Thinks 834

Economic Times: “According to Buffett, playing it too safe will not result in wealth creation. Mistakes are an integral part of the investment journey, and the important factor is how quickly you realize your mistake and trim your losses. Cutting weeds, or dead stocks, is critical for portfolio growth. If your money is stuck in dead stocks, your overall portfolio will not outperform. Therefore, as an investor, you must be willing to accept and learn from your mistakes for long-term success…Buffett advises investors not to attempt to increase allocations to stocks that have fallen, as they may find themselves catching falling knives. Instead, they should focus on stocks with strong fundamentals and growth potential. If they continue to invest in weeds, their portion in the portfolio will keep rising, hindering overall performance.”

Andrew McCarthy: “Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step. Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more…The great naturalist John Muir keenly observed, “I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in.” Has anyone ever emerged from ambling through nature for an hour and regretted their improved state of being? Perhaps this is what that dedicated walker Henry David Thoreau was referring to when he wrote, “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” So the secret is out there. It’s under the leaves on the trail. It’s right there on the sidewalk.”

John T. Reed: “When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.” [via Shane Parrish]

NYTimes: “It’s important to understand that while a midday nap will probably replenish your energy enough to get you through your day, said Rebecca Spencer, a sleep science researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it won’t necessarily negate the health risks that may come with insufficient sleep at night…Not only is the length of time you sleep important for health, Dr. Spencer said, but also the quality of that sleep, which is determined by how much time you spend in its different stages.”

Ruchir Sharma: “More than low interest rates, the easy money era was shaped by an increasingly automatic state reflex to rescue — to rescue the economy from disappointing growth even during recoveries, to rescue not only banks and other companies but also households, industries, financial markets and foreign governments in times of crisis. The latest bank runs show that the easy money era is not over. Inflation is back so central banks are tightening, but the rescue reflex is still gaining strength. The stronger it grows, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. In stark contrast to the minimalist state of the pre-1929 era, America now leads a rescue culture that keeps growing to new maximalist extremes.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 7)

Future

Many years ago (2004), I had written about my Kumbh Mela Cycle theory – that big innovations in computing come every 12 years or so: “1945 saw the invention of the world’s first computer, the ENIAC. In the late 1950s, IBM switched from using vacuum tubes to using transistors, and also launched Fortran. In the early 1970s, we had the invention of the microprocessor, along with Unix and the relational database. In 1982-83, the personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1992-94, we had Wintel come into being, with the launch of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the Intel Pentium. It also saw the creation of Mosaic, the graphical web browser, and the start of the proliferation of the Internet.” Almost two decades later, the cycle has (sort-of) continued: 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, and in the late 2010s and early 2020s, we started seeing the rise of Generative AI.

Going forward, I think the Kumbh Mela Cycle will probably be compressed given the rapidity of innovation that is happening in multiple disciplines simultaneously. Even as it has been an amazing ride in my 56 years lifetime, tomorrow’s world promises a lot more. As consumers, business owners and managers, researchers and entrepreneurs, we will see many new and exciting technologies in our lives, with the promise of many more revolutions in the years and decades to come. Here is some crystal-gazing.

From my vantage point, there are two revolutions which will have a huge impact for consumers and businesses:

  • AR/VR (augmented reality and virtual reality): this may or may not lead to the metaverse and is taking longer to come to life, but it will transform how we communicate, play, socialise and get entertained. It is one innovation away – just like ChatGPT brought the 50 years of AI innovations to life.
  • Martech: this will shift focus from new customer acquisition (a $400 billion industry with half of it as AdWaste) to existing customers, and empower both brands and consumers at the cost of Big Adtech. I have written about this extensively.

ChatGPT’s response about the future digital revolutions (which I have edited lightly, and have also removed duplicates from earlier lists):

  1. Virtual and Augmented Reality
  2. 5G
  3. Blockchain, which is expected to lead to new applications in fields such as finance, supply chain management, and digital identity
  4. Quantum Computing, which will enable breakthroughs in fields such as cryptography, simulation, and optimization
  5. Autonomous Systems, such as autonomous vehicles and drones, which is expected to greatly increase efficiency and safety in transportation, delivery, and other industries
  6. Edge Computing, which involves processing data closer to the source of the data rather than in centralized data centers
  7. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is a form of AI that mimics human intelligence
  8. 3D Printing, which is expected to greatly increase the efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing, as well as enabling new applications in fields such as bioprinting and space exploration
  9. Digital Twins, which are virtual representations of physical objects or systems
  10. Wearables, which will improve our ability to monitor and track our health, as well as enable new forms of entertainment and communication

Here is Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech (2022):

All this is just in the narrow world of the computing and digital ecosystem. Technology, defined broadly by Atanu Dey as know-how, or “knowledge of how to do”, continues to impact every sphere of life and business. So, lots to look forward to, and a great time to be an entrepreneur. Imagine, Innovate and Initiate!

Thinks 833

WSJ on the technology skills every employee should have: “An explosion of analytical, organizational and communication technologies is remaking every aspect of office work. Whether people work in sales, marketing, project management, design or many other fields, employers expect them to manipulate and analyze data, and bundle it into slick presentations. And as remote work has become the norm, people must know the advanced features of online collaboration. “There is no debate as to whether technology is not just an enabler, but is really a driver of disruption, of change, of value, within organizations,” says Columbia Business School dean Costis Maglaras. “And as a result, [there] needs to be some core knowledge that people need to bring with them, even if they’re not going to be technologists themselves.”

WaPo: “Lentils conceal their superpowers with a dowdy exterior. Pound for pound, raw lentils have more protein than steak. While not as protein-dense once cooked, they pack even more iron than meat, in addition to other vitamins and minerals.”

Azeem Azhar: “AI is the real Web 3…I believe large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are the future of the web. Web2 has transitioned from a social web to one ruled by major online aggregators like Facebook. For the past few years, the search for Web3 has been focused on building a data model on the blockchain. Despite its promise, adoption has been slow, and developers in the Web3 space face regulation challenges due to some dubious claims and behaviours. In contrast, AI’s rapid improvement has led to the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and new behavioural interactions across the internet. These models have immense potential to revolutionize how we access and use information online. For example, even though products like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are still in development, they are already being used more than blockchain-based Web3 products for practical day-to-day purposes. I have gotten more done using ChatGPT than I ever did on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.”

Economist: ““Games, even before video games, were a way for people to meet one another and spend time together socially,” says John Hanke, Niantic’s chief executive. “So when you talk about getting people together through some electronic mediation, games are already a natural fit.” As interactions are more electronically mediated, gaming touches all corners of life. “Perhaps one day, we won’t even have the term ‘gamer’,” says Jim Ryan, chief executive of Sony’s gaming division, “because everyone will play in some form or other.”” More: “When video games were just electronic toys, this might not have mattered. But as games expand and spill into other formats, it is becoming clear that whoever dominates gaming is going to wield clout in every form of communication. In every sense, the future of the media is in play.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 6)

SaaS

The cloud has transformed our lives – email, files, photos are all stored on servers rather than our own devices. Many of the services we use would not have been possible had it not been for the cloud. For enterprises also, software has started moving from the enterprise LAN to the cloud. Netcore has had SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings for many years – though for the early years, we did not think of ourselves as a SaaS company.

The mindset shift happened when Kalpit (Netcore’s CEO) and I attended SaaStr, a conference in San Jose, in February 2019. As I wrote a couple of years ago: “Software developers wanted APIs that they could integrate into the code they were writing without having to talk to salespeople. For this, the product needed a self-serve and perhaps even a free trial. This needed a new approach to product development and sales. It needed targeting developers – which needed a very different approach then meeting CIO and CMOs. The SaaS way of marketing and sales was also different – a new world of SDRs (sales development representatives) and ABM (account-based marketing) was enabling companies to reach out globally without a physical presence in multiple countries. The primary metric was not annual sales but MRR (monthly recurring revenue). There was a new language of business that had fuelled a new generation of companies – and we were oblivious to both the vocabulary and the competition. SaaStr opened my eyes to this new world. And the question that kept coming to me was – why had I not seen it earlier? A few knowledgeable colleagues had told me about the new world of SaaS – I ignored them repeatedly. I did not recognise that a new set of decision-makers were emerging in enterprises – developers, product managers. I also failed to recognise that a new class of companies was emerging – aggressive, exponentially growing startups. I was still locked to a worldview that sales and marketing of our solutions had to be via face-to-face connect in large organisations.”

We have now brought in the SaaS approach to every aspect of our business. Netcore has grown to $100 million ARR, through a mix of organic expansion and acquisitions. SaaS is the one revolution I was late to recognise, but did not miss. We are now in the thick of the action with many new ideas around CPaaS – hotlines with Email 2.0 (AMP) – and Martech – unified stack and site search for omnichannel personalisation. The ProfitXL [LINK] focus is what can help Netcore expand its footprint globally.

**

As I look back, the computing revolution changed the direction of my life, the Internet revolution gave me my first success, the mobile revolution was what I missed, and the SaaS revolution has given me the foundation to build an enduring, great company. An entrepreneur’s life is about climbing mountains beyond mountains; at age 56 I am fortunate to have climbed many even though I stumbled on a few. I have seen amazing changes in digital technology through my lifetime, and I am sure I will see many more in the future.

Thinks 832

FT on war games: “Due to their close resemblance to real conflict experience, games offer compelling evidence for policymakers facing difficult choices. Indeed, they can be such powerful devices of influence that organisations have been known to change rules to sway outcomes and leak the results when it benefits their cause. A game designed to answer a question — who would win a war over Taiwan? How would American support for Ukraine affect the war? — needs five qualities. It needs to be believable, it needs the right players with the correct expertise and demographics, and there must be enough players and game iterations to come to realistic conclusions. The best war games control for bias within their scenarios and rules. Good data collection is vital.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “The root cause of the milk shortages isn’t even being talked about. The Bangalore Milk Union president admitted that “many small milk producers have given up on rearing cows as it has become unsustainable”. Though he doesn’t mention the underlying reason for this change, the bans on cow slaughter and recent attacks on people transporting cattle surely have reduced the incentives for farmers from stepping into this minefield called milk production.”

Shane Parrish: “Things you control: Your effort.  Your beliefs. Your actions. Your attitude. Your integrity. Your thoughts. The food you eat. How kind you are. How reflective you are.  How thoughtful you are. The type of friend you are. The information you consume. The people you surround yourself with.”

Martin Casado: “Generative AI is a very different type of system. The cost of creating something new now is very, very cheap. For example, look at these large image models. If you’re like, “OK, so I’m Martin.” If you enter the prompt, “Martin in the Alps, drinking a martini with an alpaca,” the cost to create that is about one one-hundredth of a penny. This is relatively new technology, and relatively unoptimized technology. If you compare that generation, that one one-hundredth of a penny, to hiring a designer or going on Photoshop or, God forbid, flying to the Alps, you’re talking about four or five orders of magnitude in difference in cost, the time to create that. And that’s very rare in my 20 years’ experience doing—to have four of five orders of magnitude of improvement on something people care about. The way that I think about it is: The creation of the microchip brought the cost of compute, the marginal cost of compute, to zero. And with the internet, and with software, the marginal cost of distribution went to zero, meaning you can reach anybody. And that’s why software businesses are these 80%-margin businesses. I think there’s a chance that with these generative things, not traditional AI, the marginal cost of creation can converge on zero.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 5)

Mobile

I was early to the mobile revolution, but this was the one I missed as an entrepreneur – multiple times. As part of Netcore, I had started multiple services: an SMS content service, an SMS groups service, a mobile web portal, and had even tried something called phone.cc to create a dedicated mobile portal for every mobile. All failed. What I missed was the smartphone and apps revolution – both from the B2C and B2B standpoints.

I was one of the early buyers of the iPhone. I was in the US in August 2007 – a few weeks after it was launched. I went to the Apple store in New York and bought one. I had a colleague at work do a jailbreak so I could use it in India. I should have seen the power and potential of apps, but for some reason, I did not focus on the consumer side. I stuck to the enterprise SMS services that Netcore had launched, perhaps bitten by the repeated failures of the MyToday variants in the previous few years.

A decade or so later, I missed the app engagement and analytics layer in the marketing automation platform Netcore was building. While I had correctly identified the emergence of martech, the focus was more on journeys and the web platform. The exponential growth of apps energised by the launch of cheap data from Jio was a big miss in Netcore’s journey. We did catch up in terms of features over the next few years, but as they say “the early bird catches the worm” and we were late.

As I look back, the mobile revolution was what I missed in India. It was going slowly until Jio revolutionised mobile data with its aggressive pricing. In the early days, could I have focused on global markets like I did with IndiaWorld? Perhaps. Maybe, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money in the global mobile apps game where I thought we would not have a significant advantage working out of India. But I underestimated the power and ubiquity of the smartphone. During those years, I was also trying to think of ideas to transform India with digital technology. While this later came to fruition with Niti Digital and my work in the 2011-14 political campaign, I had by then moved too far away from technology to get an intuitive sense of the new opportunities being created in the mobile and smartphone era. I do sometimes wonder: what if I had recognised the potential of apps and smartphones? I was an early adopter and I knew something transformative had taken place with the launch of the iPhone. What should I have done as an entrepreneur? All I can say after all these years is: it was a road not taken, and that did make a difference.

Thinks 831

Economist: “The real point of Mr Xi’s foreign policy is to make the world safer for the Chinese Communist Party. Over time, its flaws will be hard to hide. A mesh of expedient bilateral relationships creates contradictions. China has backed Iran but chosen to ignore its ongoing nuclear escalation, which threatens China’s other clients in the region. In Ukraine any durable peace requires the consent of Ukrainians. It should also involve accountability for war crimes and guarantees against another attack. China objects to all three: it does not believe in democracy, human rights or constraining great powers—whether in Ukraine or Taiwan. Countries that face a direct security threat from China, such as India and Japan, will grow even warier. Indeed, wherever a country faces a powerful, aggressive neighbour, the principle that might is right means that it will have more to fear.”

Pratik Sharma: “While over 60 per cent of our population continues to be engaged in the agricultural sector, their contribution to GDP is about 17-20 per cent, implying very poor per capita incomes for this population. The lack of reforms has led to farmers owning smaller lands, and they cannot leverage any economies of scale. The Indian political economy can be broadly termed as ‘naturally populist, seldom liberal.’ Economically liberal ideas and reform agendas are seldom implemented, but major public policy and spending flow into popular schemes.”

Jaspreet Bindra: “Two major factors underpin successful networks: network effects and switching costs. In the former, people use a network because that’s where their friends are. Most of us have tried weaning off WhatsApp to go to Telegram or Signal, but have returned because our friends are still on WhatsApp. Similarly, all sellers blindly go to Amazon because most buyers are there and vice-versa. Switching costs imply the trouble of building your social graph and preferences all over again. Moving from Twitter to a Mastodon or Koo means you need to rebuild your friends circle. Moving away from Amazon implies abandoning your e-books which are locked in that platform. You would have even experienced the costs to switch operating systems—say from Android to iOS, or Mac to Windows—and the sheer hard work and annoyance that entails.”

Tyler Cowen: “In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that. As for the children, most of them will be willing if not downright eager…In the near future, such friends will be quite real, albeit automated, and they will talk back to our children as directly as we wish. Having an AI service for your child will be as normal as having a pet, except the AI service will never bite. It will be carried around in something like a tablet, though with a design that is oriented toward the AI.” Reminds me of “Klarna and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 4)

Internet

In the summer of 1994, I was looking for something new for my entrepreneurial venture. I had failed multiple times over the past couple years, and needed to pivot. This is what I wrote in 2004:

The Internet was far removed from my life (other than using email through an email account on NCSTs servers, along with the Usenet newsgroups). I had a business developing image processing software. That was just not working. Efforts to sell our Image WorkBench solution to metallurgists and medical institutions had been largely unsuccessful. It was two years since I had returned from the US to set up a business in India, and I could see that we had gone quite wrong in our business activities.

As I started thinking then about what to do, I started reading various magazines trying to spot future trends. It was then that I came across the Internet as the new information highway. For all practical purposes, India’s linkage to the Internet then was through ERNET, the educational and research network. Access to it was limited.

Some more reading and thinking led me to put a concept called SpiderNet. I imagined it as a network that would have all kinds of India-specific information which people could use their computers to dial into. Though I didn’t make the link then, it was a kind-of private CompuServe or AOL. The only operating network then in India was Business Indias aXcess. So, there seemed to be plenty of opportunities.

The summer of 1994 was when I put together my first ideas for an electronic news and information service. As the months passed, the SpiderNet ideas gave way to IndiaWorld, an Internet-based news and information service primarily focused on Indians outside India and others interested in India. Instead of trying to set up our own network, we would use the Internet as the distribution medium.

I launched IndiaWorld as India’s first Internet portal in March 1995. Here is the story:

The IndiaWorld story begins in September 1994. I was in the US, trying to figure out a good business to do in an area other than software exports. It was the time when the Internet and Web were just about beginning to catch people’s fancies. I spent a few weeks at a friend’s place, browsing the Web on a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem with Netcom’s Netcruiser account. The experience was absolutely amazing. It was quite evident then that the Web as a medium would have a significant impact on how information was disseminated. The Web offered a good business opportunity: attract the NRIs (I was one myself!) with good intent, and then look at offshoots in electronic commerce.

That was the vision of IndiaWorld: a bridge between Indians worldwide.

On my return to India in November 1994, I wrote to various publishers and talked to a number of companies and individuals to participate in the venture by offering their content. It was tough explaining the Internet and the Web to people in India then: there was no commercial Internet access provider (our “shell” account was through NCST/ERNET). Most thought the Internet to be another variation of a satellite channel! I would take a notebook with NCSA Mosaic, and show them the power of hyperlinks. It wasn’t quite clear how it would make an impact on businesses, but yes, it was going to transform how NRIs got their information.

Our focus was on IndiaWorld as a news and information service for NRIs. With help (and content) from Indian Express, India Today, Dataquest, Reader’s Digest, Kensource, Crisil, CMIE, DSP Financial, Professional Management Group and Laxman, IndiaWorld was formally launched from a server in the US on March 13, 1995.

(There is more on the IndiaWorld story here.)

And the rest, as they say, is history! Five years after imagining IndiaWorld, I sold it to Satyam Infoway for $115 million in what was then one of Asia’s largest Internet deals. I am still remembered as one of India’s two early Internet pioneers. (Sabeer Bhatia, who sold Hotmail to Microsoft, for $400 million, is the other.) I did it out of India – riding the Internet revolution and its many ups and downs through five years. The PC introduced me to the digital world; the Internet gave me success, money, fame, and freedom.

Thinks 830

Carlo Cipolla: “Between 1780 and 1850 an unprecedented and far-reaching revolution changed the face of England. From then on the world was no longer the same. Historians have often used and abused the word “revolution” to mean a radical change, but no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution opened the door to a completely new world, a world of new and untapped sources of energy such as coal, oil, electricity, and the atom; a world in which man found himself able to handle huge masses of energy to an extent inconceivable in the preceding rural world.” [ via CafeHayek]

Patrick McKenzie: “The thing killing banks is a very simple idea with profound consequences. It is not a secret: when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall. This is both almost a law of nature and also perpetually underestimated in how much it affects the world outside of asset prices.”

James Gorman: “I had no fear because to me, strategy comes from fundamental beliefs about the industry structure, and then you put guiding principles around it. Not everybody got an equal vote. I had plenty of people telling me, “You’re wrong.” I said to one of them, “Okay, if I’m wrong, I’ll fail, and I won’t need to be kicked out; I’ll walk out. And maybe they’ll tap you on the shoulder and you can run the place. Until then, we’re doing it my way.””

Ginni Rometty: “I think if you shut your eyes and think about when you learned the most in life, it’ll be at times when you were in risky or uncertain situations. That crystallization made it much easier for me to take on risky changes in different jobs that were really difficult. I realized that when I put myself in those circumstances, even though it didn’t feel right on the inside, I learned a lot. I also learned that just because I may feel uncomfortable inside, it doesn’t mean I have to tell everyone that at the same time. It’s okay to be uncomfortable on the inside, and I would go on to find that to be true whether it was a person, a company, or a country.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 3)

PCs

In 1982, TIME magazine named the PC as its “Machine of the Year” (instead of naming a “Man of the Year”). An excerpt: “There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year’s news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes. That is why, after weighing the ebb and flow of events around the world, TIME has decided that 1982 is the year of the computer. … TIME’S Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.”

I am certain that the cover story influenced my father to purchase a computer in 1983 for his office. It was a decision that changed the trajectory of my life. I was in college (11th standard at St. Xavier’s College). With free time on my hands, I would go to my father’s office and write software. Here is what I had written on my previous blog in 2004: “I remember using my first PC in 1983-4. I remember getting a ZX Sinclair home but didn’t use it much. At the same time, my father had also got a computer at work. It was very expensive (Rs 200,000 or so, when the dollar was Rs 8 per dollar). Since we couldn’t find a software programmer who would stay long enough (!), I decided to learn BASIC programming, and would go after college and write programs on it. [I] wrote many interactive games then: one that simulated a one-day cricket international (remember that was the time India had won the Cricket World Cup), Monopoly, and a game I called MinderMast (guessing a 4-digit number in upto 10 tries). The computer was my life then – that was how my love affair with technology began. Till then, I wanted to follow my father’s footsteps and become a civil engineer and build bridges and buildings. The computer in the office changed my life.”

I learnt some theory about the digital world during my IIT years, and did some low-level assembly language programming for a communications project. Computers came back into my life at Columbia University during my Masters education. That is when I started writing software seriously, something I continued at NYNEX, and then the early days of my entrepreneurial career. I wrote (along with my co-founder Sanjay) a multimedia database in 1992-3, and then an image processing software (Image WorkBench) in 1993-94. None of these succeeded commercially. By then, the next revolution was already underway – and I had already started thinking about how I could play a part in it.