Well Starbucks is currently caught up in the middle eastern conflict which more or less is a reason for their bad quarter.

Yup, a lot of people in US are currently boycotting Starbucks for its support of Israel

Staff Engineer

Recruiter

Trying too much too soon is a problem with young Indian businesses, just too restless. They want sales to pour in instantly, hire someone to 100x growth in a month, become "like Zerodha" in next 5 years (even Zerodha took longer) 
 Everyone wants to IPO, don't understand what's the fashion. They don't see the downside of these.

Consultant

That which will sustain its value proposition will survive. What u describe is normal in a growing economy.

Software Engineer

Sometimes I feel, Indian businesses are trying to do too many things at the same time. Will scaling be possible? RIL is the only example, but it keeps killing its branches.

Management guru - Howard Schultz!

Product Manager

Management guru - Howard Schultz!- Grapevine

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

Load of crap

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

- Packaged food brands in India struggle to scale beyond 100Cr in revenue, unlike other sectors like personal care and apparel.
- The core issue is low gross margins (GM), with food averaging 40% compared to 70-90% in other industries.
- Consumers are willing to pay a premium for products that enhance their appearance or status, but not for packaged food.
- Packaged food lacks the visibility and instant gratification that products like skincare and apparel offer.
- Despite these challenges, some entrepreneurs continue to build packaged food businesses, driven by passion and a sense of purpose. 

 Source: [Shashank Mehta- The Whole Truth Foods](https://substack.com/home/post/p-147808988)

Why Packaged Food Startups Struggle to Scale

Journalist

Which are the companies that never did a layoff?

Senior Software Engineer

Product Designer

Do you guys agree with the list? Anymore candidates

Dead 11

Oyo was the only Indian startup who had defined a  India specific problem, had a solution and had money to scale. What went wrong? What a pity. 
  
 In comparison Airbnb made it big...

Project Manager

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

This is a big big number

Software Developer

If flipkart , despite being the flagbearer of Indian startup success story, is far far away from real profitability ( not falana dhimkana adjusted) even after 16 years of its operation, it says a lot about Indian startup ecosystem

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/mensa-brands-fires-200-employees-as-business-shows-signs-of-slowdown-10699211.html

Mensa brands fires 200 employees

Hi all smart folks out there, I have been wondering for so long as to why did Indmoney's growth stagnate?  They were the first one to launch a comprehensive financial tool and had a freemium model for Advisory. 


What all have been the reasons? And if you used to be a user of the app, what made you stop using it?

Why INDmoney stagnated?

Product Owner

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

A quick search on LinkedIn shows there are so many senior leaders for product management at Hotstar. Feels like even more than engineers. What are they building that they need so many senior folks. Also they are still hiring! With Reliance takeover on the cards, I wonder if there are massive layoffs coming up. I hope not.

Why does Hotstar need so many PMs?

From the rumor mill: Wakefit might fire 70%-80% employees

Founder

1. Migrating PhonePe to India 1B $ in useless tax

2. Like that stupid separation of PhonePe from Flipkart ~0.7B $

3. Now this 3.5B$ just to increase its stake when it was already a majority owner! What's going on?

Why does Walmart keep pumping soo much money even with unnecessary things with Flipkart?

Maybe, 
  
 Taking on Reliance retail and Amazon in India? 
 Tech infra for Walmart (random guess)  
 100% or ownership yields absolute power

Data engineer

Apparently this company is planning to go head to head against openai and Google as an AI chat app using India's data resources. What do you all think about this?

Krutrim - Bhavish Aggarwal's  new venture

I don’t understand what the point really was 

- companies with a bad product are still struggling 
- companies with a good product are still growing
- rent in Bangalore, Mumbai is still sky high 
- salaries are still high, people are still asking for more 
- food is expensive as ever 
- stock prices of companies that fired people never really went up 

Someone make any sense or any of this?

Layoffs were a total failure at changing anything

Analyst

I work as a Product manager at a series A well funded startup.
This company is run by a solo founder/CEO.

This is a wannabe tech and product startup that does not care about their product at all. The internal review meetings get 5 minutes on product and 55 minutes on business and operations on a good day!

All they care about is how to run operations and tech just works on automation instead of building the product for the end user. Every OKR cycle runs for two months where OKRs are set for product but we end up building internal tools because things get "re-prioritised" and operations "can not miss targets".

The worst part is that the strategy changes every 2 months and every week, the CEO keeps adding new "wants". Almost like a baby seeing shiny new toys.
At this stage, the product has become a mess with no identity at all!

This baby always says "But is that even do-able" acts critical and tries to seem smart in front of their employees while lying to the investors and board every other week that we are a tech and product company.

I don't know if this happens at other startups in India. 

Would love to hear what y'all have experienced.

Identifying a Baby founder

You sound like a tech bro, who thinks that only tech runs the world. Huge companies like Tata, reliance etc are built on solid operations and business insights.  
  
 Tech is enabler, if the founder is smart with business and operations, most likely he will make a good business, and unless you start valuing things beyond tech also, you will keep hopping jobs and cribbing why people don’t value you.

Senior Product Manager

While I'm proud of these two revolutionising the quick commerce space, I somehow have a bad feeling about this

Profits aren't coming, money is flowing
Don't know what the VCs are seeking?
Why bake a a pie that you can't eat later?

Too much money too soon, where have we seen that?

Waycool is undergoing organisational restructuring, following the footsteps of UDAAN, don’t see any turning point due to the lay offs. One of the worst planned companies I’ve worked for in my 8 YOE.

Lay off at Waycool foods and products!! 300 already laid off as of now.

Sales Manager

I love to read about tech and how startups evolved. Have spent a lot of time figuring out how the good product companies in the US got built: Google, FB, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest etc. etc. 

One thing stands out: A lot of these started out as just projects, and not a real startup. 
Instagram was just an idea to make photo filtering better. Reddit was just a project around making a cooler internet.

They set off as projects, and got some traction before becoming funded startups. Because they had devs in the founding team, who were always doing projects as side hustles. 

This wasn't the time when SDE salaries were so pumped up, they didn't want to just become good devs, they probably wanted to solve real problems. 

My takeaway: 

Maybe Engineers shouldn’t be too incentivised to just code. They should be incentivised to think business. 
Thats how FB, Google, Insta etc happened as companies.

In India, high pay endears engineers to stick to coding, do less business thinking.
That’s why we don’t see too many coders posting their side projects on X, Reddit, GV within India. Maybe there just aren’t enough. 

Have just been thinking about this. 

Open to thoughts from the community - maybe my view is limited. Would love to hear.

Why Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley, and why that will likely not happen in India

This is an actually very true. 
  
 I’ve seen developers who are very good in the stuff they do but lack the thinking from a customer / business POV. They take the PRD and convert it into code but never ever question whether this is the experience they want to provide to the end user.  
  
 Everyone needs to understand code is a way to achieve business and to achieve business , you would need to think from a business prospective. 
  
 That’s why , I always tell my juniors whenever they code , always take a step back and put yourself in the customer shoes and think what you are doing is what you want as a customer or not

Corporate Strategist

https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/flipkart-india-logs-9-revenue-growth-at-rs-55823-crore-losses-widen-by-42/amp_articleshow/104644333.cms

Flipkart losses widen by 42% to Rs 4,845.7 crore. Total loss of Flipkart  since inception now amounts to Rs. 12,600 crore. And we are talking about  the flag bearer of India's success story 's performance in 16th year since its inception

After 16 years of existence should we still call Flipkart a startup?

Management guru - Howard Schultz!

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