Episodes
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A new generation of designers is on the rise. These designers are expected to be a lot more than just “one trick ponies”. The new-age ‘Designer X’ is expected to bring a little bit of everything to the table. They understand the basics of sustainability, how their designs would impact things like climate change and culture. And they would also generally know a little bit of coding too.
And that is because the whole perception of design has shifted. Just last month, IIT Delhi announced a new certificate course in design thinking. It quoted multiple reports explaining why aspirants should take it. One of them was a 2023 Deloitte report that said companies that integrated design thinking in their innovation process brought new products to market 50 per cent faster than others and saw 2.5 X more revenue growth.
The latest batch of design generalists are the products of a new era of design education that has been sweeping through India’s universities. As of now, about a dozen have started their own design schools. Some of these universities are leaning into the industry’s demand for a well-rounded designer.
But now that more universities have entered the picture and generalist designers are becoming a dime a dozen, landing good jobs is going to get tougher as the job market matures.
Tune in.Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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*This episode was originally published on July 12, 2024
Have you ever heard of a 'f*** off fund'? Or better yet, do you have one?For the uninitiated, it is a sum of money that women should ideally set aside to get out of a difficult situation – think toxic job, abusive relationship or family situation, you get the drift.
The term was coined by freelance writer, Paulette Perhach, in 2016. We recommend that you read her powerful essay on financial independence. The idea is for it to give you enough power, confidence and control to literally be able to say “f*** off” and walk away.
You are probably thinking, ‘great in theory, but how do I actually build one for myself?’. We have got you covered. In this special episode of Daybreak, Chaitra Chidanand, the co-founder of Salt, a financial services platform for women, demystifies f*** off funds and how you can get one.
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Suggested reading
A F*** Off Fund: the most important female prep, Reddit
"The FOF has saved me and my kids a few times. Health crisis. Unemployment. Violence. S**t happens. But just as important—having a FOF means you can act from a position of power, not fear, not subservience."
Warren Buffett Invests Like A Girl? Forbes
"Buffett has always said that it’s temperament--not intellect--that makes you a great long-term investor. When you look at studies that have been coming out in the last 10 years about how men and women invest, what you see is that women tend to naturally have this temperament that creates long-term investing success."
For Women With Money Issues, an A.D.H.D. Diagnosis Can Be Revelatory, NYT'But because activities like planning or budgeting don’t usually give people with A.D.H.D. a dopamine hit, they can find it harder than neurotypical people to get started or stick to accounting activities. This results in extra costs — paying cancellation fees for missed appointments or late fees for not opening a bill on time, or losing refunds because we missed the deadline for returning an unwanted purchase.'
For feedback, write to us at [email protected]
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Missing episodes?
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In the 2024 financial year, Apple sold products worth $8 billion in India. This was a third more than the previous year.
But how did a premium company like Apple that hates giving discounts sell products worth 8 billion dollars in a country as price sensitive as India? Apple obviously knew that its phones were unaffordable for most people in India?
It found an answer was easy financing. After the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, Apple made financing tie-ups with banks a mainstay. And one of the most important deals Apple made was with India’s largest private sector lender, and leading credit card issuer HDFC Bank. In fact, it was one of the costliest deals HDFC had. Thanks to it, HDFC customers have been enjoying exclusive cashbacks on Apple products ever since.
Here’s the bad news. The deal between Apple and HDFC is now over.What happened?
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For a whole decade, Ola and Uber dominated the cab-hailing market. But cut to 2024 and that scenario is shifting. Both these companies are drifting. And a third contender – Rapido – is making the most of it.
Both homegrown Ola and US-based Uber are dealing with a unique set of problems. The whole ride-hailing business seems to have taken a backseat for Ola, which is now knee deep in the electric vehicles business. Meanwhile, for Uber, the problem is stagnation.
And those factors combined have taken a toll on their combined marketshare. The big two’s combined dominance has come down to around 60-70 per cent from over 90 per cent three years ago.
But there’s a huge opportunity here for nine-year-old Rapido. Which the cab aggregation newbie is making the most of.
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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Welcome to the world of luxury-lifestyle management, where firms like RedBeryl, Indulge Global, and Quintessentially play the role of concierge for their ultra-wealthy clients, making the impossible possible.
Now this sort of thing has become even easier for the rich. Because their wealth managers are also taking care of some of these requests.
It isn’t a one -off thing. Companies like RedBeryl, Indulge GLobal, Quintessential – all of which play the role of concierge for their ultra wealthy clients – are increasingly partnering with wealth managers to edge out competition and increase their clientele.
In today’s episode, we dive into how wealth managers are finding new ways to delight the ultra-rich.
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Zomato planning to raise 8,500 crore rupees again. This comes just three years after its grand IPO where it had raised almost the same amount. The company's stock prices have doubled in the last ten months.
Interestingly, this fundraise is going to be through a qualified investment placement or QIP when a listed company raises capital from domestic markets without the need to submit any pre-issue filings to market regulators. Only qualified institutional investors are allowed to participate in this kind of a fundraise. All this just as rival Swiggy is prepping for its IPO. And the quick-commerce trio—Blinkit, Instamart, and Zepto are gearing up to expand beyond the metros and into smaller cities. Plus new, deep-pocketed companies like Reliance Retail and Flipkart are also joining into the race. In a letter to shareholders, founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal wrote that the fundraise is intended to ensure a “level playing field with competitors who continue to raise additional capital” and to “strengthen its balance sheet”. There was no mention of how the funds would be used.
At first, this seems like Zomato declaring war in the quick-commerce space. Some analysts believe it could be a move to show the market that it has a balance sheet that is the “strongest of all.
But is that all there is to it?
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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If all the women of the world had a collective wallet where we could put in a penny for every time we heard the words “your biological clock is ticking,” we could move to Venus and run our own planet.
But as unfair as it may be, it is true. There is an ideal time period in a woman’s life when she can have a baby. Or when she is the most “fertile.”
Unlike men who are biologically not limited by such constraints, women are born with a limited number of eggs. And turns out, this number of eggs sees a drastic decline after the age of 37. And when we say drastic, we mean drastic.
But in the 1980s, scientists figured out how to freeze women's eggs. They developed a process called oocyte cryopreservation. It took thirty years for the procedure to become widely available. Today, a growing number of women are opting for the procedure.
Most people assume that women freeze their eggs so they can buy time to achieve professional success. Women who freeze their eggs are often envisioned as 'career-driven', 'power hungry', and ambitious. But, egg freezing is an intense process. It is invasive, it is painful. It takes a toll on women not just physically but mentally as well. Plus, it is expensive.So why do women freeze their eggs?
Hosts Snigdha and Rahel went to Dr Marcia Inhorn, a professor at the University of Yale and author of Motherhood on Ice to find out.
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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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For a country that boasts of its digital public goods infrastructure like Aadhar and UPI, it is a wonder why telecom has been so ignored. After nearly 1500 crore rupees of was reportedly lost to digital fraud in the financial year 2024, the govt’s Trai is finally scrambling to catch up with CPAN or the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) service, its own version of Truecaller.
Truecaller, the Swedish call-screening company, meanwhile, has been holding the fort for a while now. Users count on it to save them from spam and fraud calls. While TrueCaller maybe looking like a hero in this situation, it is a private company after all. It is using this opportunity to make money from both users and businesses.
But its success in India is also built partially on how inadequate privacy laws are in India. The company has been accused of breaching data privacy norms in the past.
Can TRAI replace Truecaller?
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(This episode was first published in July, 2024)
DAYBREAK UNWIND RECOMMENDATIONS for "coming of age"
Rahel: Big Mouth, Netflix
Snigdha: The Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro and Lady Bird (2017)
Atish Deore: The works of PL Deshpande, a Marathi author and playwright
Shubhangi: Derry Girls (2018)
Brijesh: Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia OwensDaybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite translated books."
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Late last month, the Supreme Court made a very strong statement about NRI quotas at medical colleges. It essentially said that the whole thing was a fraud.
But the thing is, since the Supreme Court called it out, the practice has only gotten murkier. So The Ken reporter Alifiya Khan conducted an investigation. She scoured several social networking sites only to find countless posts promising seats in medical institutes to aspirants who scored way below the required cutoff and even those who were hardly eligible for the NRI quota.The only requirement? Well, applicants need to be ready to cough up some big bucks. The Ken wanted to see if there was something to these claims. So Alifiya went undercover. She posed as the sibling of a Maharashtra-based MBBS aspirant, with a measly NEET score of 180. She then contacted four education consultancies. And all of them, quite unsurprisingly, had boilerplate replies. The running thread – regardless of your score, they would hook you up with a medical college.
And yet, most people high up in medical colleges don’t want to let go of NRI quota. Because in many ways it is what keeps the whole system afloat. What’s going on?
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There is an unusual one-of-kind competition brewing within the Indian fintech space. It is so disruptive that its leaving founders and chief executives of some of India’s biggest fintechs feeling pretty intimidated and also helpless.
The funny thing is, the brains behind this new competitor that’s left the whole industry feeling pretty blindsided is the Reserve Bank of India itself. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the banking regulator. And it’s called the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub or RBIH.
The RBIH has been around for two years now. It's a first-of-its kind sort of company, because it is led by a central bank. Now, perhaps its closest counterpart, would be the National Payments Corporation of India or NPCI. We all know it for creating the unified payments interface or UPI. The NPCI is owned by a consortium of banks, whereas the RBIH is wholly owned by the regulator.
It’s raison detre is simple: it’s meant to accelerate innovation across the financial sector.
But unlike the NPCI, which collaborates with lenders in some way or the other to develop its products, the RBIH asks lenders to participate. But for the most part, a lot of fintech founders say that it works in a silo.
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We are now on WhatsApp at +918971108379! Text us or send us a voice note to tell us what you thought of this episode.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Earlier this month, CRED, released its financials for the year ended March 2024 at a press conference. Cred claims to have about 13 million monthly active users. For the financial year ended March 2024, it saw revenue rise more than 60% to nearly $300 million, and losses shrink by around 40% to about U$70 million. Plus, its monthly transacting users grew by more than 30%.
Shah said how it's the top 10% of households who drive 60% of consumption. Even with UPI, he said, it was the top 30–40 million that drove billions of UPI transactions. And out of that target audience, Cred claims to have about 13 million monthly active users.But Cred says it does not present the option to take a loan for many of its users. And while a little more than a third of them are qualified to borrow, only about 10% have taken on a loan. According to Shah, Cred has taken a deliberately conservative approach here, which is what makes Cred unusual and 'popular with the chief risk officers of banks in India.'
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We are now on WhatsApp at +918971108379! Text us or send us a voice note to tell us what you thought of this episode.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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A little more than a week ago, we read a really strange piece of news. Apparently, an expert committee recommended the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to ban the over the counter sale of emergency contraceptive pills like i-pill and Unwanted 72. They suggested women should be only allowed to access it with a doctor’s prescription because of concerns over side effects.
This was weird for many reasons. One, levonorgestrel, which is what these pills contain, is one of the safest emergency contraceptives available in the world. It is approved by WHO and the FDA. In fact, it is so safe, that even breastfeeding women can take it.
Second, these emergency contraceptive pills are already a part of the Indian govt’s family welfare programme. It was approved by the DCGI back in 2001. Ten years later, the ministry of health even made it a part of the ASHA workers drug kit.
Much to the relief of women, the DCGI came up with a clarification a few days later saying no such ban was going to take place. But the news brought us face to face with the possibility that something as life-changing as the emergency pill—the one saving grace women have when it comes to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy—could be taken away, just like that.
Despite our progressive policy on the matter and the fact that more than 60% of emergency contraceptive pills in our country are sold over the counter, women often hesitate to buy it themselves. The fear of judgment and shame comes in the way of access.
In this episode, hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rahel Philipose talk to two experts, Vinoj Manning, the CEO of the Ipas Development Foundation, and Leeza Mangaldas, a sex educator and author of The Sex Book, about about this chasm that exists between our seemingly progressive policies and our actual society and its attitude towards emergency contraceptive pills and women's reproductive rights.
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We are now on WhatsApp at +918971108379! Text us or send us a voice note to tell us what you thought of this episode.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Back in 2004, two sisters, Kainaz and Tina Messman, decided to turn their life-long passion for food and baking into a full fledged business. They set up Theobroma, a small cafe tucked away in a corner of Mumbai’s posh Colaba. Today, there are more than 200 Theobroma outlets in over 30 cities across the country.
The bakery chain’s evolution has been nothing short of remarkable. It has managed to build a profitable business that too in a category known to have products with one of the shortest shelf lives. The chain now commands a valuation of well over Rs 3,000 crore. In fact, investors like Chrys Capital, Bain Capital and Carlyle Group are queueing up to buy the 20-year-old brand.
But being in the big leagues has meant changing up its strategy. Over the years, Theorobroma has cut down the number of baked and semi-baked items on its menu, and instead filled their shelves with longer lasting products like cookies.
It’s been able to do that because of its massive, centrally located commissaries. And these strategic shifts have paid off big time. Because now investors are valuing the company at 7-9X its revenue. All of this is good news for its current promoters, the Messman sisters and the private equity investor ICICI Ventures, which invested $20 million between 2017 and 2019. Both are likely to exit with handsome returns.
But once that happens, where would that leave Theobroma? Most industry experts say that sailing through with new owners is no picnic.
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Daybreak Unwind recommendations for folk songs:
Rahel: Genda Phool, Delhi 6, 2009
Snigdha: Sketches of Darjeeling by Bipul Chettri, 2014
Anushka: Mor Bani Thanghat Kare by Jhaverchand Meghani
Hari: Kalakkatha Sandana Meram by Nanjamma**Correction: Snigdha mistakenly said Mame Khan instead of Mangey Khan while talking about the Manganiyar singer's death. The error is deeply regretted.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "coming of age." -
Today, most conventional or slow clothing brands like Lee, Wrangler, United Colours of Benetton, Pepe Jeans and Levi’s are facing a tough new reality where they aren’t just trying to outperform each other. They are also up against fast fashion brands that are now dominating the industry.
In the process, many of these slow brands have lost relevance in the larger scheme of things.
In this episode we are going to talk about two of these brands in particular – Lee and Wrangler. Both are international brands that were launched in India in the late 80s and early 90s. But neither really took off.
But now, they are trying to make a comeback. And behind this comeback is a Bengaluru based retail company called Ace Turtle. It wants to build a mini version of Indian conglomerate Reliance Brands Limited. That’s a pretty ambitious goal, considering the brands in their lineup couldn’t be more different.
Tune in.Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs."
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Earlier this year, Zomato acquired ticketing platform Paytm Insider. With this, Zomato was able to take its 'going out' strategy to the next level.
Since 2018, Zomato has been holding live events. You have probably heard of its its massive carnival-style event called Zomaland. The idea behind it is simple: a big part of going to a movie, or a music festival, or pretty much any live event is the food and drinks.
So by being associated with live events, Zomato is able to expand the company’s reach from just restaurants to other spaces where food and beverages are consumed. The Insider acquisition takes this to a whole other level. It will place Zomato in the big leagues and really shake up India’s live-events sector.
But so far, this has been a space dominated by one player – BookMyShow. For a long time now, it has been the default choice for both users and big artists because it offers discoverability and visibility like no one else does.
But at the same time, it has also been facing some heat for not providing a great customer experience. Case in point: the recent Coldplay fiasco.This is exactly where a formidable rival like Insider could come in and shake things up. In fact, Zomato’s shadow is already looming.
Tune in.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs." -
The PM’s internship scheme wants to provide 10 million internships to freshly minted students over the course of the next five years. Students from premier institutes like IITs and IIMs or students with professional degrees like CA, CMA or masters are not allowed to apply. The idea is to address India’s problem of youth unemployment by making students from lower socio-economic backgrounds employable and giving them real world exposure. It sounds great. If it is implemented well, the scheme has the potential to challenge deep-rooted hiring biases that exist in the job sector in India.
However, 10 million interns in five years is making corporates uneasy. They’re overwhelmed because they don't know how many interns they can hire. Two million interns per year between 500 odd top companies is a lot and corporates are unsure if they have the resources and the bandwidth to train and retain these interns and then deal with another two million pool the following year. The scheme opened up for signing up to students on Saturday, Oct 12. Within one day more than 1 and a half lakh students had already registered according to news reports.
But because the scheme doesnt really have a sector specific approach, it is highly likely that we have a problem-solution mismatch coming our way.
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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs."
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Back in 2014, Ashoka University introduced India to the concept of a liberal arts education. The private research university, tucked away in Sonipat, Haryana, came along at a time when the cracks in India’s higher education system were starting to become pretty glaring.
It positioned itself as everything a conventional Indian college was not. Ashoka promised to offer ‘holistic, liberal, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary’ education. Simply put, it was offering choice. And that simple yet powerful promise is what made it stand out.But ten years later, it is facing new pressures.
The latest phase of the Ashoka story is not one that a lot of people may have seen coming. It's marked by a stronger focus on business and sciences than ever before.
Case in point: the university’s thriving entrepreneurship department. In the last few years, it has become one of the most popular courses on offer. A big reason for its popularity is because students think signing up for courses like these will make them more ‘employable’. And that, fundamentally goes against what Ashoka stands for.
So now, Ashoka is facing a dilemma: Should it give in to parental pressure and start acting like a business school, driven by placements and employability? Or should it just stay the course?
Tune in.Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs."
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About a month ago, news broke about Reliance's plans to merge Disney+ Hotstar with JioCinema after their Star-Viacom18 merger. While the merger is pending approvals from the Competition Commission of India, data from Google Play Store data shows Disney+ Hotstar had over 500 million downloads while JioCinema had over 100 million downloads.
While the idea makes sense from a consumer's perspective who has to deal with too many subscriptions and too many choices, things don't quite add up from a strategic perspective for Reliance.
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DAYBREAK UNWIND RECOMMENDATIONS for "favourite murder mystery."
Snigdha: We Have Always Lived in The Castle by Shirley Jackson
Rahel: Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene (The Phantom of Venice)
Devansh: Blood on the Tracks by Shūzō Oshimi
Venkat: Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya, 2019 (movie)
Vaidehi: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Rohith: Jane Jaan, 2023 (movie)
Ashish: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Hari: Dial M for MurderDaybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite folk songs."
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So far, buying medicines in India has been a complete minefield. Allow me to elaborate with the help of a completely plausible hypothetical scenario. Say you catch the flu one day and need 75 mg of the antiviral drug Oseltamivir. More often than not, we don’t really check the price tag of these drugs. But what if I told you the prices can swing anywhere between Rs 30 and Rs 125 per capsule, depending on the manufacturer and the doctor prescribing it.
Now, variable pricing is not really a revelation. It’s a pretty common practice. The government caps the price of nearly 400 essential drugs through the National List of Essential Medicines. But that’s where the oevrsight ends. Generally, non-essential drugs remain outside this price cap.
The National Health Authority, the body which runs India’s public health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, is now looking for digital pharmacy partners to promote pricing transparency. The aim is to tackle this overcharging crisis.So in September, it went ahead and enlisted Marg ERP, a leading provider of pharmacy inventory software as one such partner. Now Kaushal Shah, founder of Evitalrx, revealed that even his cloud-based pharma software firm is on track to join the initiative in the coming weeks.
But here’s the thing. This one click solution is still a long way off.
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Don't forget to send us your recommendation for this Thursday’s Unwind segment. The theme is “your favourite murder mystery.” Send them to us on WhatsApp as a voice note or as a text message. The number is +9189711-08379
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Back in the day, being from one of India’s prestigious boarding schools – the likes of Doon or Mayo – was the ultimate stamp of honour. Most of these schools were established close to a century ago, during British rule. And for the longest time, they were infamous for taking that legacy pretty seriously.
In fact, that was exactly why they remained the go-to destination for India’s elite. But now, things are changing. In the recent past, the likes of Doon and Mayo have had to change their approach. They are now fighting to stay relevant. And the reason for that is the exponential growth of international schools and foreign boarding schools across the country.
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Don't forget to send us your recommendation for this Thursday’s Unwind segment. The theme is “your favourite murder mystery.” Send them to us on WhatsApp as a voice note or as a text message. The number is +9189711-08379Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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