Rajesh Jain

Thinks 150

To sell or not to sell: Lessons from a bootstrapped CEO: from Techcrunch. “Put happiness at the center of the decision, and let your intuition — the instincts that made you the person you are today — be your guide.”

A new book on James Buchanan by Donald Boudreaux and Randall Holcombe. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics and is considered, with Gordon Tullock, the originator of public choice theory.

James Otteson: “There is, unfortunately, no Great Mind who can survey the totality of one’s life, who knows all the possible courses one’s life might take, who can anticipate all the surprises and accidents that emerge in one’s life, or who, therefore, can know what you should do. (Maybe God could do this, but He is unfortunately not running for office.) [via CafeHayek]

The Alternative India Needs (Part 1)

Talking 2024 – 1

The 2024 Election Games have begun. Who will be India’s next Prime Minister? Who will challenge Modi? Will the Opposition unite? Will the Congress replace the Gandhis? As the English Editorial Elite sense a weakened Modi, the WITA game is now firmly under way – Who Is The Alternative? It was also played a few years ago – just prior to the 2019 elections. While it is a fun game, it is the wrong game. The alternative to Modi is Nota (None of the Above) in the single individual sense. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s first look at the commentary from recent times as the BJP and Modi complete seven years in power.

Shekhar Gupta: “Can 2024 become more challenging for Modi? Yes, but it’s all up to Congress… Modi and Shah know Congress is the only likely challenger to them nationally, and the Gandhis are key to keeping it together. That’s why they need to be targeted ruthlessly… The Congress and the other opposition parties, in what we might loosely describe as the Modi-peedit samaj, have another option. Think what a company with great legacy brands and strong customer loyalties, but losing out to niftier challengers, does. It gets a CEO from someplace else. It won’t happen in the Congress. But, can it happen with a larger opposition coalition with the Congress at its core? What it brings to the table won’t be the charisma of its leaders, but that loyal 20 per cent customer base. If such a thought emerges, Mamata Banerjee and others like her can be back in the reckoning.”

Yogendra Yadav: “Modi is not Manmohan Singh. He won’t fade away without fighting to the finish. In the 7 years since he took oath, Narendra Modi’s government has never looked as shaky as it does today. But there is still no alternative… Despite all his blunders, mere Modi-bashing won’t lead to his defeat; the people look for an alternative before they can discard what they have. And let us face it: Such an alternative does not exist, at least not on the menu that an ordinary person gets to see. This is not to discount the existing opposition parties, nor to dismiss the need for their unity. Opposition unity is necessary but not sufficient. The opposition needs a glue that holds it together and a glow to radiate hope among the people. As of now, it doesn’t seem to have either. This is why we need an alternative to supplement the existing opposition… Such an alternative to Modi would need, first of all, a positive and believable message about India’s future… Once we have a positive and believable message, we need credible messengers… Finally, we need a powerful machine to carry this message across the country. This machine needs two parts: Organisation and communication.”

Rajdeep Sardesai: “Seven years into their terms as PM, Nehru, Indira and Manmohan Singh faced political setbacks…Modi too now faces his moment of truth. His initial appeal was drawn from his claim to be an anti-establishment folk hero, a man from humble origins who combined religio-nationalist zeal with the image of an anti-corruption crusader and a development icon. For seven years, this image has been artfully managed, a teflon-like coating ensuring that no blame ever stuck to it. The Covid-19 surge is the first time that the glossy protective veil around the PM’s persona is being lifted and a governance deficit lies exposed: the optics of a tika utsav for example cannot compensate for a floundering vaccine policy… The headline-grabbing dream merchant of 2014 must now transform himself into a nuts and bolts crisis manager to ensure that his government too, like those led by other PMs in their seventh year, is not pushed into ventilator mode.”

Thinks 149

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky in FT: “I think the psychology of the leader often becomes the psychology of the organisation..The trick is to be optimistic..The optimism has to be rooted in facts that you can present as a case to people, to tell them, ‘I’m optimistic because here’s where we’re going, and here’s how we’re going to get there.”

Your Money Will Be Digital. Will It Be Smart?: by Andy Mukherjee. “It may be more practical for central banks to make their digital currencies smart. The private sector can do the programming. The money we put in the car’s wallet would handle fuel, parking and toll expenses. The refrigerator’s app could deduct an item the online grocery forgot to send and pay the rest of the bill without messing up the entire delivery.”

100 reasons to love Satyajit Ray: from Mint

Microns and AMP: A Powerful Combo (Part 5)

The Possibilities

Now that we have understood both sides of the AMP story and seen the possibilities, it is time to look at how microns and AMP can enable some very interesting new use cases and why I believe that microns and AMP are made for each other.

Content Microns

The News micron can have just the headlines and choosing a headline can show more details in-place rather than having to click through to a website.
It could have a daily quiz to test one’s knowledge about events. This can be linked with a leaderboard.
The Word micron can have a “fill in the banks” test to ensure that the meaning and usage has been correctly understood.
The Markets micron can offer real-time updates on the stock market – in the same micron.
The Cricket micron can provide live scores without having to open the app or visit a website.
For students, a micron can have an interactive Q&A AMPlet with immediate feedback on whether one got it right or wrong. Imagine using this for exam preparation. (Of course, this can also be via apps but the push format of scheduled emails makes it especially powerful.)
Game microns can offer many interesting timepass moments: word jumbles, hangman, crossword, chess, housie (tambola/bingo) are some examples.

Marketing Microns

The content ideas above can be used by marketers to use microns for branding: offer a daily short email which has more than just static content, making it more inviting for consumers to open and interact – thus reinforcing the mental availability of the brand
AMP-enabled microns can also be used for reactivation. Since customers don’t seem to be reacting to regular promotional mails, a different approach can be taken with microns which offer interactivity – using carousels, accordions or lists. These microns can be made to stand out in the inbox via the use of BIMI and µ.
Brands can also send surveys and interactive forms via microns – they are more likely to generate a response because the hurdle of clicking through and moving to a different page is eliminated.
AMP microns can also be used to profile users – every micron can ask them a question which they can answer within the email itself, thus helping brands do better personalisation with information shared voluntarily.

These are just a few ideas to get started. Email’s 4 billion users are ready for an experience upgrade – without having to download another app or leave the email inbox. The power of microns (short, informational) can be combined with AMP (dynamic and interactive) to create new innovations in the most powerful communication channel with the largest reach. A new world awaits – for content consumption and marketing communications. Welcome to the micron-verse – powered by AMP!

Thinks 148

A virtuous cycle of entrepreneurship: by Neelkanth Mishra. “In a country notorious for stifling private enterprise, can the next decade be the best ever for new businesses?”

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life: from NYT. “Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.”

The Truth About Mental Models with Shane Parrish: from Superorganizers. “With mental models, you learn to walk by falling down. You can learn the lessons, but you can’t be taught how to put them into practice. In order to do that, you take those lessons and go out and over-fit them—try to apply them to as many situations as you can, and that will give you tons of practice with their limitations. But by doing that, you’ll gather all the information you need in your own reflections to start creating your very own abstractions.”

Microns and AMP: A Powerful Combo (Part 4)

AMP Use Cases

There are many excellent examples of what AMP can do. Here are some sites which offer animations and videos to show the power of AMP:

Forms, Carousels and Slideshows, Accordions, Sidebars, Lists, Selectors, Lightbox – these are some of the things that AMP enables in emails.

From these building blocks emerge many ideas for the B2B and B2C world. Ray Schultz has a good summary of the Dyspatch paper: “AMP recipients can interact with live content without clicking through to a web page. They can take a survey, respond to an invite or order merchandise…In B2B, AMP emails can be deployed for events, demos, comments, surveys, onboarding, product feedback and requests for reviews. In B2C, AMP can drive improved ecommerce shopping, reservation bookings, upsells, recommendations, referral campaigns, product reviews, abandoned cart campaigns and newsletters…Dynamic emails produce 34.64% more opens and 60% more click-throughs than blast emails.” Of course, there are still limitations. “AMP emails have limitations that require having an HTML fallback. For instance, they expire after 30 days: After that, the recipient who opens it will see the HTML or plaintext, fallback, the study notes. In addition, some email providers don’t support AMP, and forwarded emails won’t show AMP.”

Dyspatch calls AMP the future of email. “AMP for email brings new opportunities to stand out in saturated customer inboxes, with few risks. AMP has already been proven to deliver significant ROI as compared to standard HTML emails, and with more adoption coming from various ESPs and marketing automation platforms, we expect that AMP will redefine how marketers build relationships with their customers, both in transactional and marketing emails.”

The summary: AMP for email is new and exciting; it offers marketers many innovative ideas to strengthen the brand-customer relationship; there are still significant challenges in mass adoption; it remains a “technology for the future” (much as it was 2 years ago when it was announced).

Thinks 147

Ruchir Sharma in FT: “The idea the state has been shrinking for 40 years is a myth..The ‘neoliberal’ era that began with Reagan and Thatcher has instead presided over ever-bigger government.”

Adam Grant on Rethinking: “I don’t think it’s easy for most people. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to get better at it. For a lot of people, rethinking requires skills they are uncomfortable with. One is valuing humility over pride. You have to be comfortable acknowledging your limitations—the discomfort of doubt over the comfort of conviction. You need to be willing to recognize that you’re wrong, which is difficult for a lot of people, especially those in leadership positions.”

John Stossel: “When markets are free and private property is protected, innovation happens in ways that allow ordinary people to live better. Over time, that innovation multiplies. It’s why, today, most of us live better than kings once did.”

Microns and AMP: A Powerful Combo (Part 3)

The Criticism

As with every new technology, not everyone is excited. Devin Coldewey offers a counter view on AMP. The main criticism is that it is an attempt by Google to convert what is an open standard (email) into something with a moat. “AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to. Using its privileged position as the means through which people find a great deal of content, Google is attempting to make it so that the content itself must also be part of a system it has defined.”

Besides, according to Devin, AMP also tampers with the simplicity of email. “This is the great genius and curse of email, that all you can do is send messages back and forth. It’s not always the best option, but it’s rarely the worst. If it’s more complicated than that, you use something other than email: a chat app, a video call, a file host. These useful items are often located adjacent to email, sometimes closely integrated, but they’re never actually part of it. This is a good thing. The closest you get is little things like adding something automatically to your calendar or scraping flight info from an itinerary. Ultimately it’s still just reading something. What Google wants to do is bridge that moat, essentially to allow applications to run inside emails, limited ones to be sure, but by definition the kind of thing that belongs on the other side of the moat.”

Vijith Assar adds: “One of the fundamental miscalculations of AMP for Email is that it degrades the delivery speed of a medium in which nobody really likes rich-message content to begin with. AMP for the web was a faster subset of the standard web, but AMP for Email is a slower superset of standard email. The product name is a misnomer — it’s not accelerated at all!… AMP for Email will probably fail, in part because it is not very good but also because most ideas fail in technology, in business, in the world. But the biggest flaw of AMP for Email is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version two of email.”

For the more technically inclined, there is a 2019 thread about on “AMP for email is bad” at Hacker News (YCombinator). Chad White and Jason Hall have a good analysis on the pros and cons of AMP emails. Oscar Adika discusses the challenges with AMP, concluding thus: “Whether AMP for email will become more than a trend remains debatable. There are benefits and downsides. Nevertheless, it’s budding technology, and it might be worth checking out, even if just for its immense potential. Hanna Kline has a section covering AMP’s drawbacks, risks, and workarounds. Her suggestion: “Regardless of whether you think it’s a good idea, others will make use of it. Even if you decide to be a last-call adopter, you should keep an eye on the value others get from it.”

Thinks 146

What history tells you about post-pandemic booms: from The Economist. “People spend more, take more risks—and demand more of politicians.” And: “Social unrest seems to peak two years after the pandemic ends. Enjoy the coming boom while it lasts. Before long, there may be a twist in the tale.”

James Otteson: “What has changed over humanity’s recent history is not biology, psychology, physiology, ecology, or geography. What has changed, instead, is their attitudes. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has demonstrated in her magisterial three-volume investigation under the general title The Bourgeois Era, the most salient factor distinguishing the post-1800 era from everything that went before is the attitudes people held toward others. Before that period, the standard background assumption people had was that some people are superior to others – more specifically, one’s own people are superior to those other people – and hence people believed they were under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to treat all human beings as their moral equals. What began as an inkling in the sixteenth century, gained some traction in the seventeenth century, and then began to spread in the eighteenth century, was the idea that cooperation was not only allowable, but morally appropriate; and not only with some people, but with ever more people. As that idea spread, more and more cooperative behavior was engaged in, leading to mutually beneficial exchanges and partnerships, which launched world prosperity on the precipitate upward slope we have seen since.” [via CafeHayek]

An amazing visualisation of airport runways

Microns and AMP: A Powerful Combo (Part 2)

The Excitement

Let’s start by understanding AMP Email.

AMP.dev has the basics: “AMP for email allows senders to include AMP components inside rich engaging emails, making modern app functionality available within email. The AMP email format provides a subset of AMPHTML components for use in email messages, that allows recipients of AMP emails to interact dynamically with content directly in the message. More than 270 billion emails are sent every day, it is the pillar of many consumer and enterprise workflows. However the content that is sent in an email message is still limited – messages are static, can become out of date, and are not actionable without opening a browser. AMP email seeks to enhance and modernize the email experience through added support for dynamic content and interactivity while keeping users safe.”

Amp.dev outlines the benefits: increased in-mail capabilities, increased personalisation, interactive customer experience and improved and smarter services. Pepipost (a Netcore service) adds: “AMP allows you to create website-like experiences in emails by allowing you to use carousels, accordions, and accept recipients’ inputs from the email. For example, it will let your subscribers take actions such as respond to questionnaires, book an appointment, take a survey and RSVP for an event straight from the inbox. They don’t have to leave the email window, click on a link and go to an external website. Which increases the chance of your email recipients interacting with these emails and take action compared to the regular emails. Also, it prevents your emails from getting stale as the content of the email gets updated in real-time.”

Sendpulse makes the case for AMP:

Widens the opportunities for email usage. AMP emails provide email subscribers a more web-page-like experience. In other words, email marketers can implement interactive functions that are typically only available on webpages — carousels, forms, confirmations, accordions, event invitations, replying to a comment, etc., directly in the email inbox.
Revitalizes email technology. The old technology, email, that started to look a bit outdated has been refreshed to meet modern demands. Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels, now more than ever. People continue to use it globally, and have since the early 2000s, not much has changed. AMP email intends to refresh static emails with more dynamic web-page-like content.
Offers a new level of personalization. With AMP email, marketers can receive and send more data than ever. This feature allows brands to personalize emails even further. Besides, because AMP emails are dynamic, the message content can update within the email (like weather reports, prices, webinar dates), so subscribers will always receive highly personalized content on demand without even leaving their email client.

But not everyone is thrilled with AMP.