less humans, more robots

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.
But we won’t.
And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Managers within Monster suggested that the job board site was itself under threat by the next generation of job-finding tools. So-called job aggregator sites such as Indeed, SimplyHired, and Jobster allow the viewing of available jobs across a variety of job boards, and also list their own jobs. While none — alone — is as popular as Monster, together the aggregators get more traffic. Indeed.com is growing faster in unique visitors than Monster. Monster made the same mistake as the Globe: they believed their business model was inviolate. They didn’t anticipate, and didn’t recognize, that the fish were swimming in a new direction. This illustrates not that either company’s managers were stupid, but that it’s very difficult to act on threats to the existing business model.

In the early stages of startup, focusing on ‘execution’ will put you out of business. Instead, you need a ‘learning and discovery’ process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute.

I strongly believe that the only way India can sustain its long-term economic growth is by unleashing and harnessing the creativity of its grassroots entrepreneurs, especially in rural areas.

But here is the challenge: these grassroots inventions don’t scale up. Indeed, most rural innovation initiatives such as DesiCrew and grassroots inventions like Mitti Cool, however impressive they may be, are sadly limited in their impact to a local or regional market of a few hundred customers, and end up employing no more than a dozen workers in the local community.

What is missing is a mechanism to cross-pollinate and scale up these bright ideas among India’s 250-million-strong agricultural community which lives scattered across more than 600,000 villages.