Festive cheer for ecommerce

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Ola Electric is planning to open experience centres across India, said Founder Bhavish Aggarwal. While 20 such centres are already operational, the company aims to open 200 more such facilities by the end of March 2023.

According to Bhavish, these experience centres will enable more people to experience Ola's products.

Today, Britons in the UK and the Royal Family will pay their last respects to the departed Queen Elizabeth II as the longest reigning monarch of England is finally laid to rest at Windsor Castle.

The state funeral event, compared to the scale of the London Olympics, will see several dignitaries from across the world, including President Draupadi Murmu, who will convey her condolences on behalf of the Indian government.

ICYMI: Can AI bridge the chasm between our consciousness and other animals? Find out here.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about

• Festive cheer for ecommerce
• No more hustle
• Jarvis to investment rescue

Here’s your trivia for today: Which band is considered the highest-selling of all time?

Ecommerce

Festive cheer for ecommerce

‘Revenge shopping’ seems to be the word on the street as online festive season sales kick in from September 23. After being frugal, customers are looking to loosen their purse strings this year and are keenly watching the online space.

Flipkart announced its flagship sale, The Big Billion Days, from September 23 to 30.

Amazon India's Great Indian Festival sale, too, is scheduled to begin on September 23, though it is yet to announce a closing date.

Festivities to begin:

• As inflation stabilises and consumer demand increases across the board, festive season sales are likely to be the primary fuel for the growth of ecommerce sales in 2022.
• Smartphones and big-ticket purchases such as consumer electronics are expected to pump up the GMV numbers.
• Ecommerce players will have to contend with brick-and-mortar players, as it is the first time since 2020 that offline retail players will be able to run their businesses at scale.

Entrepreneur

No more hustle

Ravi Handa, by all means, is a successful edtech founder going by the celebrated yardstick of an exit by sale. Now that he’s also exited Unacademy, which had last year acquired his cheekily named online learning platform Handa Ka Funda, he’s actively scouting for a job.

Not any kind of job. He’s quite picky, and here’s his pitch: “Ideally, I am looking for a job where I do not have to do anything and still get paid a lot.”

That ideal doesn’t exist, though. Definitely not in an overzealous startup universe where ‘hustler’ is a badge of honour and founders are rooting for 18-hour work days. And he knows it.

Why the rush?:

• Hustling has been getting a bad rep lately. Relentless grind and ploughing through meeting after meeting and iteration after iteration is almost an inevitability for most founders.
• Startup employees embraced a ‘work hard, play harder’ culture. The ‘play harder’ part ground to a halt during the Covid curfews. And as companies worked harder to survive, the successes borne out of those efforts got glorified.
• For now, Ravi’s not looking to startup, or even take up a full-time job—viewing both options as extremely demanding and bearing much responsibility.

Startup

JARVIS to investment rescue

The investment process looks very different for a high-net-worth individual (HNI) and somebody who wants to invest smaller amounts.

For HNIs, there are banks and investment firms, brokerages and brokers, while the smaller guys are mostly left to their own devices to make (mostly uninformed or at least half-informed) investment decisions themselves.

Jarvis Invest wants to change that.

Key takeaways:

• Founded in 2016 by Sumit Chanda, JARVIS is an artificial intelligence platform that provides end-to-end, tailored, and personalised investment services for retail investors.
• It targets people who have Rs 30,000 to Rs 1 lakh to invest, and it does all the functions of a traditional investment bank, including asset reallocation and risk management.
• JARVIS-curated portfolios have provided average returns of 50%-80% across portfolio categories to date. Its risk management capabilities were able to recently predict the market crash of March 2020 and January 2022.

News & updates

• Bleaker outlook: Goldman Sachs cut its US economic growth estimates for 2023 after recently boosting its predictions for Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. US gross domestic product will increase 1.1% in 2023, compared with a forecast of 1.5% previously.
• Need for speed: Chinese researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, Sichuan province, performed road tests for modified passenger cars that use magnets to float 35 millimetres above a conductor rail.
• Money matters: The underlying pressures driving inflation in Canada are likely to peak in the fourth quarter of this year, though most see signs that fast-rising prices are becoming entrenched and warn a recession may be needed to avoid a spiral.

Which band is considered the highest-selling of all time?

Answer: The Beatles.

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