Vaccicorns: An improbable rescue mission
Over the past decade we have learnt a lot from watching the good folks at Nalanda Capital invest. In this blog one of their team members, Anand Sridharan, writing in his personal capacity provides some great insights into why two pharma businesses which none of us had heard about 18 months ago – Moderna and […]
Stanley Druckenmiller: ‘The greatest investors make large concentrated bets where they have a lot of conviction
This week we feature investing lessons from the legendary Stanley Druckenmiller, who in this free wheeling yet insightful interview with The Hustle, talks about everything from position sizing and taking concentrated bets to the tech bubble and Bitcoin. The article introduces him as:“Stanley Druckenmiller is widely considered one of the greatest investors ever.Born in Pittsburgh […]
Europe’s Soccer Elites Took Their Eyes Off the Ball
Many still scoff at the idea of stakeholder capitalism and believe the only purpose of business is to maximise shareholder value. This article shows what happens if that is the case and the business forgets who else it is serving to begin with. The ill-thought out idea of a European Super League featuring a select […]
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
A couple of weeks ago, Azim Premji at an RSS lecture talked about how ‘Truth and good science are key to confront the Covid crisis’ and we all would agree we tend to accept science as closest to the truth. But what if science itself was flawed in the first place? Well, not all of it. But this brilliant article shows […]
Is India Really a Flailing State? Let’s Review the Data
If like us, you too are battling to deal with “recency bias” resulting from the steady negative news flow through the pandemic, you should know that a review of India’s progress across a battery of metrics across thirty years shows that relative to six other prominent developing countries, India has made steady progress. Clearly, more […]
Competition Demystified in India’s Small-ticket Consumption
High market share does not necessarily indicate high pricing power in Indian small-ticket consumption. Pricing power arises from the existence of barriers to entry. We have used Bruce Greenwald’s ‘Competition Demystified’ framework and applied it to India’s small-ticket consumption space to illustrate how Indian franchises consistently deepen existing competitive advantages and build new ones even as technology […]
The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something
Most of us tend to get carried away in our work lives, perhaps, passionately at that, getting better and better at it as we learn the nuances of our trade. But not many of us get to learn completely new skills outside of our work. And even fewer of us get to master any of […]
Sunderlal Bahuguna: A Himalayan voice for ecological truth and social justice
Anyone’s death is a cause for grief and mourning but with some people, it is a time to celebrate the life that they lived and ensure that the values and beliefs they stood for are kept alive for future generations to carry on. Sunderlal Bahuguna, one of India’s foremost environmentalists, most famously known for his […]
Daniel Kahneman: ‘Clearly AI is going to win. How people are going to adjust is a fascinating problem’
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning psychologist and author of the fascinating book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ is back with a new book, ‘Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement’. Given what we learnt about the biases which affect human judgement from the first book, a book from the scholarly Kahneman about Noise, a factor we all encounter in […]
Distribution and Demand
Last summer, following Jio’s slew of deals with global investors and tech companies, Ben Thompson, one of the more independent thinkers about the business of modern day technology, put out this piece connecting Jio’s telecom infrastructure to the layers of services including media content, built on top of it. In his latest piece, he analyses the takeaways from […]
Thomas Piketty is right: Everything you need to know about “Capital In The Twenty-First Century”
Now let’s move from Paul Graham’s theory to see an application of this theory i.e. let’s dig into one of the most original books published this century. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was published in 2013. At that time, the discourse on the widening inequality in income was already five years old. Piketty […]
How to think for yourself (and ‘independent vs conventional thinking’)
One of the privileges of working for Marcellus is that our colleagues share plenty of non-Finance related reading material such as this outstanding blog from Paul Graham which is useful as it is thought provoking. Paul Graham’s Wikipedia page says that he is “an English-born American computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is […]
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