Acquired FM is a great podcast on great companies. Their episodes on Standard Oil, Walmart and Tesla were simply mind-blowing. These three giants found in different eras faced incredibly different circumstances in the American society. If you listen to them in order, you will also see how the American society has evolved over the last century. Another great podcast on this theme is Business Wars- Their episodes on Boeing vs Airbus, Marvel vs DC, Sony vs Nintendo, Blue Origin vs Space X are full of so many fascinating insights and human stories, it is mind-blowing.
The topic is my passion and my profession (SWE with a little experience in operating system kernel and worked with companies building HW including DEC and Google). I might have more than one comment - take that as my excitement and not as boasting. Sorry for the spam. Innovation needs safety and security as foundation. Google was a safe and secure place for the employees. Even when the company's market cap reached several hundred billion dollars, Larry and Sergey would show up on TGIFs to answer employees' questions. Neither the questions were filtered nor the founders prepared the answers in advance. The honesty of those who asked tough questions and of those who were on stage to answer was inspiring. Innovation *feels* almost like a byproduct.
+1000 to The Soul of a New Machine. The book's title is as good as it can get. Ajay, it hasn't aged a bit. I read it for the first time in the last decade - three decades after it was published - still it tells a very powerful story around building a hw/sw stack.
Another great episode! I find digging into company culture and the backstories of certain firms very interesting. I would recommend two podcasts that cover this at a much greater depth - Business Breakdowns by Colossus( hosted by Matt Reustle and Zack Fuss), and Business Wars by Wondery.
Economics, Law and justice system, Public Policy, finance, technology, firms, music (springstein), History, Wars and strategies around them, (writing?), ... Inviting collaboration from gentler readers to attempt finish the list.
Listening to this episode remembered Hans George Gadamar,'s quote in his book "Thruth and method" Architecture is adding beauty to the space. This episode adds beauty to the listening time.
I think what the three companies had in common was a system that allowed them to pursue things that did not belong to their conventional domain. I think what may seem like "audacity" in hindsight was actually a well considered decision by these companies that knew that they had the base to tackle the challenge.
Enjoyed the chat. One hour seems too short:) The three firms are indeed innovative. Well, for Sun, one has to use the past tense. The very factors that allowed them to dominate the workstation market in the 90s, had failed them in the end. Sparc chips were no match to the Intel x86 and Solaris became a burden. Oracle put them out of misery by buying and burying them. The other two firms remain curious (the famous "day one" of Bezos). Hopefully, that should seem them run for a long time. Would be good to see few examples taken from the domestic market. The telecom giants have done a lot of product and commercial innovation to drive the growth of affordable services. A topic for some other day, for sure.
Building innovation is a long, long game. It isn't limited to just someone coming up with an idea and implementing it. There has to be, as Ajay and Amit put it, a "culture" for such innovations to blossom. But in our country, somewhere it fails at the most basic level where children are judged not on the basis of how innovative or disruptive they can be in their thinking, but rather how much obedient and simple they can be. Hence, the problem isn't limited to just Indian firms being non-innovative but it rather stretches further to the society and the attitude it brews in all of us that is hardly in line with innovative thinking.
True, the problem is deeper, and it starts upstream. It certainly plagued my generation, but I would imagine that kids today in India have a better chance of escaping it because they do have access to the internet and all of the world...
To be honest, I am wary of definitive statements about as nebulous a concept like society such as "Indian society values obedience over innovations." Surely, societies all over the world shares some characteristics depending on the circumstances the society inhabits. India which has always been a poor country finds itself in a position of scarcity, where innovation is inherently risky, where one must be highly certain that the risk would pay off and if not, then the natural instinct is to call it off altogether. So, I feel the circumstances of India has bred this aversion towards risk (and rightly so). That's why I don't like value judgements being ascribed towards the attitudes of societies on the whole, because what is society but a collection of people making individual judgements based on the situation at hand which over time get ossified into traditions. This is a vicious circle, and the question is how do we get out of this scarcity breeds aversion to innovation which further breeds scarcity.
@@vishvendrasingh5780 Great point, nuanced thoughts. I agree with you, but think of our statement as describing the state of the world and not as a value judgement. You are right that this has become a vicious circle. How do we get out of it?
@@vishvendrasingh5780 as Amit pointed out, the point I made wasn't in the intention of making a value judgement but rather a real observation of the situation of Indian society in general, and middle and lower income class in particular. Of course, what you wrote as the reason behind such an attitude fo Indian society is something I totally agree with! Ultimately, I was only describing the symptoms of the disease plaguing India, and you rightly pointed out why they are the way they are. But also, even I would ask, what do you feel is a way forward?
So to me, there're two ways to answer the question- How do we got out here. One is to refer to the quote- "Paradigms change, one funeral at a time" (which you refer to TSATU). Gradually, as people of the generation die from which these ideas and conventional attitudes emerged, we're gonna have a new set of people who ever so slightly differ from the prevailing attitude. This is applicable both at the level of society and to the policymaking of the State. Second is to refer to the Great Man Theory (which again, you refer to in TSATU lol). If we want to break vicious circles, we need to have a person in a position of some authority who is radically different from status quo thinking. But well, then the question arises if this theory itself is a myth and if it really is the trends of the society itself which determines if this "Great Man" would come in the first place. So, anyways, my two cents is on starting change on the margins (which slowly permeates in the mainstream) both at the societal and the policymaking level is the best I can see.
During my MBA, in our strategy courses, we were taught the idea of core competence. The idea was that each company must identify their core competence and stick to it. We were told about examples of companies which started new businesses or acquired companies which didn't align very much with their core competencies and that ended up in a disaster. In a lot of cases, that was blamed on empire building tendencies of top management. Amazon expanding into webservices sounds like building on core competency of the firm. However, a lot of things which Google does and which Sun did seem to contradict the MBA idea of core competency. Just something which came to my mind...though it is half-baked and is not deeply analysed.
I think a core issue to consider might be the 'why'? A business that expands for the sake of it seems bound to mess it up. But one that does so on a basis of an actual vision, not a rationalised one, may do better.
Along the lines of Ajay's recommendation, the book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy is also an insightful read into the lives of the early ('60s and '70s) hackers and the development of the hacker culture in the US. It was written in 1984 so it's pretty old, but some of the aspects of its culture can be seen even today! (For instance, in the development and maintenance of software technologies like Linux and Git)
(my second comment disappeared. Not sure what went wrong. Here is the third one.) The comment is regarding a very few Indian companies that I know of - a bottom up view as an engineer. Innovation is an iterative process where each iteration tries to improve upon the previous iteration. Some of the Indian companies spend time fixing individual potholes one at a time whereas the innovative people/companies tend to weigh their techdebt(proper design, fixing recurring issues for good, documentation) carefully. *Jugaad* mentality, while good in certain cases, tends to hamper innovation.
I think of the jugaad mentality as getting code out of chatgpt, or cut and paste from stackexchange. This is the dominant thread in computer programming in India, sadly.
Let's get this out of the way - Ajay's shirt is 'ambient' i.e., excellent pick for the studio 🙂 On the topic, Ajay's choice of path breaking (& path paving) companies is noteworthy in that it points to the sheer mediocrity of our own mindsets as Indians in India. Although I thought the topic could've ended up with a small quip on the natural progression of these innovators eventually leading to automation in the industry which is why these companies or at least the evolution of such companies matter in the long run. Could there be a sub topic on which innovations led to Military Industrial Complex of USA? Curve ⤵ ball :) Thanks for the excellent episode & a special shout out to your Sound Guy - Gaurav Chintamani, is it? Cheers 🥂
This was the shortest episode, apart from episode 3 I guess for people who are regular viewers (gentle readers) this will be short but someone who just started on this show this is a good start. One more thing is that if episodes are longer than an hour than person who discovers it on say 50th episode they might not bother going back to episode 1 as from my experience I like to be caught up with all the latest episodes of a show or series and if backlog is too daunting or big I might even leave it or discontinue it. But hey if it is fun what the hell I will go back 500 episodes.
Great episode as always... *Regarding Ajay's criteria for 'firm impressiveness':* I'm struggling to understand what exactly is the criteria . These 3 come up: 1. Be able to pivot / 2. Pivot to a business which is 'harder' than the previous business / 3. Pivot to a something new and useful, a.k.a 'innovative' 4. Have a narrative around how the business is working on a larger mission But none of these are inherently rare. Pivoting in itself is pretty common - any observer will notice businesses re-orienting themselves to do something different. Doing 'hard tech' is pretty common in the tech clusters - there is no dearth of companies doing technically sophisticated work in SF, Shenzhen or Bangalore. Doing something new and useful, a.k.a. 'innovating' is pretty common - in fact, it's a necessary condition to do business. Mission driven businesses, while rare in the past, are now commonplace at least in Bangalore It'd be great to know your criteria in abstract terms. *Regarding innovation:* It's surprising that you label Myntra and Flipkart as non-innovators. It goes against the wisdom in his Ajay's own book, where he explains how solutions from advanced economies cannot be directly applied in India. They are dependent on invisible infra. Getting them to work here requires invisible innovation. In this sense, Myntra did innovate - they built an online fashion retail business in a low-trust, slow-logistics economy. It would not have been possible without solving problems logistics and customer experience that firms in the west never had to solve. What do you consider as real innovation? *Some more companies:* Japanese/Korean businesses like Sony, Honda, Samsung also have journeys involving pivot into hard tech and innovation. Any reason these didn't make it to your list? *Regarding Amit's jokes* Why is it always Amit taking a (friendly) dig at Ajay? It'd be great to see the reverse as well. In case Ajay thinks it amounts to weaponization of his intellectual capability, please note that we readers think it is not.
The criterion is : memorable stories that linger in the mind long after the hype has subsided. And then we should wonder : what was that, what made it happen?
Regarding the innovation point , I really don't think Myntra and Flipkart has done much innovation which can change how the world operates....they might have done small innovations along the way to develop trust in a low trust society like India and solved logistical problems but those things are not truly innovative. They are still very much dependent on execution. But on the other hand what Amazon did was truly innovative. They came up with a technology which they developed and were using internally for a while and one day they decided to invent a new type of business out of it by renting the technology out to other people and pretty much invented cloud computing (I am not sure if cloud computing existed before amazon AWS in such a big way). Google and Microsoft followed suit soon after with GC and Azure. In India's context we can say that UPI was truly disruptive and innovative in that sense.
Talking about microprocessor architectures, risc-v is making buzz these days in that corner of hw space that is otherwise boring to the greater part of the world. Ajay, in the other episode you were talking about [limiting] access to tech-stack as a weapon in wars. Risc-v, being a far more open standard in microprocessor/isa space, is a battleground for usa-china supremacy race.
Qualcomm's story is very underrated. There's a great book on this called The Qualcomm Equation. I believe Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal (Acquired FM) have also done a podcast episode on Qualcomm. That aside, I think SpaceX was truly audacious as well.
Blue Origin, Space X and Virgin Galactic all of three of them were founded within the space of 4 years between 2000 and 2004, we here about space x more because they market it well (at first glance) I may be wrong.
@@amitvarma yes I enjoyed that thoroughly. I feel this would complete the loop on what is modern finance. Perhaps tie in accounting into it too, because that's the science (or art) of keeping score. I wondered the other day who would have come up with the concept of HTM accounting i.e. You need not mark to mkt your investments if you claim you will hold them to maturity. It's normal now but I wonder who thought of this, when, and in response to what problems of the time. I am sure Ajay would find more such peculiarities and try to seek their provenance once he starts thinking in this direction.
As someone who makes CPUs for a living (and phones earlier) and having lived through the rise of Amazon and Google, I wish the examples were picked from a different domain! :)
@@ajayshah5705 Sorry, I didn't mean these were not remarkable. I only meant that I was already familiar with these stories. Amazon is among the most remarkable since they not only created compute, storage, database and other services, they have gone into hardware and created their own CPUs, SSDs and other hardware. I might have picked Iphone over Android (even though I don't like Apple). What do you think of Ola getting into scooter manufacturing?
Innovation, new use for a product, new market, - pressure cooker in every Indian kitchen revolutionised cooking and role of women. There were no pressure cookers when TTK made them in india. There was no way to predict market. TTK story - Disrupt And Conquer: How TTK Prestige Be: How TTK Prestige Became a Billion Dollar Company - a book recommendation;)
Amazon is great to a large extent because of Jeff Bezos I think. Bezos is a visionary and has very clear thinking. He has listed out something called leadership principles which the company really sticks to. That and the company's strong writing culture have served them well I think. Lex Fridman recently did an interview with Jeff Bezos, check it out. Andy Jassy has very big shoes to step into.
How did academia evolve? Was it always mostly irrelevant (ie mostly a sorting system)? I would really like to hear a discussion on that please 🥺I'm too lazy to research and read that on my own..
I hate to be negative. It's Friday. However, having studied so many Indian companies over the years, I have to agree with what Ajay says about Indian firms. I will also add that it's true about India in general. Also, I have seen many Indian firms faking innovation, claiming to be innovative and doing interesting things which they are not doing. How can we get life defining innovations with this attitude? I find this infinitely sad. Makes me feel we will never become an advanced economy.
@@ajayshah5705 Adding to your points, those terrible incentives make Indian workplaces some of the most feudal in nature. The contract between employer and employee is violated to no end. "Naukri" does relate to the word "Naukar"
@@ajayshah5705 Perhaps the first one will remain our biggest weakness. We can't seem to even build a road right, something that has been mastered over and over again. By almost every country. I wonder why that is. I feel it's down to our education "system" and how we have distorted it. But perhaps it's something else.
Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century: The Success Strategies of Unknown World Market Leaders - Hermann Simon - Ajay sir - if you havent read this - you will like this. I think you will find similar stories.
What do you think of as the 2 big leaps of Apple? I think (a) OS X (NextOS) and (b) Arm. I think the rest of the world developed Unix. There is only the contribution of good taste by Steve Jobs in choosing bsd as the core for next OS and then choosing next OS for Apple. Apple and ARM is indeed very good. But it is in line with the resource envelope of a very big and rich company.
