It’s just a matter of time – the legacy banks will start losing revenue if they don’t re-imagine themselves In India, the banking sector has undergone a drastic transformation in the last few years. But it won’t stop here, even greater disruptions are ahead. The shift towards digital is being fueled by the changing demographics…

One of the worst kept secrets of the mobile app industry is that almost all apps (except for the top 5-8 apps) see 60-80% uninstall rate within 90 days of users installing the app. India probably has the highest uninstall rate in the world – so when an app says it has 20M installs, you…

2016 was a great year on all fronts. I became a dad; found great strength by raising money in a tough environment; Tapzo grew 14X in transactions. Also, I got back to reading a lot. My reading picked up since I bought a Kindle PaperWhite – somehow the impulsive purchase of a book (not waiting for 3-4…

As I had mentioned in a previous post, Moving away from chat: Hard-earned lessons, we moved away from a chat interface almost 10 months ago in January 2016. Since then we’ve grown 13X on daily transactions (today we do 55,000 per day). However, our app didn’t have any chat but it still continued to be…

One of the common questions that people ask of internet entrepreneurs is: what is the moat of your business? Unless you are building a business with real lock-in network effects (like say Facebook), most internet businesses in India don’t have any obvious moats. Most of the UI can be replicated and in some ways the…

One of my favourite songs (written by Bob Dylan) goes like this: You may be an ambassador to England or France You may like to gamble, you might like to dance You may be the heavyweight champion of the world You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls. But you’re gonna have…

Jim Barksdale, once the CEO of Netscape, famously said that there were only two ways to make money he knew of: bundling and unbundling. And the Internet world seems to be coming a full circle on this count. The early years of the Internet and 2000s were the years of portals: bundled monoliths that became…

I presented at Techsparks held in Bangalore on 30 September 2016. The topic was “Building a bundled app for Indians”. There’s a long way for us to go in doing that ourselves but I thought it would be a good idea to share some learning from our early experiences. I feel building for the mass user and…

This was first published as an editorial in Economic Times with a more sedate headline. A few days later it circulated and became a bit viral under the above headline. On a recent trip to China with a group of Indian internet entrepreneurs, it was eye-opening to see how Chinese Internet companies (especially utility apps)…