60 Million Users and Counting – An interview with Varun Sridhar from Paytm Money
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Varun Sridhar, CEO of Paytm Money, India’s largest online investment and wealth management platform. Varun is an expert in leading financial institutions to digital transformation through intrapreneurship. Prior to Paytm Money, he served as CEO of FinShell India, where he helped launch PaySa, a mobile fintech platform. […]
Bambu Founder Story – When “Fin” meets “Tech”
It’s the start of something new. What could lead an experienced finance professional and a serial software developer to “risk it all” by venturing into the world of startups? At age 50 and 35, Ned Phillips and Aki Ranin embarked on an entrepreneurial journey with Bambu. The journey started with a dream to empower the […]
Startup Lessons from Ayn Rand
I’ve written quite a few “episodes” of Startup Lessons by now, mostly focusing on history, i.e. ancient philosophers and generals. Not today. This is fiction. But not just any old fiction. Ayn Rand, for those unfamiliar, was something of an amateur philosopher, culminating in what we know call Objectivism. It’s a real thing. Most of […]
Searching for Scale
Why scale even matters So as you may have guessed at the clickbait, the lens here is scale. Startups care about scale, a lot. API’s matter only because they offer a new type of scalability, which wasn’t possible with traditional go-to-market channels, including Software-As-A-Service (“SaaS”). Again, for the developer community API’s are a revolution, but […]
The Selfless Startup
Let me start things off by declaring that I’m (Aki Ranin, COO of Bambu) not a people person. Always been more of a numbers guy, clearly a natural introvert. I’ve been forced to play the extrovert for various management and customer-facing jobs I’ve done throughout my career. Over the last two decades, I’ve been jumping […]
Startup Lessons from History: Sun Tzu
I’m a startup guy that likes to read about history, and spend a lot of time thinking about… well, stuff. This ongoing series is an exploration and tribute to what history can teach us about startups, and life itself. We’ve spent a lot of time in the ancient West, so why not go East next? […]
Surviving your Startup
A now widely circulated and famous article by Inc. magazine titled The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship unveils the truth behind the typically idealized, romanticized picture of the heroic startup founder. VC’s. Unicorns. IPO’s. Admiration of the masses and glossy magazine covers. It could be me. Or… Losing your life savings. Losing your friends. Even family. […]
5 Easy Ways to STOP Your Startup
My first startup Bambu has now made it well clear of the first 12 months, so we are now only at 90% risk of immediate and catastrophic failure. Phew! I can already sleep with the other eyelid closed. Do I know what to do right? Am I suddenly declaring myself an expert? Most definitely not, […]
What Tom Brady can teach Startups about Failure
That was the winning record of all teams in NFL history, when facing the situation Tom Brady was in during the final minutes of the Super Bowl last Sunday. He made it 1 out of 94. Here’s how. #1: You win games by winning plays Winning in startups, winning in life, it rarely happens in […]