The Playbook

Startups are mostly associated with non-hierarchical organisation structures, cool workplaces and at times, overall disdain for “boring processes.” However, if the past decade of flamboyant startups and their maverick founders are anything to go by, perhaps there is a greater value in building “boring startups”; the ones that are predictable, are aiming to earn monies from the day one, and foll...

Gaurav Taneja and his wife Ritu Rathee Taneja are aviators, social media influencers and parents to their 3-year-old daughter, Kyra.    In this episode of the Playbook Podcast, I sit down with them to discuss how do they manage alternate careers, mental stress, family relationships and the pressures of being YouTube influencers.  ​ Tune in and listen to the Flying Beast.   Also, on February 14 ...

Entrepreneurial comebacks are rare and extremely tough. But then, founders are known to bounce back after failed startups.    However, reinventing the same startup after shutting it down ranks amongst the rarest of rare.    Meet Monkeybox founder Sanjay Rao. Nearly two years after shutting down the startup, Rao is launching it again. He’s applying all the lessons from the failure.    When it an...

Great communities make products happen. Some of the world’s most successful products from iPhones to Netflix, Tik Tok and so on, are shaped by communities of users who love them. TED, is another example. Lakshmi Pratury co-hosted TED in Mysore in 2009, along with Chris Anderson. Later on, she founded INK Talks. “My biggest learning from building communities is not to have any purpose at all, at...

What do you do when you’re 35 and you’ve had six startup failures already? You apply all the learnings to build one of the most valuable startups. In this week’s Playbook podcast, I sat down with Thirukumaran Nagarajan, co-founder and CEO of Ninjacart, a B2B fresh produce startup. Ninjacart uses machine learning, data analytics and IoT devices to help farmers sell directly to the retailers ever...

In August this year, Cisco acquired (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-office/acquisitions/cloudcherry.html) Bangalore-based customer analytics startup, Cloudcherry, for over $50 million. While the deal did make the headlines, what’s been missing since then is the quiet and at times painfully slow journey Cloudcherry went through before getting acquired. It’s also a story o...

Far from the glory and noise of consumer internet startups, a new breed of enterprise software entrepreneurs is quietly building this decade’s most valuable companies. Zoho, Freshworks, BrowserStack, to name a few, are shining examples of such enterprises. Add Icertis, which is based in Seattle and Pune, to that list. Icertis is a startup that helps some of the world’s biggest companies manage ...

Welcome to this episode of The Playbook. Every Friday, I will be bringing deep conversations with the doers and the inventors on how they build products of impact.     For over two decades, Deep Nishar, now a managing partner with SoftBank, has built products at companies such as LinkedIn and Google. In this episode of the Playbook, he shares lessons from building products that shipped successf...