cyberlaxamana

by John Smith-Ricco Despite the obvious duplicability of its business model, Rent the Runway has aggressively protected its position as first-mover through investment in technology and operations management. Providing women with the “Cinderella” moments that accompany wearing otherwise inaccessible designer dresses may be Jen and Jenny’s mission, but their company’s expertise lies in the less sexy areas of inventory management, quality control and maintaining high utilization rates of each garment. Rent the Runway was the case I anticipated the most as a student in Launching Tech Ventures. The RTR story is wonderfully hopeful, a feel-good MBA cautionary tale on the type of success risk-averse capitalists might miss out on by taking the safe route [insert finance/consulting/CPG career path here]. Rent the Runway has the potential to democratize the world of luxury ready-to-wear. However, in order to maintain the “magic” and keep would-be competitors at bay, RTR must avoid becoming TJ M...

by Tawanda Sibanda Mukela Overview for Hotels from Mukela on Vimeo . I am the co-founder of an Africa-focused hotel reservation site called Mukela.com (mukela is derived from the Zulu word emukela, meaning welcome). Essentially, the site is hotels.com for the African hotel market. If you were to go to expedia.com and search for hotels in Harare, Zimbabwe only 5 hotels will be displayed. Our database, on the other hand, contains over 150 accommodation options in Harare alone. Western online travel agents only scratch the surface of accommodation in most African countries, and are overwhelmingly weighted towards the most luxurious. Mukela.com’s value proposition is to provide the intrepid traveler access to a wide spectrum of comfortable but more affordable mid-tier hotels. Why aren’t hotels.com and expedia.com adequately serving the African market? The hotel market in Africa is extremely fragmented with few hotel chains. Achieving broad coverage in the region requi...

by Humberto Ayres Pereira (republished from his personal blog ) This is the first of (I hope) many contradictions in my opinions in regard to entrepreneurial matters. A few posts back I talked with some  disdain about the Lean Start-Up movement . Essentially my argument was that while it may be easier than ever to build a service/company nowadays, and people can and are starting such companies, the result is a massive and hard to navigate world of start-ups and apps, many of which reach success status because of the extensive guidance and care of VCs and their networks. There is, I argue, a false perception of the start-up world as being easy. But while people see it as a gold rush, I'd warn that it is a very creative but also numbers-driven environment. It may seem as if this or that company is having a grace period where the founders can just be creative and eat pizza and blow thousands of VC-backed dollars while not delivering numbers, both bottom-line and in terms of user...

by Shavi Goel As I begin to understand more about Lean Start-up tools, I decided to learn from someone who is making real-time, active decisions about using these tools in start-up. I spoke to Ashish Rangnekar, a first-time entrepreneur who co-founded the online test prep service  Water Melon Express (WMX) in 2009. I first met Ashish last summer when he was raising Series A funding. I found it very exciting to speak to someone who is practicing what we are learning in the class, and hope you find it useful too. I have presented our conversation in Q&A format. The exchange below is not a verbatim record, but it captures the essence of Ashish's experiences. SG: How did you first learn about Lean Start-up methodologies? How did you think about using these tools as you started WMX? AR: When I started WMX, I had heard of lean start up methodology through friends and general internet reading and Eric Ries’s blog . But in all honesty did not fully understand the concepts. As I was b...

by Aldi Haryopratomo In this post I’d like to use the lens to evaluate how would I have applied course concepts like lean start-up, product market fit, etc, in the developing world based on my experience setting up Ruma in Indonesia, which coincidentally has the second largest number of Facebook users in the world. Ruma’s goal is to create an app-store for low-end phones that sell useful applications like job search. (e.g., www.kerjalokal.com ).  Based on the precept that start-ups shouldn’t scale until the hypothesis has been validated, the natural move when I started Ruma would be to start hiring engineers and start developing the product and try to get users in the system. Unfortunately, this is more difficult to do in developing markets mobile phone industry for a couple of reasons. First, most users access the Internet via mobile phones and to get access to a lot of users we’d need to partner with a Telco operator. Naturally few telecommunications operators would be willing to...

by Ashwin Limaye I would like to question the compatibility of "reality distortion fields" (RDFs) and lean startups through my personal experience working at the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) this summer. MIX was an ambitious idea – building an online platform to share management ideas, bring together leading CEOs, managers and thinkers and ‘reinvent management for the 21 st century’. Prima facie, MIX had three major ingredients of a lean startup: Leverage, Iterations and Low burn. The MIX generated phenomenal leverage: the founder was a highly-regarded management thinker, the CEO held contacts within a large consulting Firm and the ‘friends and advisors’ comprised prominent CEOs and business professors. Together, they brought rich contact lists, an initial customer base and sponsors who were able to offer favorable deals such as funding for the web development team and informal partnerships with leading industry associations. The MIX was quite lean: a five person tea...