I work in lending, which means I spend most of my time on a single unglamorous question. How do you part with money you may never see again, to someone you have never met?

For years I had a tidy answer, borrowed from Kunal Shah, who frames it better than most. India is a low-trust society. He points to evidence we all recognise. We check the fuel meter reads zero before the attendant starts pumping. We recount the cash the ATM just dispensed. We re-add the restaurant bill by hand before paying it. His explanation is that our sheer diversity makes trust expensive — we find it easy to trust people who share our traits, and difficult to trust people who don’t.

I accepted that framing for a long time. I’ve stopped.

What we call distrust is mostly just verification

Look again at those examples. Checking the meter, recounting the cash, re-totalling the bill — none of them are quite acts of distrust. They are acts of verification. We are not refusing to transact. We are transacting, and checking as we go. The distinction sounds academic until you notice that it inverts the whole diagnosis. A low-trust society avoids the exchange. A high-verification society completes the exchange, but demands proof at every step.

And proof is the thing India has built an extraordinary, almost obsessive infrastructure for. Consider what a single small loan now asks of a borrower. Prove who you are (Aadhaar). Prove you live where you say (address checks). Prove you earn what you claim (bank statements). Prove you’re holding the phone (OTP). Prove it’s really your face (video KYC). Prove you meant to send the money (UPI PIN). We did not respond to a trust deficit by giving up on strangers. We responded by building some of the most elaborate machinery on earth for verifying them.

We ran Fukuyama backwards

Which suggests fintech has been quietly solving a different problem than the one on the label.

In Trust, Francis Fukuyama made an argument economists had circled for decades. Trust is valuable largely because it lowers transaction costs. High-trust societies can transact on a handshake; low-trust ones fall back on detailed contracts and enforcement to do the same work. The usual reading is that trust comes first, and cheap transactions follow.

The machinery we built runs that causation backwards. We did not become more trusting and then transact more freely. We made verification so cheap that the question of trust mostly stopped needing to be asked.

That is what every product I admire actually does. UPI doesn’t persuade you to trust the recipient’s bank; the money simply arrives, and the rails settle it out of sight. Stripe doesn’t convince a developer it’s reliable; payments work, and the proof is the absence of incident. Amazon doesn’t ask a buyer to trust a seller they’ve never heard of; the returns policy closes the loop, so the buyer never has to. In each case the product didn’t manufacture trust. It removed the moment where trust had to be negotiated at all.

Yes, this looks a lot like surveillance

The fair objection is that this isn’t trust, it’s surveillance wearing trust’s clothes. If I only “trust” you because Aadhaar, a bureau, and a face-match algorithm have vouched for you, the warmth has gone out of the word.

It’s a fair point, and I don’t want to wave it away. But notice what it concedes. The behaviour that looks like trust, handing money to a stranger or shipping goods before the payment clears, happens anyway. The lived experience of a high-trust society is people transacting freely with strangers. We are increasingly getting that experience. We’re just getting it through infrastructure rather than disposition.

The lever was never trust

Which raises a more useful question for anyone building here. If trust is downstream of verification cost, then the lever was never “earn trust”, a vague, slow, brand-led project. The lever is making the next proof cheaper than the last. Every point you shave off the cost of verifying someone widens the circle of people you can safely transact with. That is the real story of India’s last decade. Each time we drove the cost of one proof toward zero — identity with Aadhaar, payment with UPI, consent with the Account Aggregator framework — a fresh layer of strangers became reachable.

There’s a catch, and I’d rather not gloss over it. Cheap verification is not free verification, and the costs don’t vanish, they move. They land on the people least able to produce clean proof: the borrower with a thin file, the migrant whose address never matches the database, the worker whose income arrives in cash. For them, a high-verification society can exclude more sharply than a low-trust one, because the door is open but the keys are documents they don’t have. The frontier of this work isn’t more verification. It’s verification that works for people whose lives don’t generate tidy records.

A society that stops noticing

So I’d offer a small amendment to Kunal’s framing, less a correction than a sequel. India isn’t low-trust. It’s pre-verification, a place where trust was historically expensive because checking strangers was expensive, and where the whole fintech project has been an effort to drive that checking cost down.

Maybe that’s how societies actually become higher-trust over time. Not because people grow more virtuous, but because the cost of proof keeps falling — until one day we look up and realise we’ve been trusting strangers all along, and simply stopped noticing the machinery that let us.

If you had to pick between jumping in front of a train or using your bank’s mobile app for all your transactions, would you prefer a passenger car or a goods train?

For two decades now, the promise of digital transformation has kept us transfixed.

First, our computers got faster. Then, they shrank and followed us to our palms and pockets. We grew up somewhere between 32-bit games to 4K content. The promise was that everything will soon be digital and hence, easier. That’s pretty much how it happened – there are apps for walking your dog and there are apps to order toilet paper or tune your guitar.

Except, banking chose to go the other way round.

Yes, the net-banking revolution came through and solved the problem of going to a bank for mundane things like getting our account statements. Yes, UPI changed the way payments work. But what about our cumulative banking experience? It arguably went from bad to worse. Despite every bank spending millions on their shiny new apps — or rather, because of it.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look at the data. Consumers would really do anything to not have to look at their banking apps. In India, the top-ranked apps in the Finance category on the Google Play Store have PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay at the top. Even Bajaj Finserv, Slice, Angel Broking, Jar, and Groww make the cut to the top 10 apps. The two banking apps that are present in the top 10 are SBI’s YONO and Bank of Baroda.

Conspicuous by absence are the apps of top private banks that claim to be the digital transformation stalwarts.

Fun fact: ICICI Bank’s flagship app is ranked lower (30) than a cryptocurrency app that supposedly teaches one how to invest in crypto (29). Meanwhile, Union Bank’s app is firmly at the 20th rank while Axis Bank doesn’t even make it to the top 40 finance apps in India.  

How UPI moved people away from their banks’ official apps

Not just this, look at the number of transactions in arguably the best FinTech product this country has seen - UPI. All banking apps have UPI inbuilt into them. None of the banking apps are among the top 5 UPI apps in the country. So, people really went out of their way to install an app to do something that existing apps on their phones allow them to do natively.

In fact, 95% of all transactions on the UPI ecosystem happen PhonePe, Google Pay, Cred, and Paytm. ICICI Bank ranks fifth in the top UPI apps by the total value of transactions but its total transactions are a measly 2% of the category leader PhonePe.

What does it say about trust if consumers prefer to trust a Google product with their financial data than their own bank? It deserves a doctoral thesis of its own but let’s leave that for later.

Here’s a nugget of data that I find particularly interesting. Banks like HDFC and ICICI claim that more than 90% of their customer transactions have moved online. Where? To net-banking portals and the apps, obviously.

One would assume that such massive shifts in consumer behavior and adoption of digital touchpoints would make banks jump with joy and go full throttle in building a digital experience that rewards customers. If you, like me, made that assumption, you’d have been proven wrong. Congratulations.

What’s wrong?

Every so often, I encounter a bank VP or two singing paeans about their digital journey. How far have they come? How amazing is this feature or that notification? And so it goes.

I nod along as is wise to do when one’s around bankers or lawyers. But, the question I really want to ask them is this - sure, this looks great. how much new revenue are you attributing to digital channels?

The answer, I guess, will not be as enthusiastic.

And this is exactly the root of the problem. Banks have forever made money on maximizing credit deployment while building a stable deposit book. They just take the margins like a good tax collector and forget you exist till the collection time rolls around next year.

However, there’s a new sheriff in town and that’s high-speed internet.

Consumers are now used to their Ubers arriving at the doorstep at midnight, their online food orders being delivered to them on the train and their investment apps being able to execute the most complicated trades without a fuss.

These consumers, especially millennials and GenZ, aren’t the most forgiving. They will take their business elsewhere, and they already are. Cue: Neo-banks.

As a result, most banks are now losing in the attention economy, getting beaten by digital credit apps, and have been pushed into a corner as a keeper of funds and nothing more. Most are finding out the hard way that the entry barriers and access asymmetry that built their fortress is now building fissures in their very foundations.

How did we end up here?

The problem with banking apps can be summarized easily.

Most of these apps were built for vanity not usability.

The average age of senior executives in the Indian financial sector is between 47 to 50 years of age (this number has increased from 42-47 just three years ago) while the average user of banking apps is aged between 25-35 years of age. This creates an expectations chasm where the experience, offerings as well as product flows are not in sync with what the user wants, at all.

Second, there’s the problem of outsourcing. Of course, banks are hardly the oasis of cutting-edge technology talent, but the sheer lack of technologists leads to projects like these apps and websites being outsourced to a mixed quality of vendors.

In some cases, banks don’t even run the apps on their own servers. This coupled with a lack of in-house talent means that oversight is minimal, updates are slow to come by and nobody is really invested in the product except the accounts department that pays the bills for keeping it live.

Source: FSB

The third problem that banking apps often exhibit is that they try to be everything for everyone. In a private bank’s app, one can find as many as 350+ functionalities and use cases all meshed in together like toys in a box.

It’s how terrible food and terrible apps are both made - you put everything together and hope for the best. In some cases, there’s hardly any distinction between the screen space allotted to checking your account balance and buying sovereign gold bonds (the former is a key function while the latter is a highly focused investment instrument).

Before being super apps, it’d be helpful if banks focussed on making their apps usable.

Fourth, in more than a dozen apps that I tested, there was no or minimal navigation guidance or tutorial of any kind. For most functionalities, a pop-up comes that states the obvious and vanishes conspicuously. Even for a digital native, it’s almost as difficult to figure out how to access one’s PPF account as I assume it is for my father to not post private messages to his friends as his public status updates on Facebook.

The result is that most users never end up engaging with that 80% of features and functionalities and limit their use of these apps only to the most necessary things.

Fifth, the stereotypical experience of a public sector bank branch is mirrored in most banking apps. The apps don’t look, feel or sound pleasant. No attempt is made in the app design to appeal to the customer or retain them. There aren’t many prompts, notifications, or any gamification that could help keep the users in the app for longer than a few minutes.

In all, it seems like the world wouldn’t lose much if the banks stopped developing apps altogether and just integrated with Google Pay and the likes to enable key use cases.

But since that goes against the grain of being a financial (and now technology) leader, let’s briefly look at a roadmap for fixing this mess.

Fix because it is broken

1.    User research: You can’t develop a product that solves a problem without knowing who has the problem, how big is the problem, how they solve it currently, and what are their trade-offs in accepting a new solution.

First, banks need to hire more technology-first and millennial builders in their internal teams. At the same time, they should fund independent user research to deeply analyze how different cohorts of customers use their banking apps, payment apps, and their phones in general.

2.    Build only what’s necessary: The second logical step would be to build for the customers they most cherish and want to attract/retain. For instance, a new-age bank might want to give millennials credit cards while an established lender could want to cross-sell home loans to its premier cohort of customers.

This will determine both the workflow of the app and also help set benchmark metrics that have to be tracked and optimized. For instance, total downloads are too thin a number to claim success while transactions in volume and value for a specific use case from the chosen cohort could become the guiding light.

3.    Drop ambition, choose function: To be brief about this, the existing apps need to be dumped in a dumpster fire. There’s a need to start afresh - leave the heavy branding and display banners for billboards and build a clean, functional app.

An easy way to achieve this would be to mark out five key functionalities that the app is supposed to do well for 90% of its audience and only build those. Everything else can be left for internet banking to handle.

4.    Test with an intent to learn: When launching, banks should stay away from the lure of doing a big corporate launch and having the CEO and VPs say empty praise. Instead, app betas should be privately launched and gradually expanded with user feedback and optimizations incorporated in the final release build.

I’d personally target a metric that shows an increase in the velocity and frequency of the transactions and time spent on the app (not on loading screens but in exploring and trying out the different features)

5.    Stay the course: Ideally, banks should build modules for specific use-cases. These need to be light, purely functional, and extremely user-friendly without being intrusive or needlessly complex.

For instance, these modules could simply mimic business divisions such as term deposits, cards, investments, and so on. However, the modules should map to actual consumer flows rather than sitting in silos. For instance, having a fund transfer option when someone checks their balance is more relevant than separating those two out in various sectors of the app.

*For the rest of the banking needs, banks should just invest in a quality voice and chat assistant that directs users to the right section/flow in the net banking journey.

Bottom line: It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that banks face an existential threat due to their terrible apps. But it’s much harder to justify why the keepers of public trust and money won’t respond in kind when their consumers have already adopted digital finance. The state of banking apps conveys a kind of apathy that’s not in the ethos of most bankers I know (including my own father).

Distributed and decentralized finance is here. One just hopes that banks catch up before they miss the bus.

Before some of our favorite banks started caring about their app experience, a lot of their younger customers would have likely opened cryptocurrency wallets and started developing web3 apps in an act of protest the complexity and friction in banking. This will further distance legacy banks from the ground zero of finance and innovation. An outcome that’s entirely avoidable.

PS: If you liked this post, do drop a comment and share it with your network. You can follow me on Twitter here for banter and gif wars. I also write often on LinkedIn about growth/marketing/fintech, you can connect with me here. Cheers!

When it comes to creating a founder’s brand, marketing functions tend to be caught unawares.

As marketers, we have all been guilty of focussing too much on metrics. We care about cost per lead, engagement rate, revenue attribution and so much more. Sometimes, these metrics become the sole reason for our existence and give meaning to our life. But we end up shortchanging the leadership.

How? By not caring about building a strong founder’s/leadership brand.

More often than not, a marketing team's purview starts at content creation and ends at a qualified lead. Unfortunately, this becomes a vicious loop and we forget to build brands for the senior leadership of the company. As a result, marketing efforts become less efficient because the audience grows tired of being lectured by the marketing department.

Turn this around and make the audience feel seen and heard - by no less than the CEO - and magic happens.

Why?

Because consumers aren't as dumb as we think. They know when they are being sold to. They know when they are being treated as an audience in a show where the marketeer is the puppeteer.

It doesn't mean we leave our day jobs and pack up for the hills. Quite the opposite. It implies that we must bring into the spotlight gasp people. People who are important and are respected. People who don't preach but teach.

And who better to carry a company's story to the living rooms and screens of your potential customers than the company's senior leadership - CEOs, CTOs, CROs, CMOs, and so on. These are the people who have weight. They carry with them a certain amount of authority due to their work, history, or job designation. And it's a crime to squander it away by doing nothing to harness it.

This is where leadership/CXO branding comes into the picture.

So what is founders/leadership branding?

Plainly speaking, leadership or CXO branding refers to the set of strategies and processes the marketing function uses to build the profile of the senior executives as thought leaders. It means turning them into your brand ambassadors. Quite literally.

If you are wondering why everyone's trying to spam and sell things to your CEO instead of buying from them - it's because their brand isn't set up.

The leadership's brand must indicate to customers, potential customers, investors, and all other stakeholders that the company is run by really smart people who know what they are doing.

This is the stamp of approval you need to boost your inbound leads as well as long-term brand awareness.

Think Elon Musk. There's a reason why he has 5x more followers than Tesla's official account. Certainly helps sell cars but that's not the aim. It helps that anything Musk or Tesla want to do/launch has a ready audience of 72 million people around the world. And cars, rockets, and tunnel-based commuting plans continue to sell.

Why do you need leadership branding?

Leadership or founder branding isn't just for the Teslas of the world. It's for every company that wants to be more than a website or a storefront. It's what separates Deepinder Goyal’s Zomato from Swiggy's founders (see what I mean?).

The only reason you need for investing in leadership branding is that it's hard. In a growth hacking culture, not many companies find within themselves the resolve or tenacity to continuously focus on building the brand for their leadership. Thus, it becomes a pretty effective signal to all stakeholders that the company is not just a bunch of executives making boring press statements but run by sentient beings who have ideas, opinions, and emotions.

Think Tim Cook presenting you the latest iPhone versus Samsung CEO.

But if you aren't yet convinced, here are some very attributable reasons why leadership branding is a must:

1. It gives you an unfair advantage - Nothing beats the power of accessibility. Stakeholders are more likely to be loyal to you if they know that they can reach your CEO over Twitter or send an InMail with their big idea or a complaint and know that it'll be attended to.

2. It lets the product sell itself - Most technology products don't need the brute force of selling as much as they need the careful hands of context and education. When you put your senior executives at the frontline and let consumers hear from their own mouth, you build immediate trust.

3. It adds non-linear returns to your brand - They say good marketing makes bad products fail faster but a good leadership brand will ensure that even when you stumble, there's less damage due to direct communication with the stakeholders. And if you build something amazing, the CEO's careful and contextualized messaging is stronger than all your marketing spends combined.

If you've read this till here, I am grateful. We'll quickly do some housekeeping stuff to get you started in creating a strong leadership brand.

Creating a CXO brand

1. Polish

   This is the first and the most important thing you can do. Start with the leaders' social profiles - LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack (and everything else!) and start housekeeping. Clean up old descriptions and add new ones. Write in the first person and add details with emotion rather than dry statements of fact. (Development Economics geek vs Msc. in Economic Theory).

   This is also a good time to upload new profile pictures - ideally the same one across platforms to build recall. The picture should be more Casual Friday than suit-up Wednesday.

   The final step is to secure all accounts with new, separate passwords and work on removing any random/irrelevant activity/posts from the past which don't go well with the current positioning.

2. Post

   This should be the most commonsensical of all the steps but so many people get it wrong. The secret behind a strong leadership brand is consistency with content.

   Ideally, a strict calendar should be set up that covers broad themes and areas of focus, and thought-provoking/insightful posts should be shared at the decided frequency. Once a week to start and scale it up to thrice a week.

   Caution: As much the lure of getting the CXO to post about your company/products and how awesome they are - AVOID THIS. Rather, speak more on the industry level and let people discover your company and products.

3. Connect

   The idea that most marketers and leaders often preach is that if you are important enough, people will come. But what if they don't?
   
   Set aside egos for a bit and help the leadership connect with relevant folks online. This could mean investors or bigger clients or future partners - and even potential hires.
   

   This helps create a relevant audience that's not entirely composed of their friends/classmates from college. Also, the size of the room must be big enough for the messaging to be noticed in the first place.

4. Engage

   Unfortunately, not a lot of CEOs who have strong brands believe in engagement. They do something I like to call post and forget. While it's understandable that a company's leaders are busy, it's downright rude if the leaders' presence just involves them doing propaganda.

   
   A more effective way is for the leader to meaningfully engage with their peers. Be it their colleagues' personal posts or an old friend's blog - it's always a good idea to appreciate, acknowledge and contribute in other people's achievements.

5. Expand

   Once you've built a rhythm around all the above and have started seeing traction as well as feedback, it's time to expand the contours of branding.

   
   Instead of just keeping it to one platform, see if you can use various content formats for the same piece of content and post it across platforms - from Instagram to Twitter to Substack.

   
   At the same time, a regular check-in is needed for the content plan to expand themes and scope too. There are only going to be a limited number of personal insights that the leader can write about. Beyond that, it's the job of the marketing and content teams to come up with ideas and directions that the content could take.

   
   Maybe they can talk about an adjacent industry, their learnings, their opinions on certain news pieces, their moonshot ideas, their most unpopular opinions, or their most effective processes. There's an ocean to be explored and it'll be a shame to limit their glimmer to just the shore.

Finally, remember to make this process collaborative and one where everyone has a bit of fun. People like humans, not bots.

PS: Please let me know if you enjoyed/liked reading this piece. Also, reach out to me if I can help you with further specifics on your leadership branding strategy.

I am also considering writing a more detailed and tactical guide to build and execute a leadership brand. Let me know if you'd like to read and I shall try to stop procrastinating on that.

Grocery delivery has a PR problem.

We've all heard the experts. They point out the supposed unviability of grocery startups and their severe lack of profits. However, the startups are in no mood to give up. They continue to innovate and are hoping to crack the code to profitability and positive unit economics. The latest bid is the promise of super fast delivery. Store to home in 10 minutes or less. Blimey!

Even with all the attention, the 10-minute delivery model is being characterized as a fad, money-guzzler, and a desperate solution in search of a problem. It is anything but.

Indistinguishable from magic

In fact, if you look closely enough, a 10-minute delivery is indistinguishable from magic. It reminds me of dial-up internet and how a speed of 10 Mbps on broadband was not just high-speed. It was astonishing. People who had internet before others were showing it off like a piece of art.

That's what a 10-minute grocery delivery is. It's not just a slightly faster way of getting goods - it is a paradigm shift that upends our existing belief systems about how fast something can/should be.

It forces us to redraw our mind maps and set new standards.

I can guess that some of us who have used Blinkit/Zepto have found ourselves wondering.

Hey, if Blinkit and Zepto can deliver me asparagus in 10 minutes, why can't Amazon with all its money and drones and rockets get me headphones faster than their one-day delivery?

Yes, I acknowledge one-day delivery is pretty fast. But remember the days when a parcel would take 3-4 working days? It was only a couple of years ago. Now, anything that takes more than a day's time to be delivered makes us reevaluate our buying decision.

Transforming consumer behavior and competitive landscape at the same time

This is what a 10-minute delivery is doing. It's rewiring our brains to expect a 10-minute fulfillment time for everything that lies between the spectrum of carrot to crocin.

It's a matter of time before our expectations expand faster than the SKUs on these apps. Cat food is already available but I am betting that eventually, something as niche and fancy as a Pizza for dogs will make its way to warehouses around the country.

What happens when consumers demand infinitely more categories from an app they like? Hint: A super app

The journey isn't likely to be smooth. There are logistics to be figured, unit economics to be managed and a lot of tough business decisions await the 10-minute grocery startups. These decisions will range from deciding between breadth vs depth for a certain category to figuring out the best strategy to minimize returns, delivery errors, and fleet attrition.

But, the one thing that's going for them is the most important thing indeed.

Building addiction - one delivery at a time

It's the consumer's perceived lack of time, a cohort of high-income users, and their propensity for addiction to things that sell luxury or convenience.

Be it high-speed internet or bottomless social media feed, the human mind has a knack for attaching itself to instant gratification and rewards.

I would go even further to say that the 10-minute delivery is closer to metaverse than we think. A virtual environment gives us physical rewards at our doorstep without the wait. 10 minutes might seem long but in reality, it's faster than one would think. One distraction, one chore, one scroll through Spotify to play that perfect playlist....*ding dong*.

Lots of people might wonder at this point why 10-minute is a paradigm shift while 15-30 minutes or even a 1-hour delivery offered by the industry incumbents is not.

The reason is the same as why there are more than a dozen equally fast browsers out there built on the same technology but Chrome and Firefox win out. - it's not because of their raw speed, it's because of the story and promise. We don't necessarily want the fastest browser, we want the fastest looking and most up-to-date browser that has the least bugs so the experience feels smooth and fast.

That's what the 10-minute grocery delivery is doing. It's telling us a story we can't fully comprehend rationally but our emotional and irrational brains love it.

Copy-cat is not equal to a fad

We love the gratification but we also like the puzzle of logistics that's beyond comprehension. Like children pressing a red button over and over again even though it brings the same sound out of the toy. Or ordering from Domino's when you need pizza fast even if a pizzeria is in the next street and offers doorstep delivery.

Finally, for something to be a fad, it has to have:

1. Superfast adoption

2. Wide-spread attention

3. Short lifespan

A 10-minute grocery is doing the opposite. It's not logistically possible for the model to expand recklessly because of unique issues around everything from sourcing to fulfillment in every region. It's getting a lot of press and adoption from urban millennials but it's yet to reach a critical mass when it becomes the accepted norm. And boring.

While the lifespan of a 10-minute delivery model cannot be predicted, it's pretty clear that it is unlikely to die anytime soon.

The Lindy Effect proposes that something that has been around for 100 years will probably be around in another 100 years but something that has survived only six months could perish before the next six months. The effect doesn't give 10-minute grocery delivery a lot of credit yet but with every passing day, the lifespan increases.

At the same time, the longer it stays, the harder will it be for the incumbents to not do it.

It might not make money yet but for a very short period of time, the 10-minute delivery model will offer a company or two the opportunity to forever brand their name in the minds of their consumers. At the same time, they'll force an entire list of industries to follow suit.

Like Amazon did with Prime. In the US, the number of people with Amazon Prime subscriptions is more than those who have television sets.

The current grocery startups might not all become Amazon just on the basis of their delivery speed but there's a field wide open to them to continue building on this and find ways to not just monetize but also diversify and create a sustainable long-term business.

In the near future, delivery speed in itself may not predict success for a company but it'll become extremely hard to forgive a lack of speed and reliability. (Flipkart, are you listening?)

That, to me, sounds like a win.

It's tough to be a marketer. All marketers will convince you of that. Hence, anyone who thinks about a career in marketing starts with the dream of pursuing an expensive MBA at preferably an Ivy League institution. The next step, of course, is a plush job at a big brand. And on goes the merry-go-round till you find yourself in a dead-on-arrival desk job that comes with the perks. Except, it has nothing to do with marketing. What went wrong?

Here's the thing. MBA promises a marketing education and it delivers on it.

But while you are in the program, you are never taught how to build a marketing brain.

Why do I insist that a marketing brain is different from a marketing education? For the same reason that knowing how to swim in the ocean is very different from reading 15 books about swimming in the ocean. In many careers, structured instruction and training are important and necessary.

Like doctors. We don't want doctors anywhere near a human on the operation table if they didn't learn and practice it in the classroom.

Marketing is the opposite of medicine. It requires one to constantly unlearn what they know, accept unexpected outcomes as par for the course and the punishment for following the beaten path can run into millions of dollars for the brand and a career or two for the practitioners. A marketing MBA all but ensures that for most people.

MBA in marketing is actually a master's in the history of marketing.

There probably aren't many organizations that care about whether you know the 5Ps or 7Ps of the marketing mix. Instead, they care about you being able to generate hypotheses at scale and continuously test them. A marketer's worth is inversely proportional to the size of his intellectual ego.

The only ones who do well over the long term are the ones who change their mind often and chisel away at the strategy every single day. The ones who treat their brand narratives as concrete tend to drown with it.

MBA adds dead-weight to your marketing career

Imagine doing a 100-meter sprint.

Now, imagine running with your eyes closed and your legs tied together because you were told in college that it's how Henry Ford did it. This is what's likely to happen to you after you are done with the MBA.

For a profession where everyone is making up things on the go (no, really!), it's futile and counterintuitive to learn obsolete frameworks. What worked for manufacturing enterprises in the industrial age definitely won't work for that cryptocurrency startup or the cool new health-tech company.

The composition of the business has morphed. Marketing course curriculums just haven't.

MBA in Marketing is a terrible financial decision

Are you willing to bribe someone Rs 50 lakh for a chance at a good job?

That's the tradeoff you'll be facing when you go for the MBA, no less in marketing. At a time where underemployment is peaking, adding a degree isn't going to help your job prospects much if you've no demonstrated history of producing outcomes.

Also, MBA is expensive.

It can cost anything between Rs 20 lakh to Rs 80 lakh per year of education depending on the university, location, exchange rates, and living expenses. Yes, student loans are cheap but even with a 0% interest rate, you still have to return the money on strict timelines. Think about it.

The cost of the program is just the beginning. The biggest cost associated with an MBA is actually not the cost of the MBA but the opportunity cost (you don't need an MBA to learn this).

By committing one or two years of your life, you will lose out on not just the arguably more valuable work experience in marketing but the money you would have made from it too. As a result, the MBA will cost you in the following ways:

1. Time: Two years are 100+ weeks of voluntarily deciding to not do marketing to be able to do marketing later.

2. Money: Tuition, interest on the loans, and the salary you lose out on while you're enrolled.

3. Opportunity: If you are expecting an entry-mid-level marketing position after your MBA, you'll anyway get it without the MBA if you're smarter than average and have a demonstrable skill. One skill is enough. It could just be PowerPoint.

4. Growth: Marketing isn't learned in the institutions (ask the graduates!), it's learned on the job. So your learning curve will still technically start from the day you leave MBA. Skip the drama and get a headstart instead?

5. Choices: Most of the people who do MBAs take a lot of debt. And then, they voluntarily choose to be chained to terrible career choices because they have the EMIs to pay. Marketing is a volatile career, you could make the money back in a year or it could take ten to just pay off your student debt. If it's long, you'll be confined to choosing safe companies and roles thus eliminating any possibility of a non-linear growth curve that involves considerable risk.

Don't start the sprint with your hands tied behind your back.

If all this hasn't convinced you to not do an MBA, defer it for a year at least. Find an entry-level marketing position in a fast-growing company, take responsibility, and learn on the job. After a year, if you are still dreaming about an MBA, come find me and I will write and edit your submissions.

Learning is never a bad idea as long as you don't have an ROI equation attached to it.

PS: This post is mostly written from individual experience and 100s of conversations I have had with peers and seniors. The argument mostly applies to people who are young, not born with a silver spoon, and looking for a contrarian perspective.

I have the same respect and admiration for those who have or continue to do MBAs or other masters in marketing. I hope to learn from you if you volunteer the time. :)

Over the last couple of years, I have had massive debates with managers/founders about the best hiring strategy. Or rather, as a marketing professional, my objective has been to understand what is it that founders/hiring managers are looking for in their recruitment pipeline.

As someone who built my own team from scratch here at FinBox over the last six months, I stumbled upon a few insights about my own self. This post is an amalgamation of my own observations, what worked and what didn’t and a lot of resources and conversations I scoured during the nerve-wracking process of building a team.

I realized that prefer to move fast and rely more on fitment and potential, while most of my peers tend to be the bar raisers in their respective functions/organizations. They prefer to hire only the absolute best candidates. They have learned this from books about Amazon, Google, and Netflix. The companies where hiring quality is never compromised for speed.

These devotees of perfection are now founders, managers, VPs in your network who are constantly cribbing about how tough it is to hire the right candidate and how it keeps them awake at night. Their concerns are very real and valid, except that there’s probably a solution (no silver bullets here) that could be hiding in plain sight.

We know that the hiring epidemic around us is truly real. The best people are being offered everything from a BMW bike to millions of $ in ESOPs and this situation made me think a little more deeply about the way recruiting works and how best could an organization/team leader approach it.

Here’s my own framework distilled largely from my personal experience, my reading of other people’s frameworks, insights from the current and past market structure, and my own experience as an employee, candidate, and sometimes, even being the hiring manager. 

To borrow from Marvel, how do we get the Avengers to assemble? 

Like most things in life and the internet, the solution is perhaps a simple five-step process.

Step 1: Build the A team 

Step 2: Find the B team 

Step 3: Elevate the B team 

Step 4: Elevate the A team further

Step 5: Rinse and repeat 

The A-team 

Ask any founder or a leader of any kind and they’ll tell you that talent is perhaps the only real differentiator and competitive advantage in the market.

However, where I feel most people go off the track is when they think they need 100% of the team strength to be visionaries, overachievers, burnout-as-a-way-of-life type of people. While these people are the flag bearers of any organization’s progress, trying to hire them is an immensely difficult task. Their pay is the biggest hurdle for a startup but at the same time, compensation is not even their priority when considering a place to move to. 

These A team candidates look for vision, opportunity, growth, and other intangibles that could take ages to build and convey. At the same time, they are likely to be so driven and committed that they don’t even have the time to take your company’s pitch seriously. And if the A team candidates you interview come onboard easy, they are probably not A team material just yet. 

This is the point at which we encounter a problem. 

Problem: Your product and business teams need at least 15 people in the next 2 months to just deliver the pre-set objectives for the existing team. But you haven’t got more than 5 A-level leads in total and not one of these five is yet confirmed to come onboard. 

Now, if one would follow Amazon or Google’s hiring philosophy or books written on other such trailblazing organizations, they would source more intensely, continue with the same raise-the-bar process and keep interviewing. 

The only problem? Sourcing is expensive and every ineligible candidate is a dead weight on the company’s time, resources, and cash which could have been spent better. Google and Amazon can afford to have elaborate hiring systems and raise-the-bar kind of models because they already have a workforce in tens of thousands, if not millions. 

They won’t cease operations suddenly if their regional product team is on vacation or has a dozen openings. They have built - what I call excess capacity in the system to:

1. Absorb the pressure

2. Not let them fall into the trap of hiring someone mediocre just because there’s too much pressure; and, 

3. Give them the luxury to offer vacation days and work-life balance without making a big deal out of it

At this point, and this applies more to early-stage or growth-stage startups, I suggest a solution - something that worked for me.

And the solution is to build excess capacity. While most startups today have plenty of money to throw at the problem, tightly run businesses such as bootstrapped organizations or servicing businesses such as agencies, etc do not. 

They neither have the money to get all A-players in the world nor the patience to go hunting for them one by one because these companies serve dozens of clients at a time. Clients who have outsourced possibly because they haven’t been able to build in-house capacity themselves. 

So what should one do when faced with this tangle? 

I suggest department leaders/functional heads should hire the best-fit candidates from all available options and look for the ones with the most potential.

The key difference between an A team player and a B team player is not really that much talent and skill but it’s that of exposure. With exposure and experience, anyone who works hard can become an A team player. 

However, it doesn't work the other way round. It's usually very difficult to get an A-team leader to execute basic tasks or deal with the drudgery of excel sheets and nuances. Their playground is more strategic than that. If you expect them to do execution, the chances are most will leave before their first coffee. 

For instance, when hiring a writer for our own marketing function, I prefer to look at people who are good writers and have a demonstrated flair for storytelling as opposed to people who are experts in marketing strategy or finance, or technology.

That’s a secondary skill that can be taught on the job but if I wait to find that one writer who knows FinTech and writes well and is available to join immediately and comes within the budget, it’s only going to be an exercise in failure. 

Instead, you get the best functional people, give them domain expertise and empower them with the freedom to innovate and they'll probably do miracles.

This doesn’t mean that hiring mediocre talent is necessary to scale. Quite the opposite, my thesis is that hiring for teams must be done more strategically than just looking for the smartest people.

An organization is like a human body. It needs brains and hearts but it also needs arms, legs, lungs, liver, and knees. If we over-index on one function, dysfunction is going to be the least of our problems.

Similarly, a team needs an executioner or a go-getter, a planner, or a coordinator. If you fill the team with visionaries and puffed-ego strategists, there’s a high chance that the team will always be too busy planning to get anything real done. 

A better way, forward, in my opinion, is then to only select the best of the best candidates for A teams - leadership positions in departments and teams.

And reduce the criteria for strategic insight or exposure as you hire for levels below. Instead, increase the criteria for functional expertise and attitude because those are the people who will have their jobs on the line and their careers are yet to be made. 

They are not going to disappoint if they are led by smart, empathetic, and insightful leaders who are invested in their growth. By hiring more than necessary A team-ers, you run the risk of basically having turf-wars, envelope-pushing, and unnecessary political conflicts within the workplace. 

At the same time, the organization is a perpetual entity and your A team is always going to be constantly poached by competitors from your or other industries. Hence, it becomes more important to have a deeper execution and management-in-waiting team that’s not just your hidden treasure trove but also on its way to becoming the A team through trials by fire and learning by doing. 

In the end, it is all about strategically creating teams and functions such that it is the smartest people leading the best executioners towards being future leaders. Ultimately, nobody learns leadership or strategy at business schools or in the C-suite, we learn it through exposure, observation, execution, and failure. 

Bottom line: If you wait to hire only Steve Jobs, know that they could be busy building Apple. Instead, start with a potential Sundar Pichai and elevate them till you don't hear of Larry Page in the news anymore :)

My personal favorite adage applies here: 

“Expect the best and people will rise to the occasion.” 

“Oh, you do.”

“Does it feature a monologue on productivity hacks? Or a Naval clone saying loopy things that don’t make sense except if you think really hard?” 

“Oh, you have whiskey biceps. Great.”

“I am sorry to break it to you but the cool kids have all moved away to Miami now. You don’t qualify for the badge of honor if there’s anything less than a chat with the governor or someone who follows them on Twitter.  

Meanwhile, please consider selling notion templates and an e-book compiling your favorite Twitter threads on bubblegumroad.”

– – – – 

I am not enough

Let’s face it. We’ve all felt like absolute failures and waste of potential whenever we log into Twitter. Or watch a YouTube video that’s not a Ted Talk. 

There’s always someone telling you that most successful young people work their entire weekends. 

Or someone announcing the latest fund-raise for their startup that doesn’t exist beyond a notion document. 

Or someone doing that horrible thing called making threads. Read one article about fintech?

Must make a thread and provide an extremely generic perspective with random data to sound smart. 

– – – – 

Optimizing for imposter syndrome 

How did we get here? How did the goalposts for being cool move so fast that now everyone must be a CEO, an intellectual, networked, funny, rich, modest, have a day job, and a side-hustle involving podcasts or e-books at the same time to be considered functional? 

Yes, that’s the baseline. All of this only makes you seem functional.

To be considered useful, the benchmark is to have raised two rounds of funding and being followed by the who’s who of the ecosystem. We all know the names. Let’s not do that dance of ignorance (it’s unfashionable). 

The trouble actually begins very early into most of our lives. When we are told that the next step will fix everything. We’ve all been duped for almost 3 decades of our life with the promise of well-being and stability that never materialized. There’s enough blame to go around but the effect of this is that most of us now find our self-worth dropping faster than our net worth. 

Sometimes, they are even inversely related.

Why? Because of what I now call the not-enough spiral. Stay with me for a moment. 

You may have a decent job and a good number of people who care about you and hobbies that nurture you but are you doing enough? Do you have a Twitter following or 50+ certifications that you show off on LinkedIn like battle-scars? How are you not investing in cryptocurrency or writing blogs about what you think of Dogecoin?

From a society where stability and well-being were aspirational for most of us, we switched – as fast as our data packs – to a new paradigm where optimizing is a word that you can use in casual conversations with a friend. Hustle is a word that’s so popularly accepted and revered that no one even cares to point out that it used to mean fraud, swindling, and aggressive pushing once upon a time.

– – – – 

Of flywheels and spirals

Being ambitious and working hard to get there is not bad in itself. It’s an admirable trait that takes one closer to their dreams. However, things start going downhill when working hard becomes the dream. It’s a spiral that feeds into one’s insecurities and gives birth to problems like imposter syndrome, burnout, and guilt. 

A culture of working to the bone seems like progress but it’s the wrong kind of progress. 

If you are reading this, you are probably among the richest 1% of this country. And yet, the moment you go back to your social feeds - you’ll feel self-doubt creeping into your bones and making you second guess every single thing that’s going for you. 

There’s a mental health crisis in the making. But more importantly, it’s about to go undiagnosed because who’s got the time when you have 15 tweet threads to create about work-life balance. 

We’ve all read that Languishing piece in NY Times, opined about Zoom fatigue and created support groups for people burning out. Yet, we go back and subscribe to podcasts and hoard audiobooks on productivity. Everyone’s trying to be better.

Always be optimizing. 

– – – – 

Calling out the fraud 

And no one is immune. If you aren’t on Twitter (teach me how!), you will find it in dinner conversations with your friends who will boast about their latest promotion. You will find it on your Amazon recommendations when it tells you to build atomic habits or think fast and slow (preferably at the same time).

You will also find it at your workplace. If you work at a startup, you will spend nights fantasizing about building your own. If you work at a corporate, you will be surrounded by people distributing pamphlets on ‘bias for action’ or building agility. 

The productivity cycle needs to break. Think of the wheel from Game of Thrones.

Daenerys Targaryen : Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell: they're all just spokes on a wheel. This one's on top, then that one's on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.

Tyrion Lannister : It's a beautiful dream, stopping the wheel. You're not the first person who's ever dreamt it.

Daenerys Targaryen : I'm not going to stop the wheel, I'm going to break the wheel.

As long as this intellectual fraud continues, we’ll keep lulling ourselves into a false stupor that is no more than a hallucination that you are on the right track. There’s no right track. No magic pill to make you an overnight success. If there is, certainly podcasts and side-hustles aren’t one of them. 

Those selling this snake oil are likely to be the already rich businessmen who benefit from selling the sauce of ‘passion’. It drives down the cost of operations by turning us all into dopamine-addled zombies. It also helps sell their books, their personal brand, and their companies’ stories when there’s an army of productivity warriors worshipping them. 

An entire ecosystem is being built around this. The productivity seance is their current PR strategy and a formidable career backup plan. Falling for it will make you either successfully miserable or miserably successful when you find an entire generation of clones standing next to you. 5 years from now, every single candidate at a job interview would have a substack, a side hustle, startup experience, and a personal branding pitch they think is clever and unique. 

If you think you will somehow miraculously find yourself at an advantage because your productivity spiel is better than the others, may I request you to go look at the failure rate of startups in this country and invite you to extrapolate your own chances of topping a category that already consists of the top 0.01% ‘hustlers’ of the country? 

You are not playing the game. The game is playing you. 

– – – – 

The trick mirror

This is not to say that we are all doomed. This is to say we are all lost. We have a chronic case of misplaced priorities and instead of upskilling, we are busy building a brand. Instead of using that money to build a life where you don’t need to work, we’re using that work to give us the appearance of life. Instead of adding real value to ourselves, we are now only concerned with how much value others think we add to their lives.

The answer is – not much. 

– – – – 

Keynes was not on Twitter

Keynes argued that technological progress offered the path to a bright future. In the long run, he said, humanity could solve the economic problem of scarcity and do away with the need to work in order to live. That, in turn, implied that we would be free to discard ‘all kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital’. 

- Aeon 

– – – – 

If we are all aiming to be dopamine-addled productivity warriors, we are succeeding. However, the last I checked, living meant much more than being sleep-deprived, self-flagellating, and spending inordinate amounts of time cold emailing to network with people we don’t really like.

It’s seductive to try and prescribe a one-size-fits-all cure for this situation. Wrap it up in numbers. Come up with a trite analogy and sell it as the next best-selling hot-take book. It’s definitely profitable. But, I am trying to break the wheel. 

The fraud has gone on for too long. 

– – – – 

@AZenGuy on Twitter

To promote healthy and active lifestyles, some insurers in China started offering discounts to people who would complete a certain number of steps every day on their wearable devices/phones.

The idea was to keep people active and reduce the ultimate claim ratio by organically helping people improve their health.

The added incentive of lower premiums was supposed to be the lubricant that greased the wheels and got people moving.

But, something strange happened.

In lockstep, the biggest stores in China such as AliExpress were flooded by a device called 'phone cradle'!

What's a phone cradle, you ask?

It's basically a device that continuously shakes your phone/wearable back and forth to add fake steps to your monitoring while you sit on the couch and binge on shows!

Watch it in action here.

They cost as little as $2. That's it. That's how much it takes to fool an entire industry.

If you are too lazy to even order one of these devices, there are other DIY hacks such as tying it on your pet's feet or taping it to the ceiling fan!

Now, these devices are selling like hot-cakes in markets across the world (including India!) even as the insurance industry marches on with its push towards activity-tracking.

What's next?

Some suggest that insurers should increase monitoring further to ensure nobody cheats the system.

This includes suggestions ranging from installing cameras to track exercise to peer audits where people work out together and report the other person's actual activity.

What's the problem?

Humans are evolutionarily wired to find workarounds.

There's no CCTV camera in the world that can't be broken by brute force or by simply cutting the power cord. The higher the wall, the more tempting it is to breach. 

Increasing surveillance layers only increases the number of potential loopholes.

What's the solution?

Marketers and product owners need to move beyond gimmicks. Learning to trust one's customers is the first step in establishing a rapport.

An insurer that gives premium discounts or adds disease coverage that wasn't earlier covered based on self-reported medical tests is more likely to be trusted in the long run than the one trying to get inside people's lives by making them install apps, track their location, and count their steps.

Treat customers like the adults that they are. Or they will continue to behave like children fooling their nannies for more TV time.

Would you report your progress honestly if there were financial incentives to misreporting?

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My favorite career advice is to develop a “personal moat.”

A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.

Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable, but compounds over time. 

- Erik Torenberg

Ask yourself this question: "What's something that you can do really well that's also really hard?"

More often than not, you will find that your skillset needs to upgrade in order to become a value-generation flywheel.

However, people who take time to build that personal moat are the folks who succeed! They are the ones who deliver exceptional value and hence, tend to be remunerated BEYOND industry standards because their output-value ratio is far higher than what the bell curve would have you believe!

They get there because their trajectory is not marked by promotions or appraisals but by total domination of their respective niche.

Some examples include:

Tyler Cowen: He specialized as a generalist, spending decades writing & reading all day. To recreate his encyclopedic brain would take 1-2 decades of deep work.

Elad Gil: He invested in more than a dozen unicorns and then wrote the "High Growth Handbook" to teach others about scaling startups. To match his track record would take 1-2 decades of hard work plus luck.

Tim Ferris: He has garnered a massive loyal following by posting unique content for years. Building the same following would take hard work plus luck, at a minimum.

Being the #1 person in the world with a rare skill is great. Aim for that and even if one doesn't get to the top, being #2 or #25 across the globe isn't bad either.

Have a good week!

To talk about the greatness of Google in building a massively successful business in this internet-crazed age is to mention to an adult that the colour of the sky is blue. However, despite all the tomes written about the internet giant (Amazon lists more than 20,000 titles mentioning Google), it’s impossible to still truly capture the essence of this company. 

Is it the same company that built hugely successful Orkut but shuddered to even compete with Facebook? Is Google the company that censured itself in China or the company that cited its liberal ideas when it decided to exit the world’s most populous nation? Is Google an innovator like no other that brought the world closer or just a conniving entity that looks to obfuscate more than it reveals about itself? 

The problem with Google is that it’s inherently complex and contradictory. Its executives speak the language of innovation, breaking things, and startup culture but its practices are closer to that of an old steel mill corporation that preys on competitors, is extremely top-heavy, and often tries to dominate the market by buying off any challenger before they know what hit’em.

As Google stands on a crossroads today having built the most profitable advertising business in the world, it stares at two options - whether to continue selling ads or to sell a subscription to itself. The shift has already started. Google will soon launch a subscription to its hugely popular Photos app, it’s made YouTube TV more expensive in the US. 

It continues to find ways to make as many people be hooked to its devices (Chromebook, smart home devices), subscriptions (YouTube, Photos), or its services (Cloud) as its advertising revenue could dwindle in the coming years – something Google admitted in an SEC filing as a serious business risk. 

How, then, we must think of Google? Is it a profit-generating machine at its core or a template for success in the innovation age? 

If former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former VP of Product Jonathan Rosenburg are to be believed, Google is both and something much more nebulous. In How Google Works, a book that spans the company’s early history to its blunders, the co-authors create a narrative that’s almost too good to be true (btw, so is Google’s stock performance). While offering an inside into Google’s functioning, they serve up the same contradictions and try to make sense of them into a cohesive narrative albeit with a perfect 20/20 hindsight. 

By the end of the book, even in the highly unlikely event that one isn’t convinced that Google is star-spangled awesome, the readers are likely to take away a lot of wisdom that can only come from decades of being at the cutting edge of innovation and creating things that are bigger than one’s ever dreamed of. 

Without pontificating much more and pretending to be a management guru, I will leave you with some of the most insightful tidbits from the book that can probably help you build your own playbook – even if your playbook is titled ‘How not to be Google’!

On dreaming big 

The first step to building a rocket is to dream about the surface of Mars and the kind of flag your colony would have. Creating things of unimaginable nature requires ambition of an unprecedented scale. Here are Google executives on the importance of ambition: 

• One night I had a dream (literally) and woke up thinking … what if you could download the whole Web and just keep the links? So I grabbed a pen and scribbled down the details to figure out whether it was really possible. The idea of building a search engine wasn’t even on my radar at the time. It was only later that Sergey and I realized ranking web pages by their links could generate much better search results. Gmail started out as a pipe dream too. And when Andy Rubin started Android a decade ago, most people thought aligning the mobile industry around an open-source operating system was nuts.

• It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.

• The math works: If you do something 1.3X every quarter, you’ll hit 10X within three years.

• Examples of roof shots (as opposed to loftier moonshots) include Google search, which launches around five hundred improvements every year, and our powerful and efficient data centers, which started as a pile of machines in the cages of an external hosting service. When you look at how great search is now, and at the amazing efficiency of the data centers that power it, these developments can seem like moonshots, because they are well over ten times better than when we started. But they didn’t get that way through a few giant leaps. Rather, it was lots of small steps that built them. 

• Go out there and have huge dreams, then show up to work the next morning and relentlessly incrementally achieve them.

On good marketing failing bad products faster

• As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

• With so much information and so many good choices, it’s harder for an incumbent, crummy restaurant (chain or not) to survive, regardless of the size of its marketing budget, and easier for a new, high-quality place to gain a word-of-mouth foothold.

• And the customer has a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril.

• Have you ever heard of Google Notebook? How about Knol? iGoogle? Wave? Buzz? PigeonRank? These were all Google products that, while they had some merit, never caught on with users. They weren’t good enough, and so they died a deserved death. 

• The tailwind of Google’s marketing and PR engine and the brand wasn’t nearly strong enough to overcome a headwind of mediocrity.

On helping create Instagram 

Once, Salar Kamangar was impressed with one of our young marketing associates and wanted to transfer said young man into the APM program. Unfortunately, the APM program only accepted candidates with degrees in computer science, which this associate didn’t have. 

Although Salar argued that the young associate was a self-taught programmer and had a “history of working closely with engineers and shipping things,” several influential execs, including Jonathan, steadfastly refused to expand the aperture and denied the transfer. 

The young marketing associate, Kevin Systrom, eventually left Google. He co-founded a company called Instagram, which he later sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.109 You’re welcome, Kevin!

On cramped offices and limited budgets

• A lack of resources forces ingenuity. 

• In 2002, Larry Page began wondering if it was possible to make every book ever published searchable online—not just the most popular titles or some other subset, but every single book. (We later calculated there were precisely 129,864,880 different book titles in the world.) 

• As the co-founder, Larry could have assigned a team of engineers to the problem and given them a nice budget. Instead, he got a digital camera, rigged it to a tripod, and set the contraption up on a table in his office. He pointed the camera down at the table, turned on a metronome to pace his movements, and started snapping pictures while Marissa Mayer turned the pages. 

• Based on this crude prototype, they were able to estimate what it took to digitize a book and made some calculations that the audacious project was indeed feasible. Google Books was born. 

• Sergey later employed a similar approach to see if Google’s Street View project was feasible. He took a drive around town with a camera and snapped a photo every few seconds. He showed off the pictures in Eric’s next staff meeting to rally support for what is now called Street View. Today Street View covers over five million miles of roads.

• But the facilities-first culture needs to be killed, shot dead before it gains an insidious foothold in the building. Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.

On linking to Yahoo 

• To grow its search platform in the late ’90s, Google focused on one thing: being great at search, which we measured along five axes—speed (fast is always better than slow), accuracy (how relevant are the results to the user’s query?), ease of use (can everyone’s grandparents use Google?), comprehensiveness (are we searching the entire Internet?), and freshness (how fresh are the results?). 

• The company was so intent on getting users the right answers, that Google search results often included links to Yahoo, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves at the bottom of the page so users could easily try those sites if they didn’t like Google’s results. 

Finally, let’s hear why we approach our careers all wrong

• In business, and particularly in high tech, it’s not enough to be great at what you do, you have to catch at least one really big wave and ride it all the way into shore. 

• When people are right out of school, they tend to prioritize company first, then job, then industry. But at this point in their career that is exactly the wrong order. 

• The right industry is paramount because while you will likely switch companies several times in your career, it is much harder to switch industries. Think of the industry as the place you surf (in Northern California the most rad waves are at Mavericks, dude) and the company as the wave you catch. You always want to be in the place with the biggest and best waves. 

• If you choose the wrong company or you have bad luck with an aggro boss who drops in on your first wave, you’ll still have a killer time if you’re surfing in an industry with bodacious waves. (Alright, Mr. Spicoli, that’s enough surfer lingo.)

• Conversely, if you choose the wrong industry early in your career, then growth opportunities within your company will be limited. Your boss won’t move, and you’ll be stuck without much leverage when you’re ready to look for jobs at other companies. 

Conclusion

If you made it till here, give yourself a pat on the back and Google ‘askew’ (without the quotes). Also, please consider taking a moment to share this piece with others in your network and write to me about the most interesting internet fact you know? 

All credits for book excerpts: Schmidt, Eric. How Google Works. John Murray Press. Kindle Edition. Buy it here. 

A massive infrastructural giant gave kickbacks to credit rating agencies presumably for favourable ratings, a housing finance company is close to shutting down and Rs 1 lakh crore of public debt is on the line, RBI fined the biggest bank in the country for hiding defaults and frauds, india’s insolvency court made a dangerous decision and government borrowings seem to be stuck in a debt trap. That’s just some of the stuff that happened last week which caught my eye. Too much for a Saturday morning, eh? I know. Let’s jump right in and I promise there’ll be something good at the end. 

Credit ratings lose credibility

I had chronicled the ICRA-IL&FS saga on a Twitter thread where I pointed out how ICRA kept on waxing eloquent about the beleaguered group’s management and experience even as it was defaulting on its liabilities.

While there’s no resolution in sight for IL&FS which owes at least Rs 20,000 crores to just the banks, stories about its senior management giving kickbacks to famed credit rating agencies emerged on Thursday and Friday. The stories listed details of football match tickets, villas, contribution to trusts and even shirts as some of the gifts offered by the group to rating agencies professionals across Icra, CARE, India Ratings and Brickwork Ratings.

Most rating agencies declined to comment on the reports pretending to be still studying them but the reports did create a dent in the veracity of the ratings provided by these agencies to many other industry leaders.

Speaking of ratings, CARE Ratings sent its MD & CEO on an indefinite leave pending a SEBI investigation. It appointed an interim CEO but decided to keep him out of the ratings decisions, apparently to “ensure independence of ratings”. 

Situations like these are not the first time. Many in my network recalled 2007-2008 when the subprime crisis hit the US and the actions of rating agencies came to light where they gave preferable ratings to dubious loans which consumers bought believing the ratings. However, it is important to note that the whole ratings model is broken. It needs to go. 

Rating agencies need to be either made irrelevant or much more accountable. This can only happen through more regulation but not of the post-facto kind. Rating agencies chiefs need to be held personally accountable for the wrongdoing. Mismatch of ratings should call for criminal prosecution and the model of companies paying rating agencies for any kind of rating needs to be eliminated. 

Another day, another bankruptcy

Is DHFL the next IL&FS? Many are still buying DHFL stock hoping to make a quick buck when it rises with the tide in the markets but the sad reality of the situation is that, last week, the company camecloser than everto shutting down and didn’t shy from even saying so publicly. 

The company said it was "undergoing substantial financial stress" and its ability to raise funds was "substantially impaired and the business has been brought to a standstill with there being minimal/virtually no disbursements." 

"These developments may raise a significant doubt on the ability of the company to continue as a going concern," it said in notes accompanying results for the fourth quarter ending March 31, signed by the Chairman and Managing Director Kapil Wadhawan. 

Banks have about Rs 40,000 crore exposure  (out of its total Rs 80,000 crore debt) to the company with SBI, Bank of Baroda and Yes Bank leading the pack. Meanwhile, the resolution plan for the company apparently involves *borrowing more*. DHFL is said to start seeking Rs 1200 - Rs 1500 crore in loans every month to start its lending business which it hopes will lead it to the road to recovery. Godspeed! 

Solving insolvency

On July 17, Andy Mukherjee, Bloomberg’s firebrand columnist wrote a scathing piece about an insolvency tribunal’s decision to remove preferences between secured and unsecured creditors in the insolvency proceedings for Essar Steel, the country's most high-profile insolvency case. Mukherjee wrote about how it sets a bad precedent which will increase credit costs for India Inc, lead to a crash for PSU banks shares and make foreign investors flee.

Just 24 hours later, the government approved many crucial changes to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code itself which it hopes will override the problematic judgement in the Essar case. Apart from clarifying that secured and unsecured creditors need not be treated as equals, the amendments put a strict time limit of 330 days for a resolution and reinstated the committee of creditors as the one in the driver’s seat.

SBI saga

Last week, I wrote about how SBI chief Rajnish Kumar isn’t a happy man these days. He’s been angry at the insolvency code because of Essar Steel decision that we just spoke about and at the pace at which insolvency proceedings are happening. Now, he’s even angry at journalists asking questions about Jet Airways insolvency and the possibility of liquidation. 

"How can I foresee what will happen in the NCLT This is the first case of the aviation sector that will be tested," he shot back. 

Now, he’s got even more reasons to be angry/disappointed/mildly dismayed. SBI, nation’s largest lender, has been charged a Rs 7 crore penalty by RBI for “non-compliance with norms related to NPA identification and fraud risk management, among others”. I unpacked what it means in a Twitter thread herebut the summary is that the bank failed to report bad loans on time to the banking network set up by RBI, it also failed to flag doubtful accounts on time and at times, it didn’t make enough provisions for these debts which forced RBI to levy the penalty. 

However, the big question is this: SBI bad loans reduced 23% to ₹1.72 trillion as of 31 March from ₹2.2 trillion in the previous year. This is the same date as the RBI audit. How big is the hole between reported numbers and actual numbers?

Debt trap for the government of India? 

All of us have analysed, dissected and even fact-checked the budget 2019 and the overall picture isn’t too great (unless you are reading opinion pieces by India Inc CEOs). But, economy and markets watcher Sonali Ranade spotted something that many of us have missed: Interest payments on government borrowings are now rising faster than the GDP itself. This has the makings of a debt trap, she said. 

Debt trap: a situation in which a debt is difficult or impossible to repay, typically because high interest payments prevent repayment of the principal. You can read this fascinating thread here. 

Hot stuff

1. Asian Development Bank has just cut India's growth forecast to 7% from 7.2% earlier. ADB said this is because of "the unexpectedly weak FY2018 outturn". This is just the latest in the series of growth estimates about India being cut, including the RBI itself. Here's an awesome chart which shows exactly where the problem lies. 

2. FM Nirmala Sitharaman batted for protectionism in her budget in the garb of boosting ‘Make In India’, Mint found. Tadit Kundu analyzed the budget and found that the list of items on which tariffs have been increased or introduced is far longer than the list of items where they have been reduced or removed. 

3. Vivek Kaul, my favorite finance teacher, wrote this insightful piece about how the higher prices that we are paying on petrol and diesel thanks to the budget hikes are going to help public sector banks provision against bad loans. 

4. Income Tax Department can fine you up to Rs 10,000 and even send you to jail now for seven years if you fail to file your return on time (i.e. July 31, 2019). 

5. Meanwhile, ShopClues seems to have finally shut shop, so has Aditya Birla Payments Bank, 75 engineering and technical colleges are winding up and even Ashok Leyland has shut down one of its plants temporarily due to weak demand. 

6. Now, the promised good news: IndiGo reported a stellar performance with its profit rising more than four times year-on-year to more than Rs 1200 crore. It largely happened due to Jet Airways’ departure and reports noted that investors want peace more than anything right now. (Long and Short predicted last week that there's good news in the offing for investors from this board meeting!) 

That’s all for this week. Only 241 weeks left now for India to become a $5 trillion economy. 

Happy weekend! I look forward to your bouquets and brickbats. 

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