Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. I talk about India, Entrepreneurship and the New New Thing. Thanks.

Every year at around this time, I start fancying a new profession. Value Investing and Teaching. Culprit being Prof. Sanjay Bakshi. Who apart from managing Tactica Capital teaches a very popular course (titled BFBV - Behavioral Finance and Business Valuation) to second year PGPM participants at MDI.

In his own words, “BFBV is an excuse to teach worldly wisdom through multidisciplinary thinking…”. Personally I have benefited immensely from my interactions with him. If I was to write my biography, I will describe a Saurabh Garg before he met Prof. Bakshi and another Saurabh Garg after he took BFBV. The course teaches you concepts and make you aware of ideas from vast variety of disciplines - Economics, Finance, Biology, History, Philosophy, Architecture, Religion, Mathematics etc. The course takes lessons from Illuminati like Benjamin Franklin, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet (to name just a few)

He recently started the 2009 session of his value investing, behavioral finance and decision making course (course outline here). Please subscribe to Prof. Bakshi’s blog here to get an update on his teaching material. Personally and professionally I will recommend it to anyone who wants to reinvent himself and believes that learning is a life long journey rather than an one time initiative. After taking a course you start looking at life in a different view all together.

I cant say that course made me wiser and more mature but I can say one thing for sure. It is an awesome experience and even if you are not looking at any long term rewards, the time you spent on that course is one of the most satisfying periods of your life. Do try it.

P.S.: Sandeep and I started PseudoSocial sometime back in 2006 to share whatever little we know and hoping to learn more and connect with more investors. The blog was a very rewarding experience till the time we were updating it. Time and work commitment does not permit us to update is very frequently. If someone wants to resurrect it, please let me know.

Time for another Friday Update. Its not even funny how soon a Friday came. I was in Delhi for two days visiting markets for a client. The trip was more exhausting than exciting. No new highlights so to speak of. However the Delhi trip gave quite a few ideas on interesting things that can be done in the Indian market. I will list few of them here.

To start with, a business idea.

• Background: While in market, I saw that Coke has a water brand called BonAqua apart from Kinley (that they recently relaunched). Wondering why would Coke have two brands in packaged drinking water category. I also saw that Frito Lays has launched a brand called Desi Beats - in direct competition to ITC’s Bingo.
• Idea: How about a market intelligence company? Not a market research company but a market intelligence company. The difference being that market researchers would try and collect data when demanded by the clients and on the other hand, market intelligence company would gather intelligence and help companies and brands take proactive decisions.
• Business Case: As a brand it is very difficult for me to keep track of things that are happening in the market. I would readily pay for a company that monitors the market on my behalf and gives me weekly or monthly dossiers on what is happening in the market. Further, this is better than market research because I am not paying for data that is mostly fudged and has lots of biases built it. In fact more and more clients I meet as part of my work for Creativeland Asia dont want to believe in traditional market research methodologies.
• How would I do this? If I had volunteers or part-timers whose only job is to go and click pictures at retail shelves across the country, I can have reams of data. And with advent of personal technology, its cheap and convenient to click pictures and send it to a centralized location. I can then have another team analyze this data for information and patterns. For example if suddenly all pics from Delhi show that Red Bull is now visible at even the juice stores, that would mean that Red Bull is trying to revamp their distribution and has ambitious plans.
• Probable roadblocks: Quite a few. Including things like <retailers not allowing you to click pictures>, <motivation and remuneration of volunteers>, <team of analysts>, <no competitive advantage> etc. Need to think lot more on this.
• Future of this idea. I think I will post this on VentureWoods and see if I get some feedback. And once I put things in shape, will try to take it further.

Apart from this, other notable things are

• A tee shirt shop that is very close to my n00b.in tees idea. Have to check these people out.
• Learned more about LeagueOne. Rather than opening new stores, they are just aggregating traditional retail stores and selling non-FMCG products/services like insurance, mobile recharges, OOH screens, movie tickets etc. there. Very interesting concept with lots of potential. More on this later. Probably a new blog post all together.

Every-time I go for a movie in Mumbai and the National Anthem is played the show, I experience a host of emotions. Anger, Happiness, Pride, Anguish, Sadness, Disappointment, they are all there. Anger at people who refuse to show respect to my National Anthem. Sadness at all those who dont know the significance of the song. Smile at all those who choose to sing along loud. Pride when I sing it (not so loud). Anguish and Disappointment because of the new generation Z - for whom a National Anthem is just another inconvenience, something that does not suit their generation.

I find this entire idea of playing the National Anthem, ridiculous. According to some law in Mumbai (or is it entire Maharashtra, someone please correct me on this), any public display of a movie should be preceded by the National Anthem. And since cinema owners want to make money and want to be on the right side of the law, they very gladly play the 52 second clip. Not caring why are they doing it. Not caring how should it be played. Not caring what it stands for.

Anyways, as they say, to each his own. There is a larger point here. When we force the cinema owners to play the National Anthem before every movie, aren’t we forcing democracy on them? Aren’t we going against the very definition of the democracy?

As the entire world discusses Google Chrome, I close this week on a rather happy note. I am traveling to Delhi for a meeting and obviously any travel to Delhi is fun. Home. Friends. How-ever short the duration may be, distances are something that I strive to reduce as much as I can. Physical or emotional. Time for another Friday Update. Most of the week has been busy with work.

Hits

• Google Chrome. After the initial excitement over Chrome, people have started looking at it more seriously. Ars Technica reported an ambiguous EULA, others reported bugs and almost everyone compared Chrome with Mozilla and how Chrome does not support plug-ins etc.. But I remain excited about the possibilities offered by Chrome and cloud computing. (Here is my post on Chrome)
  
• Wall-E. One of the best movies I have ever seen in a long long time. The quality of animation, the story, the concept, I loved every bit of it. If you haven’t seen it, please go ahead and do so. Its worth every penny you will spend on it.
• Leader Paes wins US Open. Leader Paes won the mixed-doubles title at US Open 08 (Rediff reports). This is his 8th grand slam. Only one eluding him right now is French Open. Lets see if he can do it. He is already 35 and still as strong and fit as players half his age. BTW, he later today has his Men’s Double title match too. Lets hope it becomes his 9th.

Misses

• Tata Nano. Tata has pulled out of Singur. I am not qualified enough to comment on the plight of farmers, political parties and Tata Nano but I know one thing for sure. Tata pulling out of West Bengal is a huge dent for the development of the state and the region. No Indian company (leave alone the foreign companies) would now want to risk their money and time in West Bengal. Hope I could teach people and politicians there a lesson or two in evolution and development.

Random Musings

• Recently discovered that I love remote controlled cars. A colleague in office got a car one day and it was awesome fun. I think I will buy one very soon.
• Had an awesome Wednesday holiday. As reported on twitter, I managed Cricket, Wall-E, Dinner, Shopping, Travel, Photography, Reading all in one mid-week holiday. Only thing I missed was thinking.
• Is this blog slowly becoming a personal blog? I was thinking that my last few posts have talked about me more than anything else. Is The New New Thing going the War of Words way? Probably will ponder more on this and see what all changes I need to make so that New New Thing remains New.

All in all, yet again a very non-exciting week. Need to get hold of life soon.

To make a lot of money, you need to have ideas and time. And to come up with ideas, you need to have a lot of free time. And for a lot of free time, you need to have financial freedom.

Talk of vicious circles of life.