Weekend Reading - Some Interesting Stuff

This article is a compilation of 10 mega trends for India in 2030.

By 2030, it is on course to witness a 4x growth in consumer spend. It will remain one of the youngest nations on the planet and will be home to more than one billion internet users. The new Indian consumer will be richer and more willing to spend, and unlike her predecessors, she will have very specific preferences.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/10-mega-trends-for-india-in-2030-the-future-of-consumption-in-one-of-the-fastest-growing-consumer-markets/

Herb Wertheim may be the greatest individual investor the world has never heard of. He has accumulated over $2.3billion by buy-and-hold investing.

“My thing is,” Wertheim says as he reflects on his long career, “I wanted to be able to have free time. To me, having time is the most precious thing.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-greatest-investor-youve-never-heard-of-an-optometrist-who-beat-the-odds-to-become-a-billionaire

A fascinating tale of putting chips inside our bodies. These chips then become our credit cards, electronic keys and possibly health monitors. This is not a sci-fi article, it is what is happening today in real life.

http://fortune.com/longform/biochipping-biohax-microchip/

I have always followed the careers and lives of people. Chandra Kochhar's life is an instructive one, the ride up from nameless corporate employee to a celebrated woman-leader and the flag-bearer of ICICI Bank, to the fall from grace. Here is a recent timeline of the events.

https://www.businesstoday.in/top-story/chanda-kochhars-fall-from-grace-here-is-how-she-was-caught-step-by-step/story/321344.html

Food delivery apps have changed the way we eat. Here are two articles which give you two different perspectives on that space.

Uber is looking to sell its two-year-old UberEats business in India to cut down losses and Oyo Rooms is reportedly planning to buy FreshMenu to get into food delivery space!!

https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/ubereats-on-sale-swiggy-zomato-competing-acquire-food-delivery-app-report/story/321164.html

https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/oyo-rooms-freshmenu-oyo-freshmenu-deal-oyo-to-foray-into-food-delivery-space-in-talks-to-acquire-freshmenu-for-30-million/story/321191.html

Weekly Reading: Some Interesting Stuff

A super interesting experiment of living modern life without Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. An eye opening account of how big tech has taken over our lives.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194

An article on how to live a life of intellectual freedom and not be chained by borrowed ideas.

Confusing models with reality is a cardinal sin of clear thinking. If you believe too strongly in your models of the world, you can start to ignore evidence that your model is wrong.

https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/a-few-principles-for-thinking-clearly-d18a74a2ebe9

I have a theory about why the notion of an arms race between human and machine intelligences is fundamentally ill-posed: the way to survive and thrive in an environment of AIs and robots is not to be smarter than them, but to be more mediocre than them. Mediocrity, understood this way, is an independent meta-trait, not a qualifier you put on some other trait, like intelligence.

In other words, evolution is survival, not of the most mediocre (that would lead to paradox), but survival of the mediocre mediocre.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/04/24/survival-of-the-mediocre-mediocre/

A long read on the platform economy and how network effects work and sometimes fail.

https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-some-platforms-thrive-and-others-dont

A compilation of learnings from the markets in the last 30 years from Jon Boorman of Broadsword Capital

https://www.broadswordcapital.com/things-ive-learned-last-30-years/