Andy Kessler on Sturgeon’s Law which says ninety percent of everything is crap: “…I spent some time sitting on Mr. Andreessen’s back porch pondering the magic of 90% and how it created Silicon Valley and continues to rule it. “In venture capital, you think a lot about so-called adverse selection,” Mr. Andreessen says. “ ‘Why am I so lucky as to be the person you’re trying to raise money from?’ You want to get to positive selection, the best people coming to you.””
Nilesh Shah: “[India] missed the manufacturing/export bus in the 1980s. We did excel in services like software to become back office to the world. With China+1 becoming a geopolitical imperative, it is an opportune time for us to expand the manufacturing sector and improve our export market share. Many of our peers are ahead of us in ease of doing business, but none of them has a large domestic market like us. The automobile and generic pharma sector in the past and the mobile phone/RAC sectors recently have shown that we know the formulae. It will still be a long and arduous journey to attain a stature close to Vietnam or China in exports. To achieve our true potential we need close coordination and seamless working between central, state, and local governments, the rule of law, improvements in infrastructure, especially logistics and flexible labour laws.”
Mint: “Indians are adopting digital payments at a scorching pace. This digital stride has left China and a few developed country markets trailing digital transaction numbers. Government data shows that digital transactions grew close to 90%, from 232,000 to over 430,000 in the three years from FY19 to FY21. The growth was led by the United Payment Interface or UPI, the payment system the government-owned National Payments Corp. of India developed to enable immediate money transfers through mobile devices. According to an ACI Worldwide report for 2020, India was at pole position with 25.5 billion real-time online transactions, ahead of China at 15.7 billion, South Korea-6 billion, the UK-2.8 billion, Japan-1.7 billion, and the US-1.2 billion…The credit goes to the Indian central bank and banks and lenders that jointly leveraged the indigenous strengths in technology and innovation of non-banks to build the infrastructure for offering a wide range of payment services. The emergence of over half a dozen unicorns (with a valuation of over $1 billion) in the Indian fintech sector, offering services ranging from payments to cards and multiple payment options, both rides on the secure and reliable digital financial infrastructure and contributes to the pace of adoption.”
