The American business community is speaking with a unified voice - NAM called to invoke the 25th Amendment; the Business Roundtable and Chambers of Commerce urge a peaceful transition of power; all have denounced last week's violence. What might this mean? A few implications:
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#PolicybazaarIPO Long thread: There is monetary printing by RBI, there is lending by banks & finally there is the Indian IPO. “Foreign owned” company with ~1 Bn investment is selling “Indian” unicorn to “savvy” Indians for $ 6.2 Bn. Want to know how this printing works? Let’s go-

The basics: Rs 6017 Cr being raised by new shares (Rs 3750) & re-selling (Rs 2267). Face value Rs 2 offered at Rs ~1000 per share is one of a kind. Who decides the price? Examine the valuation ladder below.
With ~$ 150 Mn invested till 2017, we see $ 525 Mn rushes in after 2018

So, a company valued $1 Bn in 2018 & $ 1.5 Bn in 2019 by key investors like Tencent, suddenly “needs money” in March 2021. Falcon Edge “invests” all of $ 75 Mn in March at valuation of $ 2.65 Bn.
Enter IPO bankers a couple of months later & they value the company at $ 6.2 Bn

Why does PolicyBazaar need $ 75 Mn just 6 months before IPO & give away 2.5 times in returns? And it doesn’t even use that money as the B/S reflects appx Rs 1000 Cr in cash lying around.
What kind of a favor is that? Why do they need US investment bank for this just before IPO?

Notice 50% rise in shareholding of promotors here & a 1: 500 bonus share issue. After all, how do you print money & still keep share price at “reasonable” Rs 1000?
Without bonus issue in June 2021, each share would have costed Rs 50,000. Heard of circular valuation?

There’s rumour about confidential negotiations btn the Biden admin and the German gov. Their goal: to find a way out of the mess in which the whole transatlantic community finds itself because of Merkel’s support for Putin’s pipeline—Nord Stream 2

2/ The preferred solution for the Biden team would be to deny Putin the ability to exercise energy blackmail against Central Europe and Ukraine, while at the same time foregoing sanctions against Germany.

3/ Early in his career, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony @SecBlinken had analyzed the decision of the Reagan administration not to levy sanctions against West Europeans for building the Siberian pipeline with the Soviets.

4/ See for example:

5/ Reagan decided to take a step back, calculating that the unity of the West was more important than the gas pipeline. Not even Lady Thatcher supported Reagan’s policy.

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

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Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures

By now, you’ve probably heard that global supply chains are in a state of disarray.

Here's a simple breakdown of what’s causing it:

1/ There's a lot of talk right now about the global supply chain crisis.

@Business published an article subtitled "Inside the Brutal Realities of Supply Chain Hell”—it's getting serious.

This thread provides my (very) simple framework for understanding the key drivers:

2/ First off, what are the visible impacts of the crisis?

Product delays (good luck getting appliances before 2022), product shortages (see semiconductors), port buildups (fly over LA and you'll see), and rampant freight costs (sorry, retailer margins).

It's pretty bad.

3/ Global supply chains are very complex. We live in a highly-interconnected world.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Shenzhen and impacts when I receive my bike in New York. Ok, maybe not quite, but almost...

So to understand the drivers of the crisis, we need a simple framework.

4/ Let's break down what is happening using an Econ 101 classic: Supply and Demand.

Supply here refers to everything related to manufacturing, production, and transportation.

Demand here refers to everything related to consumption.

I'll walk through each side:

Bill Gates got lucky.

With an IBM deal he signs in 1980.

Here's the hidden truth about the rise of Microsoft:

So we all know the Bill Gates story.

A brilliant kid who loves computers.

Drops out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft with his childhood friend, Paul Allen.

Gates and Allen originally sell code interpreters to companies like MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System).

In 1976, their revenue is $16,000.

By 1978, Microsoft hits $1 million in revenue.

But they were far from taking over the world.

Until...

In 1980, IBM asks Gates to build them an operating system for their new personal computers.

He had never done this.

So Gates directs them to his friend Gary Kildall from Digital Research.

The IBM-Digital Research meeting goes poorly.

The two parties argue over non-disclosure agreements and other legal issues.

Eventually, IBM offers Digital Research $250,000 to build the operating system.

They refuse.

"We will only do royalties."