Amendments made in the Snapdeal

The team set to work. The number kept being sharpened. The product range kept changing. A pilot project kicked off at Snapdeal. By the end of July, Snapdeal was processing 50,000 orders a day and made a revenue of $2 million in that month. All discounts were turned off. The company was selling low-value, high-margin … Read more

Yeah, well, that’s just like your opinion, man

Aggarwal: “Why didn’t you go to Ola for funding or look for another acquisition? You could have told them, acquire us. It will take you six-seven months. You’ll be there on day one.” What is Carpooling? The man from Hyderabad: “We tried to go to Ola. But we didn’t get any response from them?” Roadies … Read more

Quo vadis Flipkart

“This is a fundamental moment for Flipkart to think again,” says Chawla. He maintains that even though Flipkart and Amazon have roughly the same amount of cash and are around the same size, they’re not even playing the same game. And that is Flipkart’s key challenge. “They may both be burning billions, but GMV is … Read more

Ola set to launch operations in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka soon

Ola is preparing to launch its operations in Kathmandu, Paro, Dhaka, and Colombo by the fourth quarter of 2017, according to current and former employees with knowledge of the SoftBank-backed company’s activities. Expanding The Operations The first city where Ola will launch new operations is going to be Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Soon … Read more

Understanding The Diversification

The first port of calling for lenders were sellers on e-commerce sites. Traditionally, banks have shied away from lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to the dearth of reliable data on this segment, meaning they were not able to assess credit-worthiness definitively. But the steady stream of data on e-commerce sellers makes it … Read more

Reverse engineering YC’s India outreach

While YC is good at remotely evaluating companies across the globe, according to Cheung, in the absence of an India partner it relies strongly on Indian founders who are its alumni to provide insights. Both for the “product-market fit” for applications received from India and the basic diligence on applicants. This, in addition to a … Read more

If you need an Aspirin, you need an Aspirin

Before we talk about 1mg, let’s talk about the company that it was spun out of. Healthkart. It was founded in 2011 and sold dietary supplements online. It clocked a revenue of Rs 79 crore ($12 million approximately) and a loss of Rs 72 crore ($11 million approximately) in FY16 and its investors say is … Read more

Tech investing in India, circa 2009

In 2009, when Tiger first backed Flipkart, there was only a handful of institutional VCs in India. Most of these firms were small outposts of reputed US VC firms and had funds in the range of $100m to $200m to deploy in India. These firms traditionally made very few investments—10 to 15 per fund and … Read more