Episode 4 - Home

Q1. Runnr, an on-demand delivery company, was acquired by Zomato in 2017 to boost its food delivery business. Mohit Kumar & Vatsal Singhal, co-founders of Runnr and both fitness enthusiasts, later began another company X in the healthcare space. While Runnr helped get delicious food to your doorstep, X will probably tell you that may not be the best idea. Name X.

Q2. Long question. The idea behind an ‘open network’ is to establish a level playing field for members of an ecosystem. So new entrants or small players in the ecosystem don’t have to worry about infrastructure & access. The Indian govt. is creating such open networks in various sectors to enable growth & inclusion.

Financial sector: Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) - Any service provider can plug in & start offering credit
Healthcare sector: National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) - Any service provider can plug in & access medical history
E-commerce sector: X - Any service provider can plug in & sell online

What is X - the open network initiative for the e-commerce sector?

Q4. Reshamandi is bringing tech & innovation to X farming - a sector that has largely been untouched by digitization across the value chain - farmers, harvesters, mills, and sellers. What is X?

Q5. The CEO of X, which recently acquired Y, wrote they want to restructure the organization from one company to a group of companies under one umbrella named ‘Eternal’. Similar to how Google transformed into Alphabet which consists of “Google + Other Companies”. Eternal will start with 4 companies under it and add more in the future. Name X & Y, two of the companies under Eternal

Q6. William Wetzel, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, coined the term X in 1978 after completing a study on how entrepreneurs raised their initial rounds of capital. He borrowed the term from Broadway where X was used to describe rich folks who provided money to theatrical productions and took back the money only once the play started earning revenue - thus making the rich lender a ‘saviour’ of the play. What’s X?

Q7. Initially started as Dreamz Unlimited, it was renamed to its more famous name X three years after incorporation. With estimated revenues of over ₹500cr, X’s work spreads across studio & production, advertising & visual effects (vfx). X also has majority stakes in four T20 cricket leagues across the world - India, Caribbean, UAE and the recently announced South African league. X is also known for its even more famous star owner Y. Name X and Y.

Q9. In X’s words - They want to build an all-in-one workspace for the modern knowledge worker. Whether it's document editing, file storage or business planning, they want to give the user Lego-like building blocks to customize their own workspace in one place, without duct-taping tens of different software tools together. Identify X, which was last valued at $10B.

Q10. “____ _____ problem” (two blanks) is a well-known problem in the field of recommendation systems (for example: music, e-commerce, videos). This is how the problem is explained - the recommendation system needs sufficient user data to infer the interests of a user (and hence generate value) but how does it get that mass of user data when the system itself is new? This phrase “____ _____ problem” is also the title of a book by Andrew Chen, a partner at venture firm a16z, and talks about different ways to solve this problem. Fill in the blanks

ANSWERS