• Entrepreneurship is happening in India, but there isn’t enough of it and there isn’t enough of capital being invested into early-stage companies.
• There are two issues: lack of angel funding (whatever little was there has now almost dried up) and lack of the first-round funding. Ventures need about Rs 1-5 crore to get started, and about Rs 5-15 crore in first-round funding. Most VC funds in India are either not investing in tech-focused cos. or need to invest $5 million (Rs 25 crore) given their fund size and the commitments they can make. India needs smaller funds with smaller overheads, with more operationally focused partners to mentor and guide early-stage companies.
• The digital opportunities in the Internet and mobile space both have challenges. The Internet cos. are dependent entirely on advertising (which has stagnated) and the mobile cos. are hamstrung by low revenue shares from mobile operator payouts.
• I continue to believe that the big opportunity in India is in building direct-to-consumer cos. in the mobile space, but this requires courage and capital.
• Also, exits in India are few and far between. M&A needs to be part of the process and that is simply not happening in India.
• Result: we have lots of small companies (since one can start) but few achieve scale. That is what needs to change.

The good news is that the situation is changing - more start-ups are happening now, and angel funding (and some bit of VC funding) is also starting to pick up.  We still need to have much more funding available for the early-stage.

• India Media Industry in 2010: A KPMG-FICCI report.
• America’s Broadband Plan: from ZDnet. “100 megabits per second download speed AND 50 megabit UPLOAD speed in 100 million homes by 2020, Build the fastest wireless network in world, Community facilities such as schools, hospitals and government buildings should have 1 Gigabit access.”
• The Profit-and-Loss Statement: A tutorial by Fred Wilson. “[For startups,] the trended monthly P&L is a great way to look at a business and see what is going on financially.”
• David vs Goliath: from Fortune. “How 3 small businesses stood up to larger competitors.”
• Newspaper Economics: by Hal Varian.

Our story goes back to a couple of accidental meetings.  The first meeting was about12 years ago — we met on a bus which was taking tourists to Universal Studios! We chatted and then parted. As it happens so often, there was no further contact. The second meeting was at Mumbai airport 3 years later - we happened to be on the same flight to Chennai. After that, we decided that the Mysterious Force does want us to stay in touch!

As we age, it becomes harder for us to make friends. Luckily, this is one relationship which has been an exception.

How we define the market opportunity will either embolden us or constrain us.

In most early stage companies, the discussion of market size never comes up because there is little or no revenue. Once the revenues start coming in, then one needs to start thinking of the future - and how the market opportunity can be expanded.

From my own experience, average traffic speed has probably halved in the past decade. I am going to take a single data point - my commute back from office to home (and this is supposed to be against the traffic).  The 6 kms route now takes about 50-55 minutes daily, when I leave around 6-6:30 pm.

Of course, the ones who need to understand the plight of us cannot be expected to do so since they travel in vehicles with red lights and roads are cleared for them. Mumbai’s traffic woes will only worsen until the Ministers don’t have to wade through the same traffic as us without escort cars clearing the way.

We haven’t even started to think about the problem, leave alone come up with solutions. One bridge across the Sea does not speed up traffic.

Where we need to queue, we rush. Where we need to walk on footpaths, we walk on the road. (Of course, that may be my habit since most urban areas suffer from a lack of walkable footpaths.) Our driving is more like weaving in and out without any regard to lanes. We don’t hesitate to spit or otherwise dirty public areas.We don’t respect other people’s time - being late in professional and personal lives is taken for granted.

This needs to change. But I don’t think it will happen easily. We should have had this civic discipline built-in to us when we were much younger.

• Switch: by Chip and Dan Heath (on Change)
• Other Colors: by  Orham Pamuk (Nobel Literature Prize winner)
• The $12 million Stuffed Shark: by Don Thompson (on contemporary art)
• Flow: by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• The Miracle: by Michael Schuman (on Asia’s economic rise)
• The Checklist Manifesto: by Atul Gawande
• Instead of Education: by John Holt

Today’s world looks very different from the vantage point of where I reside here in Mumbai, India. It is a world full of infinite opportunities as companies seek to leapfrog the legacy of decades of slow development. It is a world with youthful energy and money being unleashed as one navigates the new malls and restaurants coming up all over. It is a world where mobile phones connect people who never used a landline before—and perhaps will never use a desktop computer, opting for more advanced NetPCs and wireless devices of all manner.

It is also a world where the services juggernaut in urban India is complemented by the largely agricultural rural economy, where hundreds of millions still live in poverty. It’s a world where the old still exists and, at times, even dominates the new. The contrasts may be stark, but there is one thing that is ubiquitous in my homeland: Optimism! For the first time in living memory, there is a belief that tomorrow will be better than today. That perception alone can make all the difference. I see not just the Old India of yesterday, but the New India of tomorrow. It is an India that will be built in a world of extreme competition, and extreme opportunities—powered by transformations and disruptions.

• The Scary New Rich: From Newsweek. “The global middle class is more unstable and less liberal than we thought.”
• Building a Better Teacher: from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. “When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.”
• Role of Data in the Mobile Future: by Tomi Ahonen. “Like Alan Moore says, this is why mobile phone user data is the ’new black gold of the 21st century‘.”
• Top 50 VC-backed Companies: from Wall Street Journal.
• Reflections on India: by Sean Paul Kelley. Brutally frank. “I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation.”

Blog.800ceoread.com

I visit this at once a week. It gives very good suggestions on business books. Its reviews expose you to new ideas in the business. The sheer diversity of thought that is out there makes it a fascinating read.

Deeshaa.org (On India’s Development)

This is my colleague Atanu Dey’s blog. He is an economist and blogs on issues dealing with India’s development. He writes on what we have done wrong on the policy front, and what are the challenges that India faces on its path to development. He updates it frequently, and I check it about once a day.

NayaNaya.mobi

This is a made-for-mobile public aggregator of breaking news on many topics (created by my company). I check this on my phone the first thing in the morning. The India-centric headlines aggregated from multiple sources in different topics (national news, business, tech, cricket) provide a very good overview of all the ‘new-new’ happenings.