Category Archives: Uncategorized

Introducing Jaunt – “Document technology meets AI”

Career update: I’m headed back to the startup world!

Introducing Jaunt – the new, AI powered way to share documents, slides and pdfs on the web.

TechCrunch wrote about it! Check out the post.

We’re going back to a space that has been left behind by others – formats like videos, photos, podcasts are cranking down furiously on innovation, but documents seem stuck in the past! We think this opportunity fits our skills, interests and temperament… we’re venturing out to take another stab at it!

Why now?

Because AI has brought “text” as a format back in action! We are witnessing AI kinda rewrite the entire web landscape, and textual content is the foundational block of this rewrite! So much of human expertise, ideas and knowledge is stashed away in pdfs, documents and slides lying around on peoples computers and mobiles.

We built SlideShare and it was successful in capturing the zeitgeist of its times! But unfortunately it never kinda reached its true potential – #bigtech acquisitions don’t always pan out the way the founders visualized the opportunity (that’s another story to tell sometime!)

But for the founding team – we still are believers in the idea (think “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”). And the idea itself has morphed and grown in its scope – sharing of documents in a AI first, mobile centric world!

Check out this blogpost… captures some of our thoughts around this topic!

Signup for Jaunt

And I need all your blessings….. starting up again at this career stage (as I’m discovering!) is a different cup of tea ?

MapMyIndia IPO

To be a defacto technology superpower, India needs a 1000 MapMyIndias!

MapmyIndia goes public today… this is a big day not only for the company, but also for India’s tech ecosystem. Here’s why

  • This is a “defacto” tech product company that started making digitalmaps in 1995 (before Google was even born) #NotMeToo
  • I emphasize the word “defacto”, because this isn’t a technology enabled play like ecommerce, nor a foreign market focused Indian SAAS startup… it’s a technology platform company that was born/bred in and for India [this is my earlier essay on how India lacks platform companies]
  • It’s a clear market leader in India’s B2B mapping space, as opposed to B2C where Googlemaps is the default choice
  • I also think going forward (on a decadal timeframe), given the emerging geopolitical landscape around big tech dominance, security, privacy, sovereign data protection laws et al, this is one space among others, where foreign players will be at a disadvantage and gradually the ball may start tilting towards Indian players

Incidentally, I wrote about MapmyIndia (15 yrs ago!) way back in 2007 when this blog Webyantra had a diff avatar and was amongst the most widely read blogs about Indian internet & tech. I had forgotten about it, but Rohan’s tweet brought back distant memories!

The stock market pundits will have endless commentary about the IPO – valuation, pricing, low free float, OFS, growth/profitability prospects given Googlemaps etc. But none of that should take us away from the bigger tech picture here – this is the IPO of a homegrown, India originated, #NotMeToo, India centric technology product company.

Congrats to Rohan and his parents for painstakingly building MMI out over the years… they saw this coming 26 years ago! Here’s hoping a thousand MMIs bloom in India… if we want our nation to be a technology super-power! #ProductNation

(Pic credit https://twitter.com/BSEIndia/status/1473139794238578691)