Announcing the launch of my occasional podcast from the MountainSpeak series of free-form conversations with friends.
More details at the end of the newsletter.
DTW
During the Week, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. In the meanwhile, Vanguard group bought more shares and became the largest shareholder with 10.3% stake. This sent the Twitterati and also the company in a tailspin of narrative and counter narratives.
More people jumped in to offer their advise to the world’s richest man.
Like I wrote in my last newsletter, this only means distraction for Twitter and its employees. Many tech commentators believe that Elon may not even be serious about the whole thing and it might turn out to be one of his many “man-child“ actions.
I mean, his first tweet after the public announcement was “oh hi lol“ and then went on to run twitter poll on multiple features thereby putting tremendous pressure on top management and board including CEO, Parag Agarwal.
The larger question is how to deal with distractions while executing your companies growth strategy. Distractions could be large pandemics like Covid19 or even a socio-economic/government policy like demonetisation. Sometimes, it may be a geo-political crisis like Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Coming back to Twitter, the entire leadership team has now stoped paying attention to the growth hacks and are now singularly focused on thwarting Elon Musk plan which claim to be “…an unsolicited, non-binding proposal to acquire Twitter,”. It is going to be hard and perhaps Elon has few more tricks up his sleeves.
The current plan is based on the poison pill strategy. Simply put, make your company unattractive for a hostile takeover. In the end-game Twitter would be a net looser- either they execute the poison pill thereby lowering the share price on their own OR Elon starts dumping the stock forcing a downward spiral for the company share price.
In India, Tata Neu started making noise about their intent and suddenly the well-laid plans of many e-commerce companies have begun to look distracted. Observe the below picture which looks like an ensemble for Avengers albeit a TATA Avenger Team. The list of the powerful men and one woman (Chief Digital Officer) is given below
In the picture - N. Chandrasekaran (Chairman, Tata Sons), Saurabh Agarwal (CFO, Tata Sons); Aarthi Subramanian (Group Chief Digital Officer, Tata Sons); Pratik Pal (CEO, Tata Digital); Mukesh Bansal (President, Tata Digital); Modan Saha (CEO, Financial Services, Tata Digital); Puneet Chhatwal (MD & CEO, IHCL); P Venkatesalu (CEO, Trent Ltd); Avijit Mitra (CEO & MD, Infiniti Retail Ltd); Vikas Purohit (CEO, Tata UniStore Ltd); Sunil Bhaskaran (MD & CEO, AirAsia India); Rajiv Sabharwal (MD & CEO, Tata Capital); Neelesh Garg (MD & CEO, Tata AIG); Hari Menon (CEO & Co-founder, BigBasket); and Prashant Tandon (CEO & Co-founder of Tata 1mg)
Zomato rolled out a Food Safety policy and got an instant approval from Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) which praised the foodtech platform for its proactive approach
“This shows the importance of screening, approvals and processes undertaken by the FSSAI, and the faith the industry places in our audits and inspections,”
FSSAI chief executive Arun Singhal
When Zomato reached out to the restaurant partner, they did not like it a bit and found it to be overstepping of boundaries by Zomato.
“This is outside the jurisdiction of Zomato. They are an aggregator. Any issues that consumers may have about the quality of food has to be between the consumer and FSSAI,”
Anjan Chatterjee, chairman of Speciality Restaurants
Zomato is really caught between two hard places- FSSAI and government officials who would like to ensure better food quality and hygiene VS National Restaurants’ Association of India (NRAI) who feels that implementation leaves a lot of grey areas and scope for misuse by Zomato.
OTW
Over the Weekend, I was part of multiple interesting events. Saturday afternoon was spent with Major Sunil Shetty (Sena Medal) who is an Indian army veteran, Entrepreneur, journalist, mentor & angel investor. This was part of my MountainSpeak Spaces session in collaboration with BuckSpeak and Trice.
Major Sunil Shetty drew very insightful lessons from his life and career across industries and geographies. Two things have stayed with me- Initiatives and Redemption. Through his personal examples, Major Sunil spoke about hardships and temporary failures in his life and how he redeemed himself by taking initiatives. Many of these initiatives were spread over decades but in hindsight , he could connect all the dots.
What do I get out of this experience- I have converted this conversation into a podcast and started a YouTube channel for future episodes of MountainSpeak and others initiatives.
Subscribers to this newsletter would have received a podcast. Alternatively, you could subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or any other podcast app that you may use. (Just search for MountainSpeak ). For everybody else, there is the YouTube channel too! Do subscribe to get regular updates.
Looking forward to hearing your recommendation for the future podcasts.
I Love You
Shailendra