From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Scaling any business is about creating a model, debugging the model, making sure you understand the ingredients that need to be scaled up, and making sure you have a process to scale. All of this needs to be wrapped-up in a financial model that allows the scale to be funded.
It certainly plays a much bigger role than was ever intended to. A number of financial institutions and contracts rely on LIBOR as the benchmark by which other rates are set. I don't think it was ever intended that LIBOR would play such a central role between so many institutions and contracts.
It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years… particularly through the recession.
In December 2007, Listed credit derivatives stood at USD 548 trillion - to put that in context, The GDP of the entire world is USD 50 trillion. On top of the listed credit derivatives, there was also an OTC derivatives bubble which had a notional face value of USD 596 trillion.
The reality is that most consumers aren't excited by incremental changes. To capture consumers' attention and make the market take notice, you need meaningful innovation—something genuinely new.
At Colossal, we are not going to work in humans or non-human primates because we felt like we're already going to have an uphill battle with transparency and education, and we don't want people to be like, if a hair-loss treatment comes out of Colossal, 'are they selling a gene from a woolly mammoth?'
With 650 million global fans, MMA has the third biggest worldwide fanbase (after soccer and basketball). However, those MMA fans are very under-served and very under-monetized.
I don't have to outrun the Tiger, I just have to outrun you. When you look at many of the financial centres such as The City of London, Wall St, and their counterparts, they think of things in Economic terms.
This decade, their GDP will increase by about $12 trillion, i.e. they will create another one of themselves! More importantly, the share of consumption in this decade's growth will be bigger and this is where the big opportunity lies.
Our vision statement was about elevating the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness.
By the time you've spoken to the 30th person, you'll have a good idea if your problem is substantial or not. Validation can be pretty straightforward. All it takes is communicating with people.
We didn't initiate this venture to merely establish another VC fund – India certainly doesn't need an additional one, given the abundance of capital already available. Our belief at Together Fund is that we can effect change through our current, first-hand experience, as operators who have scaled a company in this decade. Our knowledge is fresh and applicable, not outdated.