A lot of you wrote back about emulating the Southwest CEOs arm wrestling match mentioned in the last edition - I'm intrigued by the higher confidence you have in your wrestling prowess over the strength of our legal system!
This week on Crosstalk, Prashant Sharma talks about how he and his founding team at Offrd generated and sustained excitement before the launch of the startup, resulting in 1000+ signups within the first week 🔥
Last month we brought together ~10 PMs from startups like Instamojo, Flock, FreshMenu, Practo etc and held a round table to discuss and debate different aspects of Product Management via case studies. We're planning to this monthly and with SaaS founders as well. The idea is to open up channels of information exchange and to learn from each others' mistakes. If you're a SaaS founder or a PM interested in being a part of this, hit me up on Twitter, you won't regret it. 😀
Another controversial move by the Government - UIDAI (Aadhaar), is becoming notorious for leaking private information of individuals and then belittling any claims of the system not doing enough to secure this information. Here is a list of all the leaks that have taken place and have come to fore till now Internet shutdowns in today's world are perhaps the biggest slap on freedom of expression. Kashmir has had 4 since the turn of the year. Moreover, it seems like there is no law that gives the state government the right to actually shutdown the Internet or even parts of it.
I'm wondering if the above links would brand me anti-national in the eyes of the larger public. In my defense, I'm just pro-thinking... and anti-stupid! 😇
Tech Tales
An interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review about the impact of automation on different countries. India is high up on the list, of course. What's scary is that a minimum of 40% of the population in all countries listed will see a direct impact. This is a strong case for Universal Basic Income to be looked at seriously by governments. ⏰
When it comes to the Indian e-commerce story, it's not Bezos vs Flixel vs Ma anymore. It's Amazon vs everyone else. This insightful piece by Haresh Chawla is the second part of his two part piece on the Indian e-commerce landscape. Great read.
ज्ञान
David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners covered some interesting points during his talk at the 2017 SaaStr Conference about optimizing the top of the sales funnel. Must watch.
