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KPMG Thought Leadership Update

Reshaping for future success What's next for Private Equity in India This report, based on research conducted in the second quarter of 2009, examines the impact of the global financial crisis on private equity in India and the prospects for the market in the near and long-term. The research, undertaken by KPMG in India in conjunction with Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center includes a detailed survey of 40 General Partners (GPs) and Limited Partners (LPs) active in the Indian market. I hope that Thought Leadership update will prove to be a valuable resource for you. Regards,   Download Report (2,029 KB) Privacy & Disclaimer © 2009 KPMG, an Indian Partnership and a member firm of the KPMG network of independent member firms affiliated with KPMG International, a Swiss cooperative. All rights reserved.

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How Indian Finance Sector has matured

I was Googling for some information on Financial regulations in India, when I chanced upon a few old news items from the early 2000's [ 1 ][ 2 ]. While reading those new items I realized how the Indian Financial sector has undergone a rapid transformation in the last decade or so. India's financial sector has undergone a very rapid phase of transformation in the last 10-15 years. While scam ridden 90's brought in multiple regulators like SEBI and other related organizations such as NSDL and NSE, the private banks which grew brought in newer leaner ways of banking and infusion of technology - Core Banking Systems and Straight-Through-Processing. However, it was only in the new millenium that these changes as an aggregate started hitting the psyche of the common man and the government / regulators together. This trigerred massive national level initiatives - many of these fueled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Some of these were the introduction of Electronic Clearing (EC

Weekend Trips and Google Maps

I am a self confessed Fan (yes with a capital 'F') of Google and its products - my GMail remains open on my laptop as long as it is switched on; I visit Google to reach every 9 in 10 websites I visit; I save most of my documents as GMail attachments or Google Docs; all the websites which I manage are managed through blogger.com; and almost every time I drive to a new place, I use Google Maps ! The resolution and detail on Google Maps for India has improved a lot since I first blogged about MapMyIndia version of Indian mapping software (incidentally, the makers of MapMyIndia now power Yahoo! India Maps ). However, Google Maps has forged far ahead of Yahoo! Maps or MapMyIndia thanks to its colaborative features - most of the landmarks and addresses which I find on Google Maps are tagged or identified by users themselves. This kind of crowdsourced mapping info makes Google maps an ideal tool to find anything from businesses (say CD Shop in Powai) to picnic spots and weekend getaw

Motivating People

Found this awsome list of statements on motivating employees here . people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward positive reinforcement is the most effective way to motivate people [Note that in a technology company, a reinforcer might be the freedom to spend some time working on a side project or a pet feature; reinforcement is broader than money or praise; it can be anything that the employee values.] reinforcement works best when it is immediate, certain, and frequent (Daniels points out that kids that our public schools diagnose as having an ADD learning disability are able to concentrate for hours playing video games that provide 85 positive reinforcements per minute) reinforcement doesn't work if followed up with a "but, you need to improve X, Y, Z" monthly reinforcement only provides 12 opportunities per year to shape someone's performance; weekly is the minimum (the annual review and bonus is a joke, as far as Daniels is concer

The day Could not have started worse

Image Credit: deen I took about 2½ hours to reach office today. Apparantly some truck has oveturned near Chembur and hence all traffic from the Sion-Trombay highway has been diverted towards the Suman-nagar flyover (where Eastern Express enters the Island city). This has resulted in a huge traffic jam at Sion. The small incident explains how fragile the infrastructure demand-supply equilibrium is in Mumbai. The roads are just about sufficient to support traffic. So, if it rains or a truck/bus stranded on the road side - it creates queues of traffic kilometers long. Image Credit: Marc van der Chijs This is because of multiple reasons - first of course being that road-space is narrow. The others are like: There are no alternate routes to reach the Island city apart from the arterial roads. The JNPT road remains unutilized even at the time of the traffic jams and natural calamities like water logging. The Highway Maintenance services such as towing trucks to clear stranded vehicles are n

The day Could not have started better

Image Credit : Abhijeet Rane I took the Bandra-Worli Sealink to work today and as I started on the Sea-Link the song "Yeh Tumhari Meri Batien" from rock-on started playing on the Radio. Reached office from Borivli to Lower Parel in flat 40 minutes - the day could not have started better. Mumbai's infrastructure has been improving by the day. This city which looked "more like a conglomeration of many small cities from Ghatkopar to Andheri joined together" [ ref ] is now starting to take shape of a real megapolis. In the past 5 years, almost all roads have been cemented, pavements redone and flyovers has been made on most major traffic signals. To add icing to the cake we have the first phase of Metro (Andheri-Ghatkopar) coming up by 2010-11 and at least 3 monorail (Bandra, Santa-Cruz, Borivli) coming up by almost the same time. But a lot of this good work is undone by - hawkers who still occupy the pavements and footpaths (and often uproot the tiles on them to s

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Conclusion
Bloozle – the Startup that never was (Part VI)

Continued from Environmental factors (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part V) We are confident that we will get customers and we will be able to multiply our customer base fast once we cross the incubation stage. But reaching that stage needs massive amount of research and development effort. And that cannot be sustained by us on our personal savings – and definitely not without quitting our corporate careers. And to do all this we need Seed Funding – it’s a vicious circle which probably every entrepreneur faces. Most entrepreneurs overcome this phase by sheer determination of cutting through the hardship – even borrowing money to run their dreams. We would probably have done the same – if this was a smaller venture which could be incubated on less money, but we don’t think it is like that. And so the wait is on – for the VC who would help in Seed Funding and kick starting. Till then – we reminisce on the mistakes we committed and try to learn from them. May be for this venture

Environmental factors
Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part V

Continued from Product Development Mistakes (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part IV) We probably still would have survived, because at the end of the whole charade – we still had a working prototype*, a proof of concept and most of all a revenue model – which hardly any online startup in those days had. But unfortunately for us – recession had to set in just when we were readying our b-plan and reaching out to investors. In the months since October 2008 and today – we have heard responses from umpteen VC’s^ that they are not even considering investing in seed stage startups till the recession goes away. Most of them of course camouflage their response by saying that they would have invested if we had customers (essentially saying no to Seed Stage and asking us to reach beyond that stage). Unfortunately for us, personal lives are at a cornerstone where we could not have risked our personal savings (beyond what we already had) in taking this concept beyond the seed stage. We kne