Business - Pitch.Link Blog

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Where is your strategic plan and BMC?

June 10, 2019What I Learnt Today, Startup 0

Earlier this month David Cummings raised this question in his blog On Startups – Why the lack of a Strategic plan?

Why indeed?

I was meeting with Rahul Gupta, a prolific angel investor in New Delhi and he echoed very similar thoughts. Why is it that founders are not able to articulate their priorities in a simple 5 quarterly targets format? Many a times, according to Rahul, the fact that there is no-one outside the team to whom the team/founder is accountable, makes the difference.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Will technology eat your jobs or would it create more?

June 7, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

The story of Visicalc as written by Tim Harford in bbc.com in a very recent article is indeed eye-opening. Not only because it tells the story of the first sensation in business software but because he shows how it showed the earliest signs of destruction of jobs by technology. And then creation of new ones.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

The USB Story

May 31, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

When I look around for tech business related nuggets for myself, some of which I share in this series, my primary go to topics are related to software, SaaS and startups. Then super high level ideas that need pondering about or keeping them in the periphery of your vision lest they become a Tsunami behind your back. Time to time I come across a story which does not fit my normal scheme of things but are so compelling that I feel like sharing it with friends. One such came out just a few days back in Fast Company written by Joel Johnson. It is the story of how the USB port came about.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Think browsers and not native apps as the future of mobile.

May 24, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

Hugh Durkin, Director of Platform Partner Success Hubspot, has been following mobile habits and writing on shifts that he sees in the space. Way back in 2016, when he was a Senior Product Manager at Intercom, he wrote about how browsers are the future of mobile. Data in support – “ most US smartphone owners ( read 65%+) download zero apps in a typical month,” according to Comscore’s then report on mobile apps ( how many new apps did you download last quarter?) and it goes on to show that the top App takes 50% of use time while the top 3 are responsible for 80% of the mobile usage.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

What can you learn from Successful teams at Google?

May 17, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

In an article on Google website Julia Rozovsky, a People Operations, Analytics and HR Strategy Leader at Google wrote (circa 2015) about the 5 keys to a successful team at Google. They set out to examine what makes Google team effective. This research was conducted over two years, 200 interviews, 250 attributes and 180+ google teams. I share this statistics to assure that the outcome has some solid basis.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Wisdom from Omaha – 2019

May 10, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

As one looks at folksy quotes from Warren Buffet it was interesting to see what has been the reaction to the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual General meeting at the CHI center at Omaha Nebraska where as tradition goes Warren Buffet(88) and Charles Munger (94) answered shareholder questions for 6 hours (link to entire proceedings courtesy Yahoo Finance, below). I am not a stock market buff and I went looking for native wisdom that might have been shared by the two legends. Here is what I found as I read around.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Execution is Everything. The OKR Way.

May 3, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

Peter Drucker, the original management thinker came up with the idea of Management by Objectives popularly known as MBO in the 1950’s. It seems Andy Grove adapted the basic tenets of MBO to create his OKR approach, inspired by Drucker’s The Practice of Management.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Commoditizing your products complement as a business strategy.

April 26, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

Ever wonder why Hubspot gives away most of their software for free? Their CRM, Sales Automation, Calendar applications are all available for users without charge. Joel Spolsky, Founder of Stack Overflow, identified what would be recognized as a major pattern in technology business in his post ‘Strategy letter V’ (in June 2012) – “companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.”

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

12x to $81B in 5years – Growth in venture capital investment in Asia (2013-18)

April 19, 2019What I Learnt Today, Biz Tech 0

The huge growth in funding to Asian startups since 2013 has resulted in some monstrous exits. 5 of the 10 to be exact which included 2 from China ( none in 2013) and the humungous $21B Walmart acquisition of Flipkart in India – one of the largest VC backed M&A exits. The growth in startups and their value creation is now all over South East Asia. Between 2017 and 2018 Asia saw the birth of 65 Unicorns with 3 from Indonesia.

Posted by Subhanjan Sarkar

Product / Market fit – exactly what is it?

April 16, 2019SAAS, What I Learnt Today 0

Well a lot of literature is out there specially from Steve Blank and Eric Ries. What is it and how do you demonstrate it? Is it customer traction? Revenue or YOY growth? At what stage does it make any sense for founders or the founding team? Brad Feld wrote on it way back in 2015 and it still makes a lot of sense.

Tag: Business

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