Since we moved away from chat a few days ago, we’ve had a lot of users come and ask us why we decided to bring chat to a bare minimum in our app. While several of our users loved the chat feature, for a lot of our users chat was a cumbersome way of doing… Read more

All of us (well, most of us) look for things that could have a very defining impact on us. For me, apart from meeting people, the best things have been books. These books made me super excited when I first read them and I could almost feel them changing something inside me. Thoughts which were… Read more

There’s something beautiful when a comedian makes you cry. Watch this and try and not to cry. And then read all the comments on Youtube. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYsrdh15XY8] Read more

One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO has to take involves taking calls which impact the people who work in their company. We recently evolved from our earlier business model of helping consumers in getting their complaints resolved (called Akosha) and focussed on building a personal assistant for millions of Indians (called Helpchat).… Read more

With the growing number of people turning entrepreneurs, the search for great talent has become difficult. However, a lot of these entrepreneurs will find it difficult to raise beyond seed stage money. Sometimes the team is great and yet they can’t raise money for reasons outside their control – e.g. they took seed from a VC firm and the… Read more

Sometime ago, I sat down and wrote down a letter to our employees trying to explain what exactly it means to own stock options in a startup. Context is that from my practical experience of talking to hundreds of startup employees, ESOPs are one of the least understood and most under-appreciated aspect of startups here in… Read more

In August 2014, Benedict Evans (considered one of the foremost thinkers on mobile and all things related) wrote a blog post called App unbundling, search and discovery. It is a really fascinating post and one which a lot of PMs around the world would have read. One of the key things he talks about is how… Read more

Of late, hiring has been a topic that comes up in every conversation with a fellow entrepreneur. It took me some time to think about how we built the Akosha team. I am a first-time, single (non-tech) founder in Delhi who luckily found several super-smart people to join and become co-founders/VPs. Obviously these thoughts reflect… Read more

One of my investors recently shared this awesome paper: What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial. The paper led to the concept of “effectual thinking” which has 5 core principles (copied from Wikipedia): The Bird in Hand Principle. Entrepreneurs start with what they have. They will look at who they are, what they know and who they know.… Read more

I started my entrepreneurial journey almost 4.5 years back. Over this period I have thought a lot about business, business models, how to create wealth etc. I was in Mumbai a year ago and a young relative asked an older uncle (who was a senior executive at a large bank) about “what kind of business… Read more