Focus on Sustainable Growth, NOT Growth at All Cost

You may have read my recent piece Billion Dollar Unicorns: Box Struggles in its Public Avatar, where I discussed how this darling of the VCs is finding the public market rather unfriendly:

Their stock is trading at $13.71 with a market capitalization of $1.65 billion. It touched a high of $24.73 soon after listing in January this year. Box had listed on the exchange at $14 a share. As expected, its valuation has fallen since pre-IPO levels. Prior to listing, Box had raised $564.1 million with their last round of $150 million valuing them at $2.4 billion.

>>>

How to Recruit Credible Advisors for your Startup

We get this question a lot. There is a chicken and an egg problem buried in it that you need to learn to navigate. In this post, I’d like to walk you through a strategy that we believe will work.

>>>

State of the Entrepreneurship Union: The Disease Has Become an Epidemic

I have always been bullish about the spread of entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon. My organization has worked diligently towards propagating the lessons learned from successful entrepreneurs to those coming after, on a global scale. It has been thrilling to watch the world adopt entrepreneurship as a key tool for economic development.

One of my worries have always been that the Silicon Valley disease of equating entrepreneurship with venture capital financing will also spread, corrupting and misleading inexperienced entrepreneurs around the world.

Well, I am very sorry to report that the disease has, indeed, spread.

In fact, it is now an epidemic.

>>>

Infidelity In The Digital Age

Ashley Madison, the web site that uses the tagline “Life is short, Have an Affair” is in the news for a hacking incident whereby the names and email ids of its 32 million registered users have now been exposed to the public.

The whole episode brings to focus a simple reality: large numbers of people are discontented in their relationships.

This has always been true, from the beginning of time. That it is still true should not come as a surprise to anyone.

In this digital age, there are convenient ways to explore various levels of extramarital intimacy. Ashley Madison and its competitors have simply tried to cater to that need in human beings. The “customer need” is amply validated by the site’s very large number of registered users. That they have failed to provide a solution that they promised – a private match-making service – is really what will potentially kill the company at this point, not their inability to identify a widely felt consumer need.
>>>

Why I Cook, and Suggest You Do Too

Recently, The Atlantic did an interesting story: Why Are Millennials So Obsessed With Food? It asks the question, why do people post so many food pictures on Facebook and Instagram, for instance.

“[Eve] Turow’s theory is that in a digital-first era, many people latch onto food as something that engages all of the senses and brings people together in physical space.”

>>>

Feminist Father vs. Chauvinist Father

We hear a lot of complaints about sexism and chauvinism in 21st-century Silicon Valley. I want to share some stories from India in the mid-20th century. It may sound prehistoric, but it wasn’t that long ago.

I was born into an old family in Calcutta, India. We were a traditional extended family with about 25 family members and another 25 servants living in one family home. My father is the youngest of six siblings — three brothers and three sisters. His father, my grandfather, was a good man, a noble patriarch, well-meaning, trying to do the right thing.

The right thing, however, in his worldview, did not include treating his sons and daughters equally.
>>>

Future of Education: Three Conversations

There is a lot going on in the educational technology market. In our effort to bring you continued insights in that market, we would like to bring to your attention three recent roundtable discussions:

>>>

Leadership and Brilliance Are Not the Same

When LinkedIn suggested “How I Lead” as the topic for this month’s Influencer series, I had to pause to consider how my thinking has evolved on the subject. How did I lead earlier in my career? How do I lead today? What has changed? What has remained constant? How do I synthesize what has worked particularly well?

I have founded and run four companies since 1994. In each case, I had a mission for value creation that was big, bold, important, clear, and I always made sure the mission was communicated to everyone on my team and to the external world with utmost authenticity.

When I started DAIS in 1994, my mission was to jumpstart a technology industry in Calcutta, using my MIT Computer Science background to plug my birthplace into the global startup eco-system. My team of ~50 understood that mission well. I also got the media to root for us, inspiring them with that vision. This helped us tremendously in recruiting talent at a time when “startup” and “Calcutta” were incongruous concepts.
>>>