Time at Netcore
2020 will leave a lasting impact on many of us. Many of us have never stayed at home for such an extended period of time. This availability of uninterrupted time allows deep thought and introspection. An answer to a simple question like “How are you?” comes as “Okay – so far” bringing to the fore uncertainty and mortality. Few of us expected this when the year began. In January 2020, I was in the US – my fifth visit over a 12-month period. Little did I know then that it would be my last for a long time. My deep thinking usually happens on long international flights – it now happens in the comfort and safety of my home.
One of the themes that I have spent time thinking about is Netcore’s future. Until early 2019, I was very peripherally involved in Netcore. My attitude then was – let’s keep running it for now, and then maybe sell it at some point since my interest was more on bringing political and economic change in India through the Nayi Disha activities. Creating another venture in the tech space did not excite me – bringing something to scale from scratch is a 10-year commitment, and I did not want to go through the hard grind of a startup again.
After I shuttered Nayi Disha in February 2019, I increased the time I started spending at Netcore. For the previous decade, my obsession had been transforming India and so my involvement in Netcore had been light. Now, it slowly increased. It was back to basics in terms of understanding how exactly we solve business problems. I saw a full demo of our Smartech product after many years. And as I sat through reviews and understood the present and future world of B2C Martech, I fell in love with what we did as a company. The events of 2020 deepened my interest in the future of marketing and how more availability of data would transform it even more. Peter Drucker’s words – “the two most important functions of a business are innovation and marketing” – came back to me. Marketing as a function would always be there. As Netcore, we were right in the thick of the action. So, why not keep building?
And as has happened so many times in my life, I came across a book that felt it had been written just for me.
Tomorrow: Part 2
