Tag Archives: socks

The 9 Best Conversations I have had in my life – and the lessons I learnt from them!

He said, “Alok, we have taken a good look at mobile2win India. We like the business, the Company and the management. We are moving towards sending the board a term sheet to make a large investment. However, we have also decided to acquire your shares since we believe you are not adding any value to the Company.” Continue reading

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The Seven Subjects I learnt at Marwari Business School (MBS)

I learnt Seven important subjects at Marwari Business School – these were Monetization Mentality, Accounting Archery, Righteous Rigor, Waiting and Watching, Attitude Adjustments, Risks and Rewards and Innovative Ingenuity. Continue reading

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Can you solve the mystery of PRICE?

During this process, I stumbled upon an amazing insight – the price of Baby Socks for new borns (as young as 3 months) were the same as the price of Men’s socks as large as shoe size 12! When I dived deeper, I realized that it was mothers who buy socks and they were equally attached emotionally to their newborn child as they were to their husbands and hence didn’t differentiate the price of baby socks vs. men’s socks. Continue reading

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Have you found your Queen of Hearts?

..For almost 3 decades, there had been no exports since pricing just was not viable. In about 2 months after I joined, Manmohan Singh presented his dramatic ‘liberalization’ budget and massively devalued the Rupee! All of a sudden, Indian exports became a possibility and over the next few years, our family business grew into a very profitable, highly export centric business (that was also tax free)!…

….He said ‘ Alok, Intel wants to be the first advertiser on Contests2win.com because Intel believed that encouraging new web ideas was critical to growing Internet and computing penetration and this was a gesture in that direction’. He just said, ‘Add an Intel banner on the home page and bill us Rs. 5000 per month. No metrics, no questions, no click thrus and no reports required’. I was speechless….

…I was ignorant, he was a chance taker – that one game he sent to AG created such a massive rush of American traffic to our site, that in 6 months we had changed our business model completely to a Made in India, Sold in the USA story….
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What babies and their socks can teach CEOs…

In my past life (10 years ago) I used to make socks for my father in his hosiery factory. After 5 long and laborious years of trying to establish an export division, I got a lucky break with the European … Continue reading

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