Daybreak

The NITI Aayog was created in 2015 to replace the decades-old Planning Commission. The idea was to adopt a more bottom-up approach to make India competitive in today's global economy. With CEO Amitabh Kant as the leader, the think tank progressed to become a thriving, open, and empowering space for public policy experts, including those from non-government backgrounds.

 But ever since Kant's stint ended at the think tank in 2022, the walls between the leadership and non-govt employees at the think tank are getting thicker. From what appears, NITI Aayog is going back to the top down approach, quite like the Planning Commission back in the day.

This is making its non-govt employees quite unhappy. In fact 4 out of every 10 of them have quit this year.

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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

Losing IPL rights last year to Jio and then dropping HBO content has cost Disney+ Hotstar at least 21 million subscribers in just a year.

The streaming giant though, decided that IPL or no IPL cricket is going to be its biggest customer acquisition funnel in 2023. And it looks like they are holding on to that strategy. The Asia Cup was streamed for free on Disney Hotstar. Now, the ICC Cricket World Cup is on and it's  available on Disney Hotstar too. The OTT giant is offering free live streaming of the event to its mobile users.

But a lot of the new survival strategy, put together by the Disney Hotstar's head honchos, depends on how India does in the tournament.

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CORRECTION: In the episode, the host mistakenly refers to the ICC Cricket World Cup as ICC T20 Cricket World Cup. The error is regretted.

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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

Licious, the online meat delivery platform, was India’s first direct to consumer company or D2C that achieved the unicorn status.  It was valued at $1.4 billion two years ago and it had enough money to grow to Rs 100 crore of revenue per month, but its revenue has remained flat from the last two years.

Licious follows the premium pricing strategy. Its products are priced higher price than the average market but its customer base is ready to pay that extra amount because of the quality Licious delivers. But Licious is not being able to expand its user base to the larger meat eating population because of this very premium pricing strategy.

But it needs to deliver on a growth rate worthy of its billion dollar plus valuation.

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Why India won’t see a $100 billion internet company anytime soon

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

It took Bajaj Finance over 15 years to become the most valued NBFC in the country. And then came along Jio Financial Services Ltd (JFSL) and took the no. 2 position in a span of just two months. It is currently valued at more than $17 billion.

Its all set to take the top space. Currently, the company is on a serious hiring spree and it seems to have taken a particular liking to former ICICI Bank employees for its key executive roles. After all, a lot of its future success will depend on the team it builds.

But this is not the first time Reliance has tried its hands in the finance sector. The last time it did, things didn't really take off. What's different this time?

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A job with McKinsey, Bain, or BCG trumps everything. Or it used to

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

What makes Dunzo unique is that one could never imagine a company its size to have the kind of influence it does.
In 2022, a $200 million funding from Reliance Retail sent the quick-commerce startup flying high. It began expanding its dark stores and even ran advertisements in IPL.

But the IPL led boom did not last long. The same year, the number and volume of orders began to decline. Dunzo was forced to recalibrate its focus and rethink its strategy.

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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

After the pandemic years, Kota’s coaching industry saw an unprecedented boom. Money was pouring in from everywhere–from edtechs to investors. In the last five years, Kota saw about 2 lakh engineering and medical aspirants, on average, arrive from across the country.

Kota runs on stiff competition not just among the students but also among the scores of institutes that host and prep them. But since the past four months, Kota’s reputation has been on the line. Student admissions have dropped, with coaching-centre owners pegging it to be at least 20%.

While it is partially because of the rising number of student suicides, it is not the only reason why Kota may be one result away from losing its star position in the coaching business.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

All the twists and turns in the journey of startups have been well-documented since VC funding began drying up over the past year or so. In the first half of 2022,  Indian startups received more than $17 billion dollars. But a year later in 2023. they just got a little over $5 billion.

What’s we’ve barely heard about, though, is what is happening to the funders of these startups and their foot soldiers—the VC analysts. With the slowdown, the day-to-day responsibilities of these analysts have changed and so has their approach towards dealmaking.

Tune in to find out.

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 What VC analysts do when there are few deals to make

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

From the time it was the number one indian telecom company to braving the whole phase when Jio came around and disrupted the whole space. Its been a long, brutal competition for Airtel and Gopal Vittal has managed to bring Airtel back to health.

Meanwhile, he's spent years on finding and grooming the right talent to create the next generation of leaders at the telco giant. And now Airtel is undergoing a major reshuffle. As you would expect, it’s creating a sense of both excitement and stress.

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The camel is inside the tent

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

For a people who were quite averse to the whole concept of credit, Indians really seem to be developing a new found love for the piece of plastic and banks have been happy to ride the wave.

But lately they've been left quite baffled because they are being being beaten at their own game. A growing community of people are constantly finding hacks to take advantage of the loopholes in credit-card reward systems. For some of them , in fact, it's going so well that they’ve turned their secret operations into lucrative businesses. Turns out they can make more money from it than their 9 to 5 jobs.

Meanwhile banks have realised they are being taken for a ride so some have taken extra security measures to keep such tricksters at bay.

**Correction: The credit for this story was mistakenly attributed to Gaurav Noronha whereas the actual writer is Rounak Kumar Gunjan. We apologise for the error

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Credit-card whizzes outsmart banks at their own game

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.

From content flagging, suspension, shadow-banning and even account deletion, content creators are grappling with a variety of censorship methods on social media platforms—all in the name of maintaining community guidelines.

But with social media platforms relying more and more on AI and machine-learning tools identify and remove violating content, even content aimed at creating sexual, social, and political awareness ends up being taken down. 

And sex-ed and news content creators on platforms like Instagram and Youtube are seeing their reach, discoverability, and income take a hit.

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, analytical business stories.