The unintended consequences of optimizing for valuation versus optimizing for cashflow

Introduction

Pivots are more than just a fashionable word, many start-ups use the terminology just for the sake of it and rarely understand its anatomy, mechanics, and their own ability to execute a good pivot. While there are many different reasons to pivot, and ways to holistically achieve it — this article will examine the pivot zones created by two choices i.e., optimizing for cashflow vs optimizing for valuation. Many start-ups fall into these traps very early on in their evolution. These decisions have intended and unintended consequences, landing the…

Understanding business models in autonomous driving

Introduction

Autonomous driving is one of the most disruptive developments witnessed. It will change the way we think of cities, roads, parking, commuting, leisure and ownership, and it will spawn new kinds of jobs as the business models unfold. Many open questions have answers when it comes to business models, infrastructure, technology direction and development.

Understanding the disruptive technologies propelling autonomous driving

In my previous article, we discussed various drivers of business models and the way it will change cities, roads, parking, commuting, leisure and ownership while creating new jobs. In this follow-up piece to part one, we will explore a few more business models enabled by specific technologies.

Augmented Reality

In my previous article, we discussed various drivers of business models and the way it will change cities, roads, parking, commuting, leisure and ownership while creating new jobs. …

In the last 10 years, business has changed a lot. Even many companies and industries have come as we have fundamentally changed the way we sell products or services, interact with customers, and deliver value. Having said that we still use legacy cells approaches which do not work or produce suboptimal results. In this article we are going to examine the modern day, value based selling approach.

Introduction

In today’s world, buyer have a multitude of choices and plethora of information about products, services and brands starting the sales cycle even before you have engaged with them. At times, the information…

Understand the disruption vectors of the “Stack Attack”

Major technologies shift every 2–3 years, with new platforms building on prior generation capabilities. These shifts are propelled by new technologies or new software stacks. Software stacks are also called “technology stacks” and provide a complete platform to run applications to process complex computing environments.

Introduction

In the era prior to cloud, mobility, IoT, AI, Big Data etc., technology stacks used to be vendor specific e.g., Microsoft etc. Today, there is an explosion of technologies in these stacks and we have new tools being spawned into mainstream every year e.g., Kubernetes, Docker Toolbox…

Understanding Data Challenges in the Autonomous Driving Domain

There are numerous data challenges in the autonomous vehicle value chain, a lot of it impacts specific use cases and outcomes. This article highlights the nature of challenges and their impact across the data value chain.

Introduction

Automotive data is of high interest due to the diverse and complex nature of data, its multiple sources as well as high volume of the data continually generated. Within an autonomous driving context, real-time requirements around navigation, safety and revenue models create new challenges.

General AV Data Challenges

As vehicles advance to higher levels of autonomy, the deep learning models…

Understanding the Value of Big Data in the Autonomous Driving Ecosystem

Introduction

Today, there is a ton of data generated from people, devices and about many things e.g., weather, location, demographics, purchase patterns etc. Moreover, we are shifting from an era of user generated data/content to an era of machine generated data/content increasing the volumes exponentially.

Unlocking value from autonomous driving value chains is not about having more data — but the right data, at the right time, for the right ecosystem participant

Most of these large sets of data are considered valuable because they can be packaged and sold to…

How Autonomous Driving Tech stack choices impact business models

Autonomous driving is coming of age and many companies are racing to find a place in the value chain. Each of them has a different approach implementing their technology stack — these approaches have profound strategic implications for costs, business models and use cases

AV Technology Stack: Layers and Components

At a high level, there are five primary layers of the autonomous driving technology stack i.e., sensors, infrastructure, compute and network, hardware/software interface and applications. Companies play within different layers of the stack to create value, and the resulting technologies come together as an ecosystem to enable…