, Pulse, Pulse - This candy has become the savior to the Indian small businesses and " oh, wow What is this " ? to the people who have ever popped this light green candy in their mouth. But Why have people gone bat-shit crazy about it? The best way to describe it, is by breaking the Pulse Journey into the mouth in 4 stages. ( as already explained in some of the below answers ) : Stage I - Sensational Kacchaa Aam Flavor Stage II - Slow emergence of the powder (which happens to be in between the candy) into your mouth Stage III - Phenomenal burst of Amchur into your mouth. Stage IV - Sweet taste when you reach the end of the candy. Now, Let's go in deep (in ascending order ) of what Pulse have included in this candy which has rocked few mout...

Here’s What LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Said After Stock Loses 40% of Its Value

13Feb By No Comments

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Here’s What LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Said After Stock Loses 40% of Its Value

In case you haven’t been paying attention, many tech stocks are under serious pressure. LinkedIn, where I have been an executive for nearly six years, is one of those companies, having lost more than 40% of our value after announcing our 2015 earnings and guidance for 2016 last Thursday. As you can imagine, this has the potential to cause angst and churn, both internally and externally, and over the last week, I’ve been fascinated by the varied reactions of people, both inside and outside the company, with whom I’ve interacted: indignant, perplexed, resilient, full of pity, inspired and shell-shocked. When something like this happens at a company, you can witness very extreme, and often negative, reactions from people like the CEO and CFO, who can get into a blame game and create a c...

A Study Explains Why Rich and Successful People are Often Dishonest

7Feb By No Comments

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A Study Explains Why Rich and Successful People are Often Dishonest

Let's face it, we've all been wondering why so many rich, successful, powerful people are cheating, lying, disgraces. Is it that only unethical people make it to the top? At least one study indicates that this is not the case-it's that winning itself makes people behave unethically. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just published a study that does not bode well for humanity's future. Scientists at Ben-Gurion University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem had participants in a psychological study participate in a series of games, the first of which determined a "winner," and the second of which let that winner decide how much money they could award themselves. They found that competition winners cheated, awarding themselves more money than they deserved. The games all ...

Lessons from 2015 – Deepinder Goyal, Founder of Zomato

31Jan By NitishNo Comments

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Lessons from 2015 – Deepinder Goyal, Founder of Zomato

“The rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield” –Warren Buffet 2015 was truly our year of learning. We learned while doing things we had been doing for a while, and we learned while venturing into uncharted, unfamiliar territory. At the turn of the year, as we always do, we paused to take stock of what we’d learned from the year gone by. Here are our key takeaways from 2015 – Don’t scale too fast. We scaled massively in 2015, starting with acquiring Urbanspoon, which gave us a canvas 3x larger than we had before. We were rapidly launching operations in new geographies and setting up new businesses. Suddenly having that many new competitors in new markets meant everything had to become an equal priority. When you do that, you spread yourself thinner than you want t...

From Flatchat to Unacademy to Convincing an IAS to Quit his job – Gaurav Munjal’s Story

11Jan By No Comments

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From Flatchat to Unacademy to Convincing an IAS to Quit his job – Gaurav Munjal’s Story

(The article was written by Gaurav Munjal in November 2015) As I look back at the journey of Flat.to, and now Flatchat, I remember my college days when a broker would give me 10% commission for every friend I referred to him. Soon we ended up creating a small platform for students to help them find accommodation in Juhu and Andheri. Then magic started to happen, a few months later I met Aakrit Vaish who came to give a guest talk at my college and he immediately offered me funding. I didn’t take it, because at that point of time according to everyone else leaving Directi’s offer would have been stupid. In retrospect, one year of Directi was an experience I kind of needed because it helped me a lot in the way I have done things in the companies I started. But then one year later I did ...

How To Hijack a Conference- Alok Kejriwal

7Jan By RishabhNo Comments

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How To Hijack a Conference- Alok Kejriwal

Everyone of us must have attended many conferences. Much of us must’ve spoken a several times on stage and have fallen for anxiety. It happens to most of us. It is not an easy task to convince the audience or the judges to believe in your ideas or plans, or most importantly believe in you! // How to hijack a conferenceA trick I've shared in my blogs always delivers. It's about going to a conference, sitting... Posted by Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal on Wednesday, January 6, 2016 We often wonder how to imply our knowledge or confidence to leverage out of them the most. Alok Kejriwal recently shared such his experience over a Facebook post. He seems to have mastered his trick and also has a proof for it. For those who have a little knowledge about the Business world, Alo...

The real reason why 500 people lost their job at FoodPanda

5Jan By No Comments

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The real reason why 500 people lost their job at FoodPanda

After Zomato and TinyOwl, FoodPanda India has announced that it is laying off over 500 employees - What's going wrong here? FoodPanda is a known name in the Indian food ordering business - presence in all top cities and most restaurants seem to be covered by them - they announced lay off's today and the unofficial number of people fired stands around 500. So what exactly is going wrong here? Is there something wrong in the food delivery business model in India (given the recent lay off's at TinyOwl and Zomato)? Or is this is bigger phenomenon of the start-up ecosystem itself? Let's look a bit deeper into this issue. Why suddenly grow from 180 people to 1,200 in 10 months and then fire 500 people? According to to official statement of FoodPanda, they rapidly grew from 180 people in Febru...

There is Something Extraordinary Happening in The World

29Dec By No Comments

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There is Something Extraordinary Happening in The World

Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening. A few months ago I freed myself from standard-procedure society, I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. Since then, I see the world from a different perspective: the one that everything is going through change and that most of us are unware of that. Why is the world changing? In this post I’ll point out the 8 reasons that lead me to believe it. 1- No one can stand the employment model any longer We are reaching our limits. People working with big corporations can’t stand their jobs. The lack of purpose knocks on your door as if it came from inside you like a yell of despair. People want out. They want to drop everything. Take a look on how many people are willing to risk entre...