On a Charged Up Future Ride

Success is how you keep increasing the level of your playground and keep winning the game. Elon Musk today perfectly defines that in a beautiful way. Having founded companies that have steer headed some interesting innovations which have been changing the way things function and directly impacting the face of different industries since over 20 years now, from Zip2, PayPal, the ambitious SpaceX, Solar City to name a few and the one I am going to talk about here today that is the Tesla Motors.

Auto is one of the most traditional and core industry around us today. With huge entry barriers and highly dependent on the supplier networks of auto part manufacturer, it sees established brands which we usually see around. What Tesla Motors is trying to do with its idea of manufacturing Electric Vehicles beautifully drives us to the future disruption the industry might see. The Electric vehicle as a category has been tested and fiddled upon not just by the biggies of the industry like the Daimler and Volkswagens of the world but also by tech giants like Apple and Google (Smartphone with wheels) 

With an estimated 20Mn Electric Vehicles on road by 2020, and as Tesla after successfully venturing into the premium electric category, ventures to release its low cost Model 3 in the next coming few weeks, it definitely has all eyeballs on it.

The are many factors which can make us so optimistic and bullish about it. Like, its charging stations are already outnumbering the usual Gas stations in the US. Moreover, rather than opting for the usual order the auto parts manufacturers and suppliers Musk thinks out of the box, as economist puts it below, just to name a few:

Tesla has also rewritten the economics of making electric cars. It tackled high costs by stringing together hundreds of small, mass-produced laptop batteries. Tesla claims that its power-packs cost half what big carmakers pay their suppliers for custom-designed large-format batteries, and that its Gigafactory, a huge battery plant close to completion in the Nevada desert, will cut costs by 30%.

 
It would be definitely an interesting industry to watch out for and see how smooth is the ride of Tesla from being premium to the common as the auto makers react to it with their own new products. As always, Consumer stands to be the winner in this charged up future ride driven by Tesla. However, the immense environmental benefits due to Co2 emission reduction, which is also the need of the hour is something which makes this a very lucrative area to watch out for!

Did you just spot the next Big Bang?

Big Bang, the universal phenomenon billions of years ago, the accidental discovery and control of fire a million year back, then comes wheel, and printing.. umm let me fast forward it..Google, Facebook, AirBnB.. get the idea? Disruption has always been the means of evolution which has been driving the course of history and changing human lives. Look around and you can now see how Digital is taking it into a different trajectory all together and at a much steeper curve which shows that these are just a tip of the iceberg of innovations.

Technology is trending more than ever now as a catalyst which is turning the business models, existing and new, all types and their strategies around.

Be it the developer next door whose App you are downloading next to transfer the virtual money to your friend or a Banking giant with trillion dollars AUM, the winner is the one which captures the attention of a crazily small attention-span and convenience freak Gen like us. The big banks who could have never imagined this before are now facing the threats of new entrants as Technology has literally removed the Barriers to Entry which the Banking Industry never worried about. I can easily split my dining out bills and transact with my friends just through the Apps on my mobile phone without any Bank involved. The same now applies to any other traditional industry.

So what exactly is driving these changes?

• The exponential increase in connectivity around has been changing the game as it is providing a massive path for business to connect to its customers both internal and external.
• Technology has most importantly also bridged the infrastructure constraints by converting your Capex to Opex model with most SaaS based offerings. Business today are already leveraging on the cost benefits

An idea which is usually associated with disruption is when there are new market footholds as is described in a HBR article. Like how originally XEROX which had started with high prices and catering to big enterprise gradually introduced itself to personal copiers with more affordable solutions. When you see around yourself, Uber with its increasing global presence is the best example when it comes to converting the non-customers to customers in a similar fashion.

Size and scope of an organization hardly matters. This is an era where the 50 Engineers team from WhatsApp are changing the lifestyle of over 900Mn users (and growing). Or where an idea from Baba Ramdev is already giving some tough times to the Consumer Good Industry. iPhone has always been my favorite and a perfect example of how a superior product with the right business model can create synergies to revolutionize the industry as it did for the smartphones.

What’s next is anybody’s guess but it’s definitely a win-win phase for the customers as well as the innovators and creators in us!

When the year is still new

Seneca would have just felt ashamed,

His philosophies would all seem framed

Had he been active on facebook or quora,

He would have opened a box of Pandora

For the posts shared on the site,

Told this year NOW is new and right

I wonder why I never realized that yet,

I now have a magic wand to waive off debt

And happily and 'eagerly' I 'wait' to see its magic,

But 1st day goes and so does a week in tragic

The year which seemed new, is just turn of days,

 Nothing more than, another stage for life's plays

It is then the year retorts, to not be in despair

You do the good and remain the clear

Let it take 365 fresh days to brew

When the year is still new

Flashback

23rd November 2008

8 am, Cold Chilly Foggy Sunday Jaipur Morning 

Why did I fill this form up, just because the words " International" and "Business" on the brochure looked good | Chacha dropping me off to an old government army school, am sure he might be thinking the same | Why is this place so crowded

11 am, Army Public School, Jaipur

Scribbling on my rough papers on the rickety SMALL school bench | What? is it 1 hour  already?! How the hell is anyone supposed to solve the remaining paper in next 1 hour

22nd November 2009

5 pm, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 

The paper had sectional cut offs | Forget preparing, I should have at least read the instructions well | Why on Earth do they keep sectional cut offs |Which era does this B-school lives in | Not even checking answer key

25th November 2010

10 pm, Hyderabad

Read every possible article and discussion available on the internet about today's paper | Not bad | I am so in between the cut offs | It's going to be a tough long wait for the results

10th December 2010

10 am, NIMS Hyderabad

In between the tranquilizers and painkillers | Cranky in my hospital bed | Desperate to know the result | Hanging between the cut offs | Missed by a 1.5 | Silly Me | Sleeps back again

14th Dec 2011

1 pm, IBM Hyderabad

Results Declared | Cut Off - 44.92 | My Score - 45.49 |  I am converting it. Period

(4 years later)

14th Dec 2015

11 pm, Bangalore

Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard said way back in 19th century, that life can only be understood living backwards.Steve Jobs did make the statement connect, some years back.

I could have worried about the 100s of facts around me at that time or the 1000s of people scoring better than me in the written or the fact that selection process doesn't give much weight-age to the later rounds, but then I would have choosen a parallel universe, which I don't even want to think about now ;) 

At the end it's all worth the efforts, it's a splendid maze where all the ways are beautiful in it, but you carve the way out of it which you want to and when you look back to connect the dots, it carves itself out differently and extravagantly and turns out to be the right one :)