Author: Vivek Srinivasan

  • How Flipkart exited my life

    In February 2012, Amazon launched in India. I was a puritan at the time and wanted to support Indian startups. So I stuck to Flipkart. I would not order on Amazon at all. I even bought e-Books on Flipkart, which they used to sell at the time. Then the delayed a few orders and shut…

  • Disney+ joins the Streaming Wars

    Disney+ came live in India through Hotstar on the 3rd April. Streaming services like Netflix and Hotstar have been the greatest beneficiaries of the CoronaVirus Outbreak. With several people staying at home there are certain businesses that are bound to do well. While people are working from home, they are saving between 1-4 hours of…

  • Flights… Flying No Longer

    I have some weird interests that I pursue. One of them to sit and watch flights across the planet on flightradar. On a normal day, there are more 102,000 flights that take off around the world. That number has come down significantly and in the west, all the airlines have done to their governments; bowl…

  • Did you know? Virus

    One of the most basic things that people are being pushed to do is to wash their hands. This is needed to kill the viruses. But how does that really happen? How to kill at Virus So why does soap work so well on the Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? The short story:…

  • Travel Business – will it ever be the same again?

    I have always enjoyed travel and have visited quite a few nations and cities in my life. Not only that, but I have also myself been involved in the travel business and so it is close to my heart.  A vast majority of my travels have been for work and this is possibly reflective of…

  • Luck in Business

    There is a certain aspect of luck in business. No matter how well you understand the pains of your customer and how good you may be at finding a solution for your customer, there is still a degree of luck at play. This is because there are a lot of external factors that have a…

  • Did you know? Freelance

    So we keep hearing certain terms and do not really think to know why they came to be. As someone who works with startups, I hear about freelancers all the time. In the 18th century when kings lost wars, their soldiers were left without any allegiance. Soldiers in the day used to carry lances. These…

  • Beginning with trust

    There was an interesting conversation I had a few days ago. A startup founder called me and informed me that a large multi-national company had shown interest in their fledgeling product and wanted to deploy it. Before the deployment, they wanted to go through the entire product and understand how it works. He was concerned…

  • The right kind of friction

    Slide a muslin cloth past wet hands.  If your hand is too wet, the cloth gets wet as well and would let your hand easily slide past.  If your hand is dry then the cloth will easily slide past as well. But… If your hand is just a little wet, there is enough friction to…

  • Competition

    Mentoring startups gives one a ring-side view of the way entrepreneurs think. I have often been in a situation where an aspiring entrepreneur wants to pitch me their idea and hear what I wish to think about it. Travelling across the country and meeting thousands of entrepreneurs also means that I hear more than my…