Thursday, March 07, 2019

Sunil Madhu: Serial Entrepreneur















Angel.co: Sunil Madhu

Sunil Madhu steps down as Chief Strategy Officer of Socure

Madhu was instrumental in helping Socure develop its proof of concept digital identity platform into a market leading technology.

“All of us at Socure will miss Sunil’s intellect, creativity and guidance, but are excited to see what he will invent next,” said Tom Thimot, CEO of Socure. “Sunil and his team built a world class technology platform that is being used by leaders in financial services and other sectors. Socure will continue to expand on Sunil’s original vision and beyond.” .......... “After building the most accurate AI powered identity verification platform in the world, which has outperformed Google and IBM in head-to-head customer tests, I'm leaving Socure in the capable and experienced hands of my friend and colleague, Tom Thimot and our amazing team,” said Sunil Madhu. “Having helped the company consistently scale its annual revenue by 300% for the past several years, I’m turning my attention to a disruptive new venture." ..... Sunil is a serial entrepreneur, with several successful exits through IPO and acquisition. A security architect by profession, he has spent over 20 years innovating solutions in security and risk management with a focus on identity and access management.


This Blog: January 2011





Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Discovering LinkedIn In 2019

I discovered Twitter in 2009, and JP Rangaswami was a big reason why. His blog Confused Of Calcutta that a friend pointed out to had many posts where he shared his enthusiasm for Twitter. I got infected. Within a year I became a top followed in NYC on Twitter. And I was no Ashton Kutcher. I worked hard at it.

It is not like I had not heard of Twitter. I had. But at first, I thought it was ridiculous. (I was also in attendance at the NY Tech MeetUp where FourSquare first presented, and I was unimpressed with what the two Founders called "check-in") I had been an avid blogger for years. And I thought Twitter was for people who can compose full sentences, but full paragraphs are beyond their reach. I was not going to stoop down.

LinkedIn I signed up for not long after it was launched. I have been a keen reader of tech news since the late 1990s, and so I seldom missed developments. But until this year, I never really used LinkedIn. I updated my profile and kept it current, but that was just because.

This year LinkedIn has become my favorite social network. I have become an avid user. I have been using it for hours a day. It keeps running in the background. It has become more like an Operating System.

When I was living in the city (now I live 90 minutes out, more depending on your mode of transportation) I went to numerous tech events. And often you exchanged business cards. The idea would be to try and connect with those people online.

Now I realize I was doing it in reverse and wasting a lot of precious time. You meet people online. You try to connect with them. They might, they might not reciprocate. Which begs the question, did you have a good enough reason to connect, did you write a relevant enough first email?

After you connect, you can have so much communication online. LinkedIn messaging might not be the best messaging out there, but it works fine. And if you connect with someone enough, you might even want to meet. But that is a rather high threshold. What will you talk in person that you can not over email and voice chat? Especially when a meeting is so hard to arrange. For both parties.

I continue to use Twitter and Facebook, pretty much daily. And although I don't blog as regularly as I used to, my blogs are still active. Now I also blog on LinkedIn itself. But that is deliberately few and far between. If people decide to read my articles, let them be few enough that they might actually read them. That is what I have thought.

The LinkedIn profile is an excellent format. If you have only a few minutes to get to know me, reading my LinkedIn profile might be how you ought to spend your time. The kind of work people have done over the years gives you a pretty good picture of who someone is as a person. Even if your interest in them might not be work-related.

And so I have been networking on LinkedIn like crazy. I don't miss the city. I quite like the clean air around where I live. And I don't much miss the networking tech events either. LinkedIn is far superior an experience.

It feels like for the first time I am building a company (two, actually) in earnest. And LinkedIn is the Operating System I am happily using.

LinkedIn trending topics has also become my favorite place online to go for news. Although I go many places on a daily basis.

And to say I have actually seen Reid Hoffman in person. Mike Bloomberg threw a party. I don't know how I got invited. But that is where I got to meet and know Arianna Huffington also. Hoffman was the featured speaker.





Friday, February 08, 2019

New York City Beats San Francisco



This is remarkable.

Many of us have been connecting the dots for years. But this has come sooner than I expected.

The center of gravity for tech innovation shifted from Silicon Valley to the city of San Francisco a while ago. Silicon Valley feels rural. That is where the old companies are. Old like Google and Apple. And most engineers who work for those companies live in San Francisco, because, well, it is the city life they crave. But if it is about city life, San Francisco has nothing on New York City. Shanghai beats NYC on infrastructure, but NYC is not its infrastructure, it is its collection of people. There NYC beats Shanghai.

Already NYC was a strong number two. Then, in terms of VC money, NYC became neck and neck last year. And Amazon voted with its feet. Google has been expanding in the city for a long time.

Years ago Dennis Crowley of FourSquare made news by not moving to San Francisco. His startup did open up an office there, but he stayed put. I was unsurprised. At the time FourSquare was the NYC tech startup with the most buzz.

The next phase in innovation is about reimagining entire industries. I said so in my last article posted on LinkedIn. And NYC is a good place to be for that. It is home to numerous industries.


































Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Could The New York Times Relaunch As A Tech Startup?

The New York Times Co. Reports $709 Million in Digital Revenue for 2018

709 million dollars is a lot of revenue. For a tech startup on the way up. But for an old company, it is chump change. Your market value is not what you are making this year. It is what you are projected to make in the future years. If you are making 700 million this year, but are projected to make no money in three years, your market value will nosedive to zero. On the other hand, if you will stagnate at 700 million, you might get a 5X or a 10X and have a market value below 10B.

What would it take for the New York Times to see a 40% increase in revenues every year for years and years? Obviously the same old, same old would not do.

Is it possible for an old company to relaunch itself? Or must old companies necessarily die and new ones take their place?

Is there a hybrid model possible where a new small team comes in to take an old company to new heights? An equity structure might be where that new team gets one third, and the old NYT keeps two-thirds in equity, and the new team helps take the organization to new heights with new business models.

The broad directions would be deeply digital, niche payments, tiny payments, and global.





Sunday, January 27, 2019

Chris Dixon @cdixon











https://medium.com/@cdixon






Saturday, January 12, 2019

Could Steve Jobs Have Made A Difference At Apple in 2020?



This is one of those what-ifs. There is Larry Ellison, the colorful Founder CEO of Oracle, best friend to Steve Jobs for 25 years, who will have you believe Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. Tim Cook can not wear the shoes. It is true Apple has since only been milking what was already built. They are still milking the iPhone and the iPad.

It is said Steve Jobs was thinking about tackling the TV next. If you go from the PC to the iPod-iPhone-iPad, it is a paradigm shift from the GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the touch screen. But do you really want to touch your TV? TV was and is a harder nut to crack. The innovation perhaps is not on the screen. It is in how content is created and distributed. Netflix, and YouTube and Amazon are tackling some of it.

It is true Steve Jobs managed to be a pioneer for both GUI and the touch screen. But what's next? Obviously we are looking beyond touch. They talk of NUI, Natural User Interface. Voice commands. Gesture, things like that. Computing is so seamlessly integrated to the natural environment around you, you simply speak to it, or you wave at it.

Could Steve Jobs have tackled it? It is not like you are saying, Steve Jobs grew up speaking English, could he have beat the Chinese at Mandarin? Steve Jobs would not have been handicapped by the NUI. But it might have been hard for the same person to also be the pioneer for that third paradigm. It is remarkable enough that one person became the master of two paradigms. Three? Three would have been a lot. But it was possible.

Steve Jobs' Apple had almost a hundred billion dollars in the bank. Jobs liked to say he liked to keep his gunpowder dry, in case something showed up. Perhaps things like VR and AR are more capital intensive. Perhaps not.

It is conceivable Apple under Steve Jobs might have also been a leader in this next emerging paradigm, the paradigm of the Natural User Interface. Tim Cook is already missing out. Tim Cook is more like Steve Ballmer. Ballmer kept showing crazy good numbers. But he totally missed out on the smartphone. Cook is similarly showing pretty good numbers. But it is Google and Amazon that are Hey Google! and Hello Alexa!

VR is going to be amazingly democratizing. Before VR you have bought a TV for hudreds of dollars. In a VR headset, a TV is maybe a one dollar app. Suddenly a dollar a day people might be looking at high end TV. And it can be a tremendous educational tool. Super-customized education.


Wednesday, January 09, 2019

Elon Musk: TED: May 2017




























Cloud Generation 2: Larry Ellison Keynote, Oracle OpenWorld 2018





























GoFundMe: My Twitter Campaign (6)



Angels. Let's reimagine the corporation. And take e-commerce to the final billions. Receive the gift of giving.

































































Monday, January 07, 2019

GoFundMe: My Twitter Campaign (5)