Amazon, Investments, Founders, Tax System,  and Learning to Read – are today’s recommended readings

How lower prices, and a favourable exchange rate, is helping Indian Merchants export more on Amazon.com. My pet grouse with companies like Flipkart is, that unlike Alibaba that created a successful market place for Chinese manufacturers, Flipkart created a marketplace more for Indian importers from China, than Indian manufacturers. And, that is the lost opportunity. Maybe Amazon can plug it.

R Sriram has an good read on why making navigating through the tax system easier, is a major economic reform. I agree.

 

Feeling poor? feeling you made unwise investments a decade ago, and you should have done things differently ? Here is something that will add to it …. sigh. but, lovely infographic – A Decade Later: What $1,000 Invested in These Iconic Stocks is Worth Today

 

Interesting piece in the Wire, on how the world is changing, and the brash young founder is going out of fashion, after an era when

The idea of bringing in “adult supervision” fell out of fashion, and as long as founders made growth happen, they were forgiven for many failings and sins.

I am wondering, was there ever an era when people who started enterprises were not brash, bold, and not afraid of stepping on toes. We see Bill Gates as an Elder Statesman today, but he was a brash entrepreneur in the 1980’s. Isn’t that boldness, that ability to ruffle feathers, the ignoring of the dominant paradigm, the ability to pull people along based on your strength of conviction, the hallmark of an entrepreneur? While i am sure teams can drive growth, the sheer ability to disrupt comes from the founder. But, still an interesting read.

I was talking to some of my students on book reading, and i was surprised that many of them had never read a book – outside studies. I can see how so many fall for fake news, or fake history. They can’t discern right from wrong, or truth from falsehood.  Maybe kids need to be taught to read. This NYT article on How to Get your Mind to Read, is exactly about that.

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From the album Banteay Srei – a temple dedicated to the Mahadeva –  Cambodia