My parents told some heartwarming stories about the vaccination drive in Jaipur. At 6.30 this morning, government nurses went around neighborhood parks to round up senior citizens on their morning walks. "Auntie please come, we are open", it seems.
Doctors are specifically requesting those who got the vaccine to post their pictures on Facebook and in WhatsApp groups. Apparently nothing convinces the skeptics better than seeing their friends smiling for the vaccine pic.
One center had a long 3-hour queue, but the nurses didn't turn anyone away. They said "we will work till late in the night but nobody will go home without the vaccine".
Whatever else we may think of our management of the pandemic, the healthcare workers have been absolute heroes. After a full year of being under the pump, they're still doing this with vigour and enthusiasm. God bless them all!
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Replug: open positions at @Stellaris_VP and our portfolio companies:
- Investment Analysts, Bangalore
- VP Marketing for Stellaris, Bangalore
- Product Manager for an SMB fintech company, Delhi
(deets below)
Heard an incredible story about analytics and the Coronavirus.
Apparently, a top predictive analytics company offered (pro-bono) to help a state government identify upcoming Covid hotspots.
They built sophisticated models which worked reasonably well in back tests. But they started noticing a pattern in the government's response.
When local authorities were warned about an emerging hotspot, they *scaled back* testing in that area instead of ramping it up. The goalpost moved from avoiding hotspot formation to avoiding hotspot detection.
In the last two weeks, four different friends have approached me for advice on how to start angel investing. These are not HNIs or "professional angels" - just regular people with good salaries that they want to invest in this asset class.
This is what I have told them:
Don't
There are 3 reasons for my recommendation: 1) Access 2) Influence 3) Diversification
Fully agree with Nikhil's view that telemedicine is a commodity. This is why so many companies were quickly able to "pivot to telehealth" in the past few months. At its heart it's just a platform for doctors and patients to communicate over text, voice and video.
In fact, you don't even need a webRTC app to compete in this space. The largest telehealth platform in India is Whatsapp. Every doctor who wants to consult remotely starts by giving her Whatsapp number to patients. And the experience for both sides is...not unsatisfactory.
College has its problems (lack of equal access, highly variable quality), but it remains the surest means of social mobility, and a personally transformative experience for students.
The whole "skip college and become a tech entrepreneur at 17" life plan reeks of debilitating privilege. For the vast majority, skipping college means a lifetime of shuttling between low-skilled jobs at the very edge of the middle class.
Another favourite argument of the tech echo chamber is that college education should be more vocational and focus on employable skills. To me, it's a reactionary argument that seeks to perpetuate the very differences it outwardly seeks to erase.