*|IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE|* *|IF:MERGE1|* Hey *|MERGE1|* , *|END:IF|* *|IF:MERGE7|* *|MERGE7|* *|END:IF|* *|END:IF|* When I was a kid, this is how I “earned” my pocket money:
Kept the change when I'd go to the market to run errands;
Visited relatives;
Played football tournaments with cash prizes;
And most obviously, asked my parents, and if they said no, asked my grandparents;
For me, pocket money was never an established concept.. and I gained financial literacy through real life experiences. I had a piggy bank or a Gullak as we would call it, only until I was about 10 years old, and after that, it became need-based money on demand.
But the times are changing for sure, and over the last few years, we have seen a surge in startups looking to solve for a teenager's piggy bank.
FamPay, Junio, Walrus, and many more startups breaking into this market and creating digital piggy banks for kids left many folks surprised and confused. And I must admit, I understand the reason for this confusion. Do the on-ground realities and user behaviors of an Indian parent buy into the idea of a digital piggy bank?
To dive in deeper, we've drafted a quick Investment thesis on FamPay for you to go through and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I don't know when it started, but since some point in time, Meituan is regarded by the industry to be strong in strategy. People have always been asking me to talk about strategy. Indeed, strategy is an important topic, given that Meituan is a multi-business company. There are many books on strategy, but there is no consensus on what it means. The definition that I give is rather abstract and broad: Strategy is the insight that drives our decision making plus the action plans matching that insight to help the business to achieve the highest ROI in different times and spaces. Spaces can be defined in multiple senses - geographic areas, business lines, etc. Note that what we refer to here is geared towards tactics.
Arjun Malhotra (GP, Good Capital) and Ankit Singh (iSpirt) dive into breaking down the future of the lending infrastructure in India. Starting the conversation with the on-ground reality for the credit need for SMEs, Ankit shares details on how Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) plans to address the massive problem of access to credit. Diving deeper, Ankit talks about how the cost of serving the customer through OCEN will make it feasible for facilitating the credit demand.
I wasn’t thinking. I was lamenting to my boss during a company meeting that “I need a challenge…I don’t feel like I’m working to my potential.” Ooops.
Some great bosses may encourage this honesty but many others can see it as a problem. Mine was the latter. There is also a time and a place for this conversation and a way to frame it in a career aspirations sort of way, but not in a whining to my boss off-the-cuff sort of way. Sales is a profession with an open-ended definition of success so my statement conveyed two things to him. First, that I wasn’t challenging myself. And second, I needed someone else to challenge me to get my best work done.