Forbes India has a comment from in a story about Web3: “With India having both a critical mass of consumers and the tech talent, for the first time, there is an opportunity to play on a level-playing field with global companies, says Rajesh Jain, who has been in the tech space from the last three decades, and is the founder and managing director of 25-year-old Netcore Cloud. “Having seen the early days of the internet, I sense a similar excitement with Web3. But uncertainty and excessive regulation are business killers. Given a history of retrospective actions and taxation by Indian governments, it is the rare brave entrepreneur who will create a Web3 company based in India. And when capital moves, so do people—and so does eventual wealth creation.””
Vivek Kaul: “The trouble is that a large population and the ability of that population to buy things, or there being a viable market for what any startup is trying to sell, are two very different things. One of the most important points in the story of startups has been the success of UPI. But just because UPI transactions are growing, it doesn’t automatically imply that the overall number of economic transactions are also growing at the same pace. Before UPI, almost all of these transactions were in cash. Also, when it comes to consumer transactions on which valuations of startups are built, a few people seem to be making a bulk of these. As the Indus Valley Report 2023 published recently pointed out, 1% of Indians take 45% of flights, 2.6% of Indians invest in mutual funds, 6.5% of users are responsible for 44% of UPI transactions, and 5% of users account for a third of the orders placed on Zomato. As Zomato recently reported: “Customers with annual order frequency >50 as a % of annual transacting customers have increased from 1.4% in 2018 to 4.7% in 2022.” Basically, this means around 5% of Zomato’s customers order from it at least once a week. So, as the Indus Valley Report points out: “Much of the consumption is driven by a tiny super-user set… [The] broad user base narrows sharply when it comes to paying users.””
NYTimes: “In just 15 years, the men’s Premier League has become one of the most valuable sports organizations on the planet. Teams bought for $100 million are now estimated to be worth $1 billion. The money flooding in has been used to improve infrastructure at the sport’s lower levels and groom younger players. Now, wealthy investors see an opportunity in the Women’s Premier League, too, and are pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars. That means the kind of opportunities for female athletes that never existed before. Opening up what has long been known as “the gentleman’s game” sends a powerful psychological message to hundreds of millions of women and girls in what will soon be the world’s most populous country. Gender roles remain rigid in India, where only about 20 percent of women are employed in the formal work force, one of the lowest rates globally. If the country is to meet its full economic potential, it must chip away at that gender divide.”
WSJ: “Slack? Phone? Teams? Zoom? There are too many work communications. Workplaces become saturated with ways to talk, often breeding mistakes and misunderstandings…There are so many ways to communicate at work that our communication is breaking down. Bosses say missed messages and crossed signals waste time and trigger mistakes, while research suggests that so much virtual communication makes it easier to snipe at or ignore co-workers. Then there’s the stress of having to stay on top of so many different channels all the time.”
