Marcellus Insights
Short read: Why Can’t You Sit Still?
How many times have you sat down to get some work done, but within minutes found yourself reaching for your phone? Or your mind just started wandering to things that didn’t need your attention right then? In his weekly column for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman explores this all-too-common problem. He begins with a word […]
Short read: ‘It’s a reference whenever you want to build tension’: How Psycho’s terrifying music changed film forever
Have you tried watching Jurassic Park with the sound muted? The subtitles tell you what’s happening on-screen. But without its now iconic background music, you just don’t feel the terror of the T-Rex creeping up on the main characters. It is said that one of the major contributing factors to the huge success of the […]
Short read: eMudhra’s rise from Indian digital signatures to global cybersecurity – and the red flags ignored along the way
Every Indian who files a tax return, signs a GST form or bids for a government tender interacts with a company that plays a critical role in the process. And most of us would not even know who that company is, what it does, or why it is so important. What it does is vouch […]
New Kings & Queens: India’s Mutual Fund Distributors
In our 21st October blog (India’s New Kings & Queens Are Flourishing in Small Town India) we showed how a new class of business families is flourishing in small-town India. In our 27th October 2026 blog we showed how one route into this class runs through auto dealerships. Another one runs through mutual fund distribution. […]
Long read: What happens when you’re too rich to hear no?
Plenty has been written about the ills of wealth inequality. Yet Hanna Horvath brings in this dangerous consequence of extreme wealth. Hanna says this in the context of the bizarre situation where Anthropic and OpenAI founders and researchers say what they are building could destroy humanity yet wouldn’t stop doing it. Hanna is a certified […]
Long read: [Outliers] Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs
Charlie Munger passed away three years ago and yet people crave for that extra wisdom we wish he could share. Here’s a transcript of an unreleased interview Charlie gave Todd Combs, the former investment manager at Berkshire and once considered a successor to Warren Buffett. There are plenty of gems in there to go through […]
Long read: Abolish the business school
14 years ago, one of us in Marcellus published a rant against the MBA which went viral in that pre-social media era – see https://www.vccircle.com/derating-mba . Now, in an essay for the New York Times, Chris Marquis, a professor who has taught at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, asks “What exactly is an M.B.A. for?” And […]
Short read: ‘Web Beneath the Waves’: The world in the details
Over the past decade, we have enjoyed reading Samanth Subramanian’s writings and shared many in this newsletter. Here’s a new book titled “The Web Beneath the Waves: And Other Reports From Our Tangled World”, which is a collection of his essays from publications as varied as The New Yorker, Granta, Caravan, The Guardian, Financial Times […]
Short read: Risk of irrelevance?
We have had the good fortune of being associated with Akash Prakash, the founder of Amansa Capital, a highly respected India focused fund management firm based in Singapore. Even more so, we look forward to his column in the Business Standard, for he says it the way he sees it. In this piece, he laments […]
Short read: Let’s welcome data centres—but on the right terms
India may be seen as an anti-AI story where we don’t have AI winners among our companies whilst at the same time AI’s displacement of jobs can undo our expected demographic dividend. Yet, there is reason to cheer as over the past year, hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Indian conglomerates like Adani, […]
Long read: Accidentally On Purpose
India has no dearth of options to spice up its food. From the mild black pepper we add to a tea masala, to the fiery green chillies we use in everyday cooking, to one of the hottest chillies ever measured, the bhut jolokia, we have a wide range to call our own. It is something […]
Long read: Dave Cote’s second act
At Marcellus, we love to invest in businesses that dominate their industries. Companies that build and sustain deep competitive moats, thus staying a step ahead of the competition. And such moats are often found in boring, unglamorous companies. Ask an investor about the big winners in the AI boom and you’ll hear the usual names, […]
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