Some of you know I am writing a book on Product Market Fit.

Unlike the traditional book release, here I will be releasing parts of the book online as and when I get done with each part.

Today I am releasing the first part = Chapter 1!

Thread on Chapter 1 follows. Now, there are only 5 chapters! And given the final book will be 60-75k words, each chapter is going to be long! This one is 13.5k words!

So what are the different chapters? Here you go.

I wrote a post on the 4 routes to startup, and looked at how each Indian unicorn started up.

The four routes are personal pain, personal experience, prospecting, and opportunistic.

Personal pain is when you build to solve your problem. Zomato is a classic example. On the B2B side Zenoti is another Personal Experience is when the idea evolves from, or is triggered by what you have experienced in the course of your work or personal life.

The difference between Personal Pain and Personal Experience is as @prasanna_says - in the former you are the customer, and in the latter you know the customer!

Really proud of the high-quality content being published by us at Blume. My colleagues @seekingn0rth & @dishambles hv an Edit calendar. One of the few orgs in the world with an edit calendar & capital call schedule😊

Highlighting the key pieces we published recently. I loved @dishambles’ profile of spacetech play @pixxelspace that is putting up hyperspectral satellites in the air. @awaisahmedna & @kshitijgokul are building something special. Their immense ambition comes through in Disha’s piece!

blume.vc/commentaries/a…

Yesterday, we released the Indus Valley Report 2023.

It takes stock of Indus Valley (our moniker for the Indian startup ecosystem), & looks at underlying patterns + trends.

In this thread I wanted to stress on a key message we have for the Indian startup ecosystem. Let us go! The Indian startup ecosystem is the 4th largest globally!

Not bad for a $2.5k per capita income nation with an effective India1 market of $~1.5tn.

We punch well above our economic weight when it comes to vc funding.

~5% of Zomato users (incl some who order 100+ times a yr!) account for ~45% (could be higher too) of its total orders, & v likely >50% of total value.

This is 2.7m users (~5% of its 58m annual, 15% of its 17m monthly users).

The power law in Indian consumer internet is brutal. Why I think these 5% users account for >50% of order value. Because their AOV (avg order values) are higher than the infrequent orderers.

From the Q1FY23 transcript.

Some chartbait.

Indian ecommerce + commerce majors and their GMVs (FY21) - via Bernstein.

(Reliance's digital / nondigital colours seem to have inverted. The lighter blue is for offline, and darker blue is online).

Meesho's $5b is interesting. (Flipkart includes Myntra) Here is Meesho's growth.

Grew 6-fold in yr1 of the pandemic & up 15x+ Mar-20. Clearly led by accelerating direct by consumer (vs reseller). Hearing as much as 70% is direct by consumer.

Have tried to find why they went direct. Seems more opportunistic than strategic i hear.

This 20VC podcast featuring Ian Seigel @ZipRecruiterCEO w @HarryStebbings is exceptional. It is a masterclass in how to run a company; esp useful for growth founders.

I thought the episode was so good I got it transcribed! (you are welcome!)

Transcript: docs.google.com/document/d/12E…

https://twitter.com/ZipRecruiterCEO/status/1527722494177619968

Storytelling is a superpower.

Excited to release the 1st Indus Valley Annual Report to the world.

Indus Valley = our moniker for India's startup ecosystem.

The 1st issue gives us a chance to take stock of its rise and evolution, take a look back at 2021 & finally look ahead to what is coming.

@amal_vats A brief look at the report. Check out the full report (~100 slides) at bit.ly/IndusValley2022

The report has 3 sections
• Understanding India
• Understanding Indus Valley
• State of the Valley 2021

Phew. Nearing the end now.

Going with title *Indus Valley Annual Report 2022* - Understanding India, the startup ecosystem in India ('Indus Valley') and the state of the (Indus) Valley. 3 numbers that surprised me a bit from our work on this deck. For all the euphoria about the Indian story, it is a slim (though growing) consuming class that does much of the heavy lifting on the consumption front. This is India1 as we refer to it.

*Scalable GTM enabling predictable unit-positive customer acquisition indicating a large / expandable TAM.*

This is what Series A funds traditionally look for.

As the funding environment softens, seed founders would do well to keep the above in mind. Let us unpack this. It is never been easier to raise a pre-seed / seed as in the last two years. It is also never ever been harder to raise a Series A. As Seed has gotten easier, Series A is now the chokepoint.

This is a v good essay by @athomasq on 'Minsky Moments' = when capital inflows lead to reduction in perceived risk (true risk remains). He posits a Minsky Moment in venture similar to the one that impacted the credit markets in '08-09.

pivotal.substack.com/p/minsky-momen… This is a clever piece of writing by @athomasq - the observation on time acceleration in VC is brilliant.

I am skeptical though if there will be a severe venture winter (ofc my job requires me to disbelieve in it!) because of how true & perceived risk interplay in venture.

Went down the crypto / nft web3 rabbit hole last year in a systematic way, trying to grasp the landscape + players.

A few useful resources that I leaned on. Found @thegeneralistco and their writings on space (DAOs & players (FTX, Sushiswap, Terra, Opensea, Metamask) very useful.

@mariogabriele is putting together a very thoughtful media brand, one worth subscribing to.

readthegeneralist.com/briefings

Fascinated by 'secular' or atheistic 'religions' - Ethical Culture is an old one, New Stoicism is a new one. Suppose they could be seen as life philosophies.

Thinking about this equation.
Religion = Faith + Rituals + Identity + Community + Precepts Both Ethical Culture, Stoicism dial down / remove the Faith part while preserving the other 4.

Religion has several jobs to be done incl mindfulness (prayer helps here), belonging etc.

They show you can have a practice that has best of what religion offers w/o the God part.

🧵 Native models for each ecommerce category.

Start w this useful framework (via Niraj Shah of Wayfair fm podcast on @joincolossus)

Amazon cracked #1 through marketplace. Has become the native model.

#2 solved via dark stores (Rappi etc). This is now 'native' model globally. Huge excitment around QCommerce / 10min delivery - GoPuff, Rappi, Gorillas, Jokr, Dunzo, Zepto etc - because the model of dark stores / limited SKUs / defined 2x2 sq km area etc has been cracked. PMF is now much easier with this model.

Grocery's native model is QCommerce.

Went to binge watch Tokyo Girl for the 3rd/4th time last night, & found it is off roster. Sigh.

Somehow, this portrait of a Japanese sarariwoman through her 20s & 30s, successes & failures making her way through Tokyo, became my fave watch of '21. 🧵

primevideo.com/detail/Tokyo-G… Thought I would watch it quickly & do a review but alas it is now gone. Will check if it is available somewhere on the interwebs.

This here is a decent summary of the plotline
riadalwani.medium.com/tokyo-girl-109…

Interesting post by @mariogabriele on 'DeCos' or decentralized countries. We are beginning to see provocative thinking on the future of nation states (@balajis has done a lot of thinking on this - network states v nation states) & this is certainly one.

readthegeneralist.com/briefing/the-d… I do concur that the nation state's gravitational power is decreasing; my specific area of interest is not virtual but new physical nation states emerging (more challenging + less realistic though) & the actions needed to support the emergence of these new physical nation states.

🧵

1/ There are 3 broad risks in the startup’s journey - product, market and execution risk.

A startup grows from idea to IPO by eliminating these systematically along the way.

Let us examine these. 2/ First, product risk.

Does the product you designed solve a problem for a customer. Does s/he care? Getting to a minimum viable product (MVP) broadly eliminates ~80% of product risk.

For a venture nerd like me, this was such a terrific read (the transcripts are the best thing abt Colossus podcasts).

Brief thread🧵 on what I found interesting from @roelofbotha 's convo w @patrick_oshag Sequoia holds $45b worth of undistributed public stock (companies in its portfolio who have IPOd), about the same as its private holdings.

Together, Sequoia's 'AUM' > India's largest AMC, SBI Mutual (~600kcrs = $80b)

Why does a VC reject your pitch? 🧵

A perspective basis my last 3 years in a seed VC.
(this is true especially of seed investing, but holds for the broad VC asset class) I work at @BlumeVentures, a seed stage tech VC, and we get 3-3,500 startup pitches a year. We can fund 10-12 at best a yr. This means that we reject a lot of great startups.

🧵

On @ClassplusApps, its recent fundraising round, and what we can learn from one of the most exciting B2B startups out there today.

A B2B startup with a consumer DNA, that any B2C co would be proud of. On thursday, Classplus announced its latest fundraising round, toting up to $65m across Tiger, @gsvventures and existing investors Falcon Edge / AWI, @BlumeVentures

livemint.com/companies/star…

🧵 on startup 'valuations'.

Why are loss-making startups run by 20-somethings 'valued' as unicorns while similar profit-making companies are valued at half that?

Thread below has the dope, but the longer read is 👇🏽
sajithpai.medium.com/exhaust-fumes-…

1/23 First, the title 'Exhaust Fumes'

Comes from a great quote by @fredwilson

“Early stage valuations aren’t really valuations. They are the exhaust fumes of a negotiation about two things — the amount raised and the amount of dilution.”

Let us understand this.

2/23