Ideas We Believe

There are a few crown makers in the current start-up world who have honed the art of finding startups with an industry-defining idea at their seed stage and nurturing it to realise a product market fit. But needless to mention, even in their shining armours, there are a few clicks to spot. This only explains why business is an art and not a science. While gaps in the market, consumer behaviour, technology adoption or, for that matter, a blueprint of the strategy today can be readily developed, the challenge is to get the process on the field. I would refrain from taking names, but even the biggest VC and PE out there have had their share of mistakes and have been highly humble in accepting them. What is of greater concern, however, is that most of the analysis of a bad investment can only be made post-ante. This implies that the investors carried out the same processes yet landed at two contrasting star-ups. Oversight, one of the most cited criteria for the failure of venture capital i...

Consultants are the most rampant, yet the most sushed topic in corporate. There are enough consulting firms today, to make one wonder if we need so many of them. And if the conundrum of needing to hire consultants was not big enough, here comes the issue of what they actually do. Over the last few years, many in the media have reported consulting firms to have held too much power for far too long to have become corrupted. Firms have relied on shady practices to keep their business afloat and, on many occasions, have walked out without much consequences. However, I find the above conclusion misrepresenting, if not incorrect.  The need for consultants doesn't arise from corporate's need to implement change or resolve issues. Corporations today are locked in an environment of constant change, be it in business models, products or even markets. The law forbids two companies from coming together and promising on a "happy ever-after". The consequence of this is action and r...

The journey of Microsoft as a company can be paraphrased into three leaders and their approach to the industry. When bill gates developed a proprietary OS, he knew he had hit the potluck. Over the next few decades, he ensured that the Microsoft ecosystem kept itself updated and remained a close source. Given the philanthropy that Bill is known for, many expected the then-richest man to let go of the closed head and let the CS community have a look at the masterpiece, but Bill's wrath against open source was second to none. He and his successor Steve Balmer would call the open-source OS like Linux cancer. However, at the turn of the millennia, they were hit by rivals like Google in terms of the biggest tech company. Unlike Apple, Bill hadn't been able to trap its customers into an ecosystem. Therefore the battle moved away from OS to browsers, where the once reigning internet explorer faced an upward struggle from two emergent, one which its earlier rival had open-sourced to, an...