armstrongvazblogsfromgoa

Let me be honest. Before I read Arundhati’s story today, I knew nothing about this topic. Her story is about why more startup investors are veering towards a new model of funding through something called venture debt.    Me, I barely understand equity financing. Cap table. Liquidation preference. Term sheet. Pre money. Post money. Extended universe. Crossover episode. Xbox 360 version. No clue.    Anyway, after I read her story, I finally got it. If you know what venture debt is, you should click on the link at the bottom and head over to read the story. Save yourself.    If you have no idea, read on. I have come up with a really tortured analogy. It’s too late for you now. Here goes.    Startups need money. Usually to grow. Pay salaries. Things like that. And to raise this money, they need an investor. Now remember, this startup has nothing, so it can really offer just one thing—the promise of future returns. Give me money. Take...

Red would be proud.   You know Red, the black dude in the famous Hollywood prison break movie, who, in a moment of inspired wisdom, (one that can only be arrived at by spending enough time amongst con men and murderers and occasionally getting beaten to a pulp and after reflection of that wretched existence), said, “Hope is a good thing.”     So yeah, Red would be proud of India’s payments banks. These banks, like Airtel, Paytm and Fino are singing the Hope song like it is time for Obama Part II.   Two points should make you feign interest in this unique, hope-MLM scheme.    Point No. 1: Banking Correspondents (BCs) are opening payments bank accounts again. Two or three a day. They are doing physical Know Your Customer (KYC) and not electronic. The damn thing costs more money.    Point No. 2: R Gandhi, the former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and now an advisor to Paytm, said there was an expectation...

My father's always had an extraordinary complaint about me. That I'm scared of questions. It's a conversation goal I just didn't hit while growing up. "You were too scared to even ask for directions," he tells me, chidingly. Maybe it was our shuttered and repressed school system, or maybe parental affection didn't exactly warrant too much questioning. Whatever may be the case, I grew up scared of the ugly, bendy question mark. As you can already tell, this trait does not bode well for a journalist. Bread and butter and all that. But in a place like The Ken, sharp, incisive questions are to stories what espresso shots are to a Monday morning brain. There is no option but to grit your teeth and give yourself this shot in the arm. Truth be told, it's totally worth it. A well-crafted, clever, unassuming question is a beautiful opportunity. It can predict the future, it can explain the past. It can make the present an infinitely more exciting place to...

MakeMyTrip has let the OYO camel inside the tent Ten months ago, my colleague Ashish wrote a two-part story about a deal between MakeMyTrip and OYO.   The terms of the deal were simple. Grant OYO—India’s largest hospitality company—exclusivity on MakeMyTrip, India’s largest travel aggregator. Delist the others. And in one fell swoop, OYO’s competitors got kneecapped.   *Cue Michael Corleone montage*   In that story, Ashish raised a question:   “In India, sector after sector, clear market winners are already in place or will be established. In e-commerce. In cab aggregation. In online travel. In food delivery. Look around you, and there’s chatter of consolidation across businesses. Flipkart-Walmart. Ola-Uber. Zomato-Swiggy. MakeMyTrip-Oyo. So, what happens when the platforms in a monopoly situation begin choking their supply?”   It’s pretty clear that OYO is a company that’s going through the classic three stages of hypergrowth:   ...

THE GREEN WAY OF LENT – Food and Garbage Introduction Food is essential for our survival, growth, and health. The more naturally we eat, the better it is for our bodies and metabolic functions. All our food and water comes from the Earth which also provides food to the millions of other living species. Food Facts While human beings have been around this Earth for around 200,000 years, agriculture is of more recent origin – being dated to around 12,000-10,000 years ago. For millennia, humans lived off the land, starting as vegetarian gatherers eating edible plants, roots, fruits, nuts, and seeds, and later progressing to eating small animals, and still later becoming hunter-gatherers. With the dawn of agriculture, two things resulted: the abuse of land for human benefit, and the possibility of waste. At present, around 11% of Earth’s land area is under cultivation, and agriculture is responsible for around 80% of deforestation. Around 33% of all food produced gets was...

The new PC chip war comes to India The US vs the Soviet Union. Android vs iOS. Pirate vs ninja. AMD vs Intel. All battles that have rocked the world—or, well, at least some people.   What if I were to ask whether you know what processor is inside your laptop or desktop? For most people, the conversation would go, “Intel? Core i something something? What do you mean which one? And how did you even get in here? I’m going to call—”   Ahem. For much of the past decade, it used to be that for PC makers—think HP or Dell—there were two non-negotiable costs: a Windows licence and an Intel processor. Unless you were targeting the stingiest of bargain hunters (who would rather Piratebay and don’t care what’s “Inside” the computer).   AMD, Intel’s only significant competitor for the processors that power pretty much all of today’s computers and servers, was barely a choice. The 49-year-old California-based chipmaker’s market share collapsed in the mid-to-late 2000...