On our final episode, we speak with Sanjeev Bikchandani – a messiah of India’s Internet start-ups. The founder and Vice chairman of InfoEdge and also the co-founder of Ashoka University. He was recently awarded the Padma Shri in Jan 2020. He got into the IITs and IIMs - the crem de la crem - but he pursued advertising. A free thinker who started Naukri.com as a small idea within a string of ideas. Tune in to hear about his spectacular journey, views on venture capital and education.

Quotables:

“We’re prisoners of our visiting cards, EMI’s and I didn’t want to fall into that trap of chasing success of false proxies”

“ I said no to so many pre-series A like Ola and FlipKart without meeting them, Taxi, BigBasket, LensKart and the only reason was that I could not figure out how they make money. But in all the companies we invested in - we knew how they could make money”

“Truly great entrepreneurs don't listen. They have a conversation, but they will do what is right. Not so great entrepreneurs also won't listen, but they will end up doing the wrong thing”

“ If you invest behind a team that needs more than 2% hand holding,  you’re after the wrong company ”

“Your reputation is your biggest asset”

Episode notes and transcriptions available on: https://lightbox.vc/new-thinking/

Today, Hindustan Unilever is the most well-known FMCG name in India – with over 8 million stores selling its products, the company had a turnover of 45,000 CR+ in FY21. However, this wasn’t the case when Vindi Banga joined the company. A career spanning an immense 33 years, Vindi climbed the HUL ladder as swiftly as anyone has, ending up as chairman of the company and the president of the global foods, home and personal care division of Unilever. In this episode with Vindi Banga, we deep dive into what went on at HUL during the three decades that he was there, how the company thought of the Indian consumer, and how founders in India today should think about building their own brands and businesses.

Quotables: 

"Reigniting growth for our core consumer businesses and our brands meant really trying to understand where the innovation should go. That is all about listening to the customer and the consumer. We started a drive in the company to get everybody connected with the customer and the consumer."

"Communication with shareholders is extremely important, and that's a piece of advice for your founders. It's really important to engage with your shareholders."

"It doesn't matter if you keep collecting apples, oranges and pears if you don't have the best apples in town." 

Episode notes and transcriptions available on: https://lightbox.vc/new-thinking/

On this episode, we're speaking with an expert in investment management, Martin Green, who runs Cambrian asset management. ​​Martin has 25 years experience in the tech sector. He began his career at Morgan Stanley, where he was a senior executive at CNET Networks, which was later acquired by CBS and Meebo, which was acquired by Google. Today, we're going to talk to Martin about the world of crypto, DeFi and NFTs, Web 3.0, the creator economy, and pretty much everything that seems to be puzzling us in this new age and changing everything that's going on.

Quotables: 

1) "Now, in the case of bitcoin, what it's doing is, it's essentially a decentralized escrow service. It's giving certainty of the ability to settle a transaction. That's in my view what bitcoin does exceptionally well, and does it uniquely." 

2) "So, I'm not in favor of using coal to power bitcoin, but I am in favor of monstrous amounts of energy being utilized for very high value things. And I'm in favor of people being able to make those decisions without a central planning authority saying we like this energy usage, we don't like that energy usage. And I'm also in favor of energy production, I should say that is, as sustainable as possible. So, I realize those things are a little bit in conflict. But I just wanted to say that to start now, bitcoin does, I should say, utilize a fair amount of energy. The amount that is used is in direct relationship to its certainty of settlement, its security. And so, if you want permissionless, decentralized security, it has to come from somewhere."

3) "So imagine if you go back to the origins of the internet and you say, would it be valuable to have the ability to transfer bits across a distributed computer network and without having to clear them through a central intermediary? And then someone proposed TCP IP, and that became a standard. Now imagine if instead of TCP IP being just an open protocol where there is no finite number of TCP IP addresses. Imagine if there was, but they were divisible. That's essentially what you have with bitcoin. And so, what you're doing is essentially owning a piece of the TCP IP infrastructure, but for value bits now."

Episode notes and transcriptions available on: https://lightbox.vc/new-thinking/