Sunday Posts

It has been a while I blogged, but my life has completely changed during these couple of months. Overall, these changes have been positive. An idea that a colleague and I developed became a company by itself and received investment. We were pursuing this possibility for several months, but in the last twelve weeks or so, it actually happened.  The other change that happened is in my role. Given that we were working inside a larger business, I confined my role to innovation and product development, leaving the financial and revenue responsibilities to the owner of the business. However, this became untenable after the investment came through. There was a clear requirement of disconnecting from the other group businesses and necessity to have control of finance and operations aligned to the business goals of the entity itself. Therefore, when offered, I took on the CEO role, assuming, along with my thousand other things to do, the responsibility for money and investment.  In a w...

Over the last several months, I have made one significant change in my work. I have pivoted to China. It is fashionable to do so, and my own little project has nothing to do with the geopolitical shift of the Obama administration (though it was handy to borrow the term). It is also interesting. Only back in 2012, when I was starting my business and when the potential investors asked me endlessly which countries I should target, I was not sure. At best, there was this hyphenated pair of India-China, as two big Higher Education markets, and I spent the good part of the last four years focusing on India. But, as it would happen, my work shifted, somewhat on its own momentum, to China. Despite spending more time on India, the business got more students in China. And, more generally, when we explored new ways of doing education, we realised the difference between India and China: We got polite nods in China, though the Chinese partners mostly accepted the ideas for their own use...

Martin Reeves' TED talk, below, makes an important point: That there are other ways of thinking about strategy, business strategy, than the usual, mechanical, pursuit of efficiency. Whether or not you agree with Mr Reeves' point about building a business around the principles of the human immune system, you would perhaps agree that there is not much point in a strategy that crash and burn all too quickly. As for me, I would want to see this conversation, though this is NOT the point of the talk, as a part of a broader conversation about making businesses 'More Human', the title of a book by Steve Hilton (his arguments summarised in the video below). This is not what Martin Reeves is talking about - he is indeed arguing about a cleverer way of making strategy and rightly pointing out that the current methods of optimising is getting us nowhere - but one should remember that Corporate Strategy is built and executed within an environment of ideas, which is mechanica...

In the world of Unicorn companies , privately held start-ups with valuations of $1 billion or more,  global strategy is no longer what it used to be. In fact, the old, dated idea that one goes global only after securing its home market, and having cash flows to sustain far-flung operations, is as good as dead. Getting global fast, rather, is the thing to do, as the copy-and-catchup innovation, as popular in many fast-growing emerging markets, can alter the dynamic for a start-up quite dramatically by capturing large market share in foreign markets and becoming a threat almost instantly. Whatever we may think of them, copycats, imitators, etc., the copy-and-catchup ecosystem in India, China, Middle East and Africa, are made of very smart entrepreneurs, savvy technologists, and investors who are ready to back them either looking to exit in a global M&A or going global through acquisitions themselves. With this, right now, start-ups are usually born-global rather than not, and d...

I have faced this personally. When I tried to raise money for an Education Start-up in the UK, I would regularly get asked, during investor pitches, what our key markets would be. By default, everyone would assume that we would do India, specifically because of my heritage (UK Private education sector worked like that - minority ethnic founders enrolling students primarily from their ethnic groups), while I, cognisant of the complexities of the Indian market ( see my earlier post here ), would be far more circumspect.  Revisiting those discussions, and the experiences since (our sales efforts will go nowhere in India, but would eventually find traction in China), I still think that an innovative education start-up should have an India plan. The reason is obvious - India would simply be worlds largest market for Higher Education. China has more students right now, but India is at a different demographic point than China, and the growth in India would be far more dramatic. ...

Indian Education is a fascinating opportunity. It has scale and an extensive ecosystem of demand. It is badly regulated, but as such things mean in India, which helps the people who are already in and keep others out of it. As the Indian consumers get richer and demand more education, the opportunity in India gets more attractive. This is one of those multi-billion dollar market opportunities, which seem to lay untapped. And, as it is happening in other industries, one could reasonably expect a world-beating company being made by this market. Following the classic model of business growth, it should be possible for a visionary company to take advantage of this relatively protected domestic market and emerge as a player in the global stage. So far, it has failed to happen. There are some Indian organisations came close, NIIT and Aptech, the two computer training companies, among them. But in a fascinating saga worthy of strategy case studies, they both lost steam just when it seem...

Vocational Education is designed to be a poor man's thing. It is for those kids who faltered through the school and didn't do okay in the things that matter. Those who couldn't get the right GPA or work out the system of examinations to get a good college. Those whose parents never went to university and didn't know what counts in the game to get to good college. Those who perhaps couldn't pay the tuition for the private school. You get it - those who are not smart enough, not connected enough, didn't know enough. I see this as an opportunity. Because the whole system of exams and colleges are so misdirected. They are almost always preparing people with wrong skills and abilities, for professions that may cease to exist soon. I could see a model of vocational education that could be constructed on the back of various government attempts, vain and pointless as they may be, and provide a disruptive force in the education sector of the developing countries.  ...

India seems indecipherable. It is an exciting market, just that it never materialises. I have used one expression - borrowed somewhat from James Kynge's book on China - that while India looks like a huge multiplier effect for businesses from outside, the moment you set foot in the country, the endless game of divisions begins. Also, India is like El Dorado - everyone wants to go there, but no one knows how. After repeated failed efforts, excitements in the world markets, the sentiments are now cooling: The India play is treated with caution, often avoided in favour of more exciting regions, like Brazil, or Indonesia, and now even Burma or Mongolia. However, it is hard to ignore India. Apart from the fact that it has so many of the new consumers, it is a potential breeding ground for competition in other markets. Leave India to local companies for far too long and a competitor will certainly emerge, who will better the game in prized markets that you wanted to keep your eggs in...