Wednesday, 19th August ’20
Good morning, welcome to this rainy monsoon Wednesday. Dream 11 wins title sponsorship for this IPL. Interestingly homegrown companies esp. Indian startups were the prime bidders for this year’s IPL title sponsor. This included Dream11, Byjus, Unacademy and Patanjali amongst others. This clearly reflects on how India is developing into a startup hotspot with cash abundance for big events sponsorships. Interestingly, Dream 11 bid half(Rs 222 crore) of what Vivo had spent for last year’s sponsorship.
We leave you with a thought from Steve Jobs to start your day,
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
MIND MONK
Creating an awesome elevator pitch
A great elevator pitch can help you sell your product, or services to your customers, investors, partners and employees. Today, we discuss how to create an awe-inspiring elevator pitch.
- The first 2 lines matter the most as they are the most influential and important for your audience.
- The pitch should be clear, concise and simplified. It is essential that all the complexities are broken down into simple steps to make it easy to understand.
- The logline should be short. A single line should be able to tell the investor what you do.
- The one thing that you want to be identified with. Eg Macbook Air described itself as “world’s thinnest notebook”
- Master the logline and focus on that idea consistently
Create your own elevator pitch for the product of your choice and let us know how the pitching went.
MARKETS
Markets: Sensex gained points for the second consecutive day and closed on the highest level since February 27th despite mixed global cues. The scenario might further improve if banking stocks improve after a long haul of underperformance. Besides the US-China ties, developments on Adjusted Gross Revenue(AGR) would be in focus. Sectorally, action was seen in realty, banks, finance, consumer durables, and metals while mild profit-taking was visible in the healthcare space.
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
- PharmEasy and Medlife have applied to the CCI for approval to merge. The combined entity is expected to be valued at $1.2 billion. Medlife will sell 100% shares to the parent entity of PharmEasy, in return for 19.59% ownership in the combined entity. The proposed consolidation comes just as Reliance acquired a majority stake in Netmeds for $83.2 Million.
- RBI opens application window for private cos to set up a National Payments Corporation of India like entity which can be a for-profit entity as well. This is to introduce competition for NPCI which controls over 60% of all retail payments in the country, with UPI and IMPS coming under its aegis.
- Canoo, the $2.4 Billion valued EV maker, becomes the fourth electric vehicle company to have skipped the traditional IPO path and instead taken the company public through a merger agreement with Hennessy capital, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company – also known as blank check companies. Nikola Corp., Fisker Inc. and Lordstown Motors have also gone public via a SPAC.
WHAT ELSE IS COOKING
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India among top three emerging markets globally: The latest update to Mint’s emerging markets tracker shows that after lingering near the bottom of the emerging market rankings for three months, India moved up three notches to the middle of the league tables in June. In July, it moved up two notches further to the third spot, just behind China and Brazil, driven by a booming stock market, an outperforming currency and the surge in financial flows to the country. It remains to be seen whether real economic activity picks up to justify that optimism.
IIT Patna ties up with Flipkart for joint research in artificial intelligence: Flipkart has announced an MoU with IIT Patna to help create industry focused applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to students and scholars of IIT Patna, and to provide an opportunity to the faculty members to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.
Amazon to help Toyota build cloud-based data services: Amazon.com Inc’s cloud computing unit will help Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp build a platform to help manage and monetize data gathered from the automaker’s global vehicle fleet. Toyota says its Mobility Services Platform will enable it to process and analyze data that can be used to develop vehicle services from ride and car sharing to behavior-based insurance and maintenance notifications
BUSINESS LOUNGE
The Man Behind “Sabki Pasand Nirma” – Dr. Karsanbhai Patel
It was in 1969, that Dr. Patel started Nirma and went on to create a whole new segment in the Indian domestic detergent market. During that time the domestic detergent market only had the premium segment with very few companies, mainly the MNCs.
Karsanbhai Patel used to make detergent powder in the backyard of his house in Ahmedabad and then carry out door to door selling of his hand made product. He gave a money-back guarantee with every pack that was sold. He managed to offer his detergent powder for Rs. 3 per kg when the cheapest detergent at that time was Rs.13 per kg and so he was able to successfully target the middle and lower-middle-income segment.
Slowly, “Nirma” became a huge success due to Dr. Patel’s entrepreneurial skills. The best case of – Give your consumer what he wants, when he wants, where he wants and at the price he wants, selling will be done quite automatically. This is the marketing ‘mantra’ of Nirma.
The company that was started in 1969 with just one man who used to deliver his product from one house to the other, today employs around 14 thousand people and has a turnover of more than $ 500 million
TMT VARSITY
Varsity: Agile Methodology(#3 of 4)
Principles of Agile Manifesto (for lightweight development methods)
- Customer satisfaction: Customer is the highest priority
- Welcome change
- Deliver a working software: Consistently delivering a working product through the shorter feature lifecycles.
- Collaboration: The business people and tech teams continuously collaborate.
- Motivation
- Face to face conversation
- Measure the progress as per working software
- Maintain a constant pace: Checking for sustainable development
- Monitoring
- Simplicity
- Self-organized teams: The agile teams should be self-organized and should not rely heavily on other teams.
- Review the work regularly: Reviews and retrospectives are in place to ensure that work is going as per agile expectations.
Daily Standup:
This is a status update meeting usually for a duration of 15 minutes to state what was done yesterday, what needs to be done, and impediments if any.
Standup is attended by the scrum master, product owner, and delivery team. The stakeholders and customers can participate and observe. Standups are necessary as they help in tracking the progress of the project and the individual, and helps the team know the impediments.
“Done” in Agile User Story, Iteration and Release
User Story is done when the code has passed, unit test cases have passed and acceptance test cases have passed. It is then when a product owner accepts the story.
Iteration(aka sprint) is done when the backlogs are complete, performance is tested and bugs have been fixed.
The release is done when system has been stress tested, performance is tuned, and security validations are done.
Written by Kumar Sourav Mohanty, Akansh Bhatt, and Shashank Dobhal
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