Where do we go from here? 🤔

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Sep 10 Sep 25

Sep 17 2020

Where do we go from here? 🤔

#131:

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Ah man, 2020! What a year it has been, and it isn't close to being over yet (I know this feels like a facepalm moment).

The state of Indian tech has never changed as rapidly as it has this year.
COVID-19 came with Jio's enormous fundraise, a boom in EdTech, a ban of Chinese apps, virtual organizations, neo-banks, kids coding, the rise of the kiranas, Pepsi, the list just goes on and on.
Okay, nothing happened at Pepsi, my mouth just ran dry listing all the things that have happened and I feel I wasn't even half way there.

Our team decided on a way to bring all of this together. We've started working on a series of presentations to bring together the state of Indian tech in 2020.
For our first volume, we are deep-diving into Jio.
With the company raising capital from global tech giants over the last few months and coming out with various products such as JioMart, JioMeet, JioGlass, and many more, it is for sure up to something big (duh, Maanav), but where do they go from here? 🤔

Volume1: What is Reliance Jio's plan?

I hope you enjoy this, and please feel free to share any feedback :)

Coming soon:

Volume 2: How are global tech companies approaching India?
Volume 3: Geopolitics, policy, and the investing landscape
Volume 4: Startups and business models in the limelight
Volume 5: Where next? Large unsolved opportunities in…

ज्ञान

🚚 How Amazon created the Prime membership program

It’s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn’t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos’s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs.

That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best Buy, which was still in expansion mode at the time, with sales growing 17 percent annually. Toys ‘R’ Us sued Amazon in a high-profile battle, alleging it had violated an agreement the two companies had for the toy store chain to be an exclusive seller on Amazon.com.
And during the holiday season, Amazon’s website suffered repeated outages, drawing the wrath of customers and the press alike.

🎯 There are only three startup stages

When you meet startups and VCs these days, there’s usually a lot of verbiage spent on defining stage (pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-A, Early A, A, Late A, B, C…) As a venture eco-system, we continue to struggle with this.

Some of this struggle comes from startups trying to define their stage in a way that will support their fundraising efforts (or the specific meeting they are in). You’ve already done a seed round, you think are too early for a Series A, you are meeting with a Series A fund, and so do you call yourself “Early A” or do you risk calling yourself “post Seed?”

💕 Falling in love with problems

This is an honest look at what we've learned at Station over the past 3 years and why we are moving forward with a new product.
In October 2017, we launched the first version of Station on ProductHunt. We gathered over 8,600 upvotes to date and became one of the top 10 most upvoted products in the history of the platform. A few months later, we got into YCombinator and raised a $3.2m seed round with top-tier investors from the Valley.
But behind that early success lies a more nuanced reality.
After nearly 3 years, we are throwing away 99% of the code we ever wrote, and we are launching an entirely new product. In other words, we are breaking up with our solution to fall in love with the problem again.

📚 A Brief Guide To Startup Pivots (4 Types Of Pivots)

Most of the times, startup don't work. At some point it may make sense to either (1) give up on your original product and to sell the company, (2) shut down what you are doing and return money to investors, or (3) to pivot. You can read more on making the decision to give up in a future article. This post focuses on pivoting for small, early stage companies (e.g. 10 or fewer people).

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