About

I’ve been working on early stage internet ventures for the last seven years as a product guy, an investor and an incubator. I’ve led several ventures from idea to business and advised many others through this journey. I’m curious about internet-enabled disruption (in the Clayton Christensen sense) and business model failure (in every known sense). I’ve spent the last few years extensively analyzing business patterns that explain:

1. Why most internet businesses fail and a few succeed

2. Why internet startups disrupt traditional businesses

3. Why internet businesses are fundamentally different from every other business model we’ve ever known

This blog is about those patterns.

 

Publications

Most of the articles on this blog are based on real-life experiences working with startups, from ventures that I’ve built myself or from my ongoing research and analysis. I often filter these inputs through my research on business failure to structure every article around a point of success/failure in the business model.

This blog was ranked among the Top Startup Blogs by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship Chair Prof. Tom Eisenmann.

I am a contributing author to the book Managing Startups, published by OReilly Media which curates the best advice on building technology startups. Other contributing authors feature in this book include Eric Ries, Paul Graham, Steve Blank, Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Ash Maurya and others.

My articles have been featured on the Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb, The Hindu, Forbes, YFS Magazine and other leading media.

My articles have also been quoted, referenced and recommended by GigaOm founder Om Malik, ace investor Fred Wilson, The Build Network and others.

The articles from this blog have been used as teaching material or recommended as additional reading at leading schools around the world including MIT, ESADE, HBS, Bryant University and Illinois Institute of Technology.

 

 

Past Experience
I have strong experience building new ventures from idea to successful business. I was earlier the head of New Venture Incubations at Intuit across Asia-Pacific. My incubations include Fasal, one of the largest rural marketplaces in the world connecting farmers and buyers of farm produce, featured on FastCompany and Forbes, and now an HBS Case Study.  I was also responsible for early stage investments and M&A at Intuit Asia. Prior to Intuit, I was responsible for starting and growing Yahoo’s marketplace business lines (local commerce) in India.

 

Research

I’ve extensively researched and analyzed internet business models. All business models fall into one of two buckets: Pipes or Platforms.  Pipes are a well understood business model and have been the dominant business model for the last 300 years. Platforms are an emerging business model and poorly understood. Most internet businesses run platform business models. I believe most businesses, in the future, will migrate to Platform business models. The motivation of my research is to create a methodical approach to building Platform businesses.

I currently collaborate with other research scientists at the MIT Centre for Digital Business on researching this topic. I also collaborate with many other independent thinkers globally, working on Design Thinking, Business Model Theory  and Corporate Innovation. If you’d like to collaborate with me, I’d love to hear from you. 

Advisory

I work with several early and growth stage startups in advisory roles. I also work as a mentor at several incubators including The Founder Institute (Global), JFDI (Singapore), BombaCamp (Spanish South American markets), SearchCamp (UK) among others.

Some of my current advisory relationships include:

SkillShare

SkillShare is taking a Platform approach to disrupt a traditionally Pipe business, education. Connecting diverse groups of teachers with students over a central platform, it is one of the first attempts to design the school of the future.

CroakIt
CroakIt is a Platform for sound, allowing users to share 30 second sound bites with a community of listeners. It’s found great adoption in foreign language learning community globally.

Advisor-over-email: I also engage with readers of this blog on an advisor-over-email model, where I act as an ongoing advisor on the business purely over email. If you’d like to explore that, feel free to drop me a line.

Skype Consultation: If you’d like to book an hour over Skype for specific consulting, please reach out to me directly.

If you’d just like to connect and bounce a few ideas around, feel free to just drop me a line. I’m always happy to connect.

 

Speaking

I’m a regular speaker at industry events like Casual Connect, Startup Asia and at leading academic institutions like INSEAD. I have been invited to speak at the MIT Media Labs in July 2013 to an audience of C-level executives from Fortune 500 companies. I typically speak on the following topics:

1. Platform business models

2. Managing networked businesses and connected organizations

3. Success and Failure in Internet Business Models

4. Disruption of traditional industries through internet-enabled business models

 

 

Contact Details

Let’s Connect:

LinkedIn

Twitter (@sanguit)

Quora

Email

 

And if you’re in Singapore, give me a shout. I’d be happy to catch up in person.