The rise of the dragons

“I’ve seen ’em come, I’ve watched ’em go
Watched ’em rise, witnessed it and watched ’em blow
Watched ’em all blossom and watched ’em grow”

Dr. Dre (The Watcher)

These are musings from what I have seen with the emergence of new age teams and products. They helped create a whole new generation of independent creators and inspired us in ways unseen. What I hope we will continue to strive to as a theme in this coming year.

Breaking news

Buzzfeed led the way with what it saw as an evident gap for the millennials. Millennials didn’t have the attention span of their older counterparts who had not been raised with 24 x 7 media and constant news from their peers. They needed to be able to quickly grasp information by cutting through the BS that most media publishers threw in at them. Stories needed to be packaged to cut through the noise and the team there figured out a means to create a better signal from the noise. If a story couldn’t catch attention via its headline then it probably was not worth reading. They cannibalised content from a lot of publishers but they eventually figured out how to improve the signal to noise ratio. On their way to be a true blue new age media platform. While Buzzfeed showed that a small bunch of people with great tech which enabled these young age creators to produce stories which more people read than your traditional media houses.

The rise of stories

Medium was not built in a day. Ev Williams (Medium founder) with his previous ventures had figured out a niche which works. Good form of long format writing still had a place in the age of millennials. But here the key was “good”, the writing had to be consistently good. Any media platform goes viral by a mix of technology + content + community. The key being to enable the creator via tooling to generate good content which in turn spurs virality via the community. And Medium with its combination of tech and people attracted an initial set of content creators who did just that. Built out a socially created editorial if one might say so. The headlines broke at twitter or Buzzfeed but the stories formed at Medium.

Better Travel

Back home I would like to focus on something entirely different. Oyo Rooms : Their rise has been absolute meteoric this past year; and I think they are plugging in a very valuable gap in the travel ecosystem. India is one of the most sought after travel destinations for international travellers but event with that we can hardly claim to have basic hygiene in our stay conditions across the country. AirBnB has no idea what so about the India diaspora with India being run amok with run-down hotels and the like. For budget travellers the idea of a clean, nice comfortable stay in a hotel in India is a nightmarish experience. And they are plugging in this gap not only by aggregating content but by actually bettering the hotels management and quality of running conditions. The need of the hour in the industry was not to only aggregate information for consumers but to add value by creating better service conditions. Help the creators (hotel owners) run better hotels. And they seemed to tackle this head-on unlike the previous attempts in this space. I wish some of our real estate startups actually took cue and built more affordable and better quality living rather than keeping on aggregating content about housing with niftier user experiences on top.

There are a few more which I am really hopeful about this year. And Slack is just right up on my list there. I am hoping that they will make enterprise messaging and change the way we forever communicate within teams. Be the WeChat for team communication.

Which is where I daresay I hope to make a prediction. The next age of startups will enable creators. Not connect people as the previous era had focussed on but enable every small town creator or business owner to build products or provide services of the same quality as that of a large firm.

Be it starting a media publication, providing a hotel service, creating fashion, running a small restaurant or creating financial plans. The need of the hour is to enable and make more of these creators from all fields of work to work independently yet at the same quality as that of a large organization. Help build tools which will allow them to operate at the same level of professionalism and quality as any large scale organisation. Hopefully this is where we will see our next dragons. They will be the ones helping create better a world.