Growth And Strategy

Innovation is proportional to the brands on their trousers

Growth Manager

I think the VR headset is innovative though

Product Manager

Innovation

Founder

Innovation- Grapevine

When will the start retailing Coke Zero?

Inflation free industry

Product Innovation at work

Business Analyst

Welcome to Gadgets & Apps's Private Community

Top class innovation

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

According to Serial "failure" entrepreneur claims startups should only "play the gap" and not do innovation. 🍇🍇 Thoughts

Innovation or lining your own pockets

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

Lately, I have been thinking very deeply about my college days when the Flipkart story had inspired the entire lot of my batch at IIT-D. We were starry eyed college kids who wanted to do something innovative in India and break away from the "three" most popular moves after IIT:

1. UPSC
2. MBA
3. MS/PhD abroad

I proceeded to then work in various Indian startups and noticed an alarming thing. I began to realise a pattern across all my stints:

The initial founding team does exceptional work innovating, they excel at what Thiel calls "Zero to One", the act of creation. I will concede that although most founders fail to innovate by often copying what worked in the west but the initial founding team usually excels in execution. It allows for initial traction as it breathes a fresh breath in the\ space that they are operating in.

Almost always, when Product Market Fit is "achieved"(whatever that means), the founders begin to deploy insane amounts of funds into growth. 

By definition, Growth is not a bad thing. But, I have been noticing that across all startups I have worked at( all raised funds from the largest global funds) that it comes at the expense of product building. And during this era of hypergrowth, the product starts to stagnate while focus becomes marketing and sales. 

I often felt that this was temporary. That once we reach enough scale, we would start to innovate again. 
But time and time again, the ability to innovate atrophies over time.
Rather than building something that has enduring value by executing faster than anyone, the focus becomes achieving growth at all costs. 

This ultimately leads to two outcomes:
1. The startup cannot sustain this growth and retention begins to look dire. The churn becomes unbearable and the startup goes out of business.

2. The startup gets acquired by someone bigger, allowing founders and investors to believe that they created value where none existed in the first place.

I am completely dejected at this.

The Death of Indian Innovation: Why Indian Start Ups are failing to Innovate?

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

Saw a college chick that was a big proponent of "smashing capitalism" and installing a marxist/communist system. It got me thinking why do people hate capitalism? First thing that's interesting is that people don't know what capitalism is. Discuss what it is, as it seems to be hotly debated on its beginning, etc.

To start, the Wikipedia page is wrong on the definition of capitalism. It describes it through the lens of Marxism and calls it an economic system.

Capitalism more so resembles a social system based on individual rights.

The economic system under capitalism that advocates for private industry and production, would be the free market economy. 

Adam Smith described capitalism using the emergence of the division of labor:
"Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society. "

The people who understand the practicality of life, know they must develop some ability to produce something that may lead to a valuable and exchangeable surplus that can be traded on the market.

Capitalism is social and natural while the economic system must be reflected in the private and individual institutions that allow for the free exchange of goods.

Why do people hate capitalism?

What Is Capitalism, When Did It Start, Or Is It Natural?

Software Developer

“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?” -Robert J. Gordon Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the &#…

The hierarchy of innovation

Two months ago I posted this rant on Grapevine (https://share.gvine.app/CLkpBuEqcCvrzKvx6) which I think is one of the most viral posts on the platform.

Since then I took a break, learned Vipassana, went to the mountains, read, and reflected. Here are some truth bombs that have been exploding in my head

1) There is a leadership crisis

Is it me or do today's self-proclaimed leaders just suck? Look around Grapevine: insecure toxic managers forcing people back to the office, overhiring CEOs who don't know WTF to do, and founders just abandoning ship. 

"Leaders" and founders today are about as disconnected from reality as the political class, because like politicians most of them are privileged, sheltered, and already wealthy.

2) Technological innovation doesn't mean progress. 

I couldn't laugh harder when I saw the Indus Valley report basically saying that maybe all of us VCs overestimated how much money we could make funding lending and consumer apps. 

Maybe funding lending apps that "open up credit for the poor" isn't sustainable when the rate of interest is >18%?

Technological innovation doesn't always mean real-world progress. A lot of times, it just ends up perpetuating and amplifying pre-existing inequality. 

3) Endless growth toward nothing 

Most of India's startup money comes from the West. Most of that money was just printed to repeatedly get out of an economic crisis. That's it. There was no great vision to fund the future of humanity behind all this new capital. Just Central Bankers and Presidents pressing the "Create Money" button to delay the inevitable.

Most of us here owe our wealth to Easy Money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpMLAQbSYAw

PS: A book, that completely flipped my worldview during this time is this: https://www.amazon.in/Debt-First-Years-David-Graeber/dp/0143422715. I urge all fellow foot soldiers of capitalism to read this.

Until the next rant, stay sane, safe, and debt-free!

Follow-up to the most liked Grapevine post ever

Product Marketing Manager

Welcome to Business Roles's Private Community

Any industry, any product or service. Something that you've seen happening in India.

I'll start with one : Fogg appealing to the mass market by marketing their value for money products (x number of sprays), literally beating axe out of market share in 3 years.

What's an innovative growth/marketing strategy you've come across?

Product Owner

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

I'll go first,

1. Paying fair wages
2. Ensuring work life balance + providing support 
3. Diversifying hiring from various backgrounds
4. Investing in learning and development

What other things do you think can be done?

Since there is so much talk about Indian companies, innovation and it's lack thereof, what do you think workplaces can do to make them more conducive to bringing in more innovation?

Welcome to Fintech India's Private Community

What is the most exciting fintech innovation you've seen in India recently?

Which are the most innovative companies to work with in india.

I'm okay to put in extra hours if the company has the right mission and vision.

Innovative companies

Business Development Manager

I have noticed that the best people from my college got into FAANGMULA companies and ultimately trashed their mind while making great money. Their tech development has literally grown slower than living in a buddhist monastery. Their stunted learning is a strict reminder of how people get trashed into bad engineers with good money. Ultimately you can't even switch companies because no one will hire you at your ZIRP salary while you can't even be 20% of your CTC in terms of productivity.

Do you also hate how FAANG transforms smart people into trash engineers?

Remember the time when we were surrounded by 5-6 startups making waves every day? They were the talk of the town, with incredible growth, innovative offerings, massive hirings, and funding galore. We couldn't stop discussing their latest feats!

But lately, it feels like a different era, with a cloud of negativity casting a shadow. 

Dear Indian startup ecosystem, you have a history of miracles and game-changing moments. We believe in your potential to inspire, innovate, and motivate the youth. Let's bring back that magic and remind everyone why we're at the forefront of global innovation. 🇮🇳💡

It's time for something great, something remarkable. Let's reignite the spark and make headlines for all the right reasons!

Kuch machao yaar, it's getting boring :)

Welcome to Software Engineers's Private Community

First of all that event with sam altman was embarrassing. The aftermath was even more embarassing, leading the embarrassment squad was https://twitter.com/C_P_Gurnani/status/1667140990413537284?t=dei0Qm2UKg8SZNb4fHEAmA&s=19 

Dude accepted the challenge while paying his engineers 2.5LPA, running a service based company. After this he wants to compete with a proper product. 

His following tweets are just BS inspirational quotes and generic tweet about ramping investment in R&D. But how are you going to compete with open ai? Nothing has been said.


As Indians we have a very big ego, instead of accepting something as feedback why do we always go all out and try to match the other person by words and not action. Then these leaders will go and say action matters a lot more than words.

Admittedly, Sam didn't even mean that indian companies are hopeless. It's just that with 10M he said it's hopeless to compete on foundational models of open ai.


We don't have a tech leader or an ecosystem where we can say that we can take on open ai. We don't even have a global product that competes with big tech. So why are we full of anger if somebody points out a fact.

In comments, can we discuss a solution to the tech ecosystem being shit so we build the foundation on which we can eventually compete on a global level?

Embarrassed with our CEOs

Software Engineer

Welcome to Company Reviews's Private Community

Please describe the work culture and benefits , how is the company management ? 

If you don’t know what is verse innovations - it’s a parent company of Daily Hunt , Josh and few more .

How is verse innovations as a company ?

Can be GMV, revenue, users, EBITDA, customer satisfaction etc. 
Curious to know what are things people here have seen 👀

Innovative ways you've seen a company/startup pump up their metrics?

An Indian social app (not koo or sharechat) hired a guy who would go on different groups in the app and write “jai shri ram”. He will get about 40 replies saying the same. They said startup claimed high engagement and retention with this tactic

Analyst

At Nexus(our startup), we're passionate about revolutionizing the way people invest in Stocks and crypto. But as any startup founder can attest, the path to success is often filled with obstacles.

Recently, we encountered a significant roadblock in our quest for funding. A potential investor turned us down, citing that hit us hard: we didn't have a fully functioning MVP.

Now, you might be wondering, what exactly our MVP was showing? Well it wasn't the flashy trading platform we dream of. Instead it considered a basic interface with stock prices displayed here and there. The cold reality is that users couldn't buy or sell any assets, nor could they access other advanced features. Why, you ask ?

The answer lies in the complex regulatory landscape of the financial industry. To facilitate the trading functionality, a platform must obtain a SEBI license. This license requires rigorous compliance with financial regulations, and crucially proof of "financial backing". 

Investors won't understand that we need a significant amount of funding to take off. Without it, we'd be swimming in the shallow waters.

Navigating the tough terrain of startup funding: the MVP dilemma

Hi all,
I graduated from IIT Delhi and have been working at well established startup since. 
So for a while I have been wondering why we don't have any deep tech startups doing innovation. Don't get me wrong, there are startups doing innovations but not the kind of innovation which we would call industry shattering or taking the level up a notch. Most of these innovations are just integrating what others are doing in an aggregated platform. I again wondered this today when I saw cognition launching Devin the AI software engineer. They have a pretty small yet highly talented team. 
We in India too have highly intelligent folks educating themselves in CS, why don't we have this mindset (even I don't have this mindset). 
Is it about the difference in culture or a sense of security that folks in the US have that helps them be free from an economic point of view and try innovative things ?

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