Relax Peter, Uber is on it. I wonder how flying cars will navigate through India though. We can already imagine startups pitching to solve this 'problem' 5 years from now.
Crosstalk
We're trying to curate high quality content specific to the Indian startup ecosystem on our Medium publication - Crosstalk. This week, Ish Jindal from Tars has written about chatbots and how businesses, especially SMBs can use them to automate different types of customer interactions. Cheggit!
Speaking of automation, I'm afraid a vast majority of the population isn't even aware that their jobs may get automated pretty soon. An estimated half a million jobs within the IT service business will become automated by 2021. Additionally, coding might just become the new blue collar job. In the immediate future however, new jobs seem to be heading more towards quasi entrepreneurship. Online trading platforms are spawning micro-entrepreneurs across India. Shout out to Meesho (portfolio) for enabling the next wave of micro-entrepreneurs in India.
Tech Tales
We're very happy to see India make major strides in the renewable energy sector. Solar power will cost less than INR 3/kWh from the recently concluded bidding for a solar field in MP. That makes it cheaper than any other source of energy out there! Amazon is taking Microsoft & Slack head on with their recently launched enterprise collaboration tool - Chime. It's safe to assume, this will be a great up sell for their existing AWS enterprise customers.
With data becoming more and more easily available, a new breed of highly specialized developers have cropped up. Data Engineers (new age) typically create tools to automate the type of work that data engineers (old school), data scientists or analysts may do manually. Intriguing.
ज्ञान
A Product Manager is one of the most crucial positions in any startup. Sachin Rekhi, with over a decade worth of experience with product roles, has created a simple (& brilliant) deck demystifying the role talking about the art of Product Management.
One of the core things that a PM must do in order to be successful is get rid of friction. Kintan Brahmbhatt, who's had product roles at Amazon Music, IMDB & Skype, has some invaluable advice on the subject.
