AI a Boon or Bane for Businesses
Mark Cuban the Billionaire Shark Tank investor is not very excited about AI as a technology as it may be able to curate a lot of information but may not be smart enough to make the decision, or even to ensure that the information is right. Mark finds this leading into confidence despite being faulty. Businesses and corporates using AI have to watch carefully in terms of what information is being shared with the AI models by the employees and what is withheld. Ultimately for individuals and for businesses AI’s importance will be equal to it’s use-case.
Mark Cuban Says AI Is “Stupid” But a Make-or-Break Tool for Businesses
Being in Charge
The will to do the hard things no matter what, is the most important ingredient to be in charge. It helps one to become the person who can take charge of any situation, the resulting benefits are ancillary.
Bottlenecks – to think of them as an opportunity to improve.
Brainstorming
Validating ideas is often done by discussing it with others, conducting surveys, proof reading with experts. Reading is magical, but at times recording our thoughts or work and listening to it later, also helps in refining our work.
Crisis Management
The old school playbook of managing a crisis no longer works. Crisis management in the digital and AI age requires faster action, take a clear stand and build trust.
Staying Neutral Is Not An Option
Customer First
Katherine Kostereva founded Creatio (2014) a workforce automation company by prioritising customers from day one. Listening to customers needs and serving those from day one has helped Creatio remain bootstrapped for the first 7 years and currently being valued at approximately $2 billion.
This Is How She Built a $2 Billion No-Code AI Company
Feedback
Giving and receiving feedback is very important for leaders. Giving feedback empowers team members to grow, receiving feedback models a culture of learning.
Feedback protocols for better growth and leadership
Fellowships for Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is challenging, most times involves a lot of years of trying and failing before succeeding, and that to most aspiring entrepreneurs becomes a closed door, as they prefer to take up a job instead which guarantees a pay check. The problem of going solo into entrepreneurship without any backup is now being solved with venture funds and institutions providing fellowships to young professionals and graduates with validating ideas.
Fellowships Open a Door for Campus Entrepreneurs
F&B + AI
The Filter Coffee founded by Avinit Bagri and Sankrit Iyer in 2014 with a 40 seated outlet has now scaled to 2 cloud kitchens, 3 Quick service restaurants and 4 casual dining restaurants, clocking revenue of approximately Rs. 100 crore ending FY2025. The interesting part of their story is the use of technology across their operations to scale.
Dosa with a side of AI: The Filter Coffee is brewing a Rs 100 Cr premium ‘darshini’ revolution
Governance Reforms
Bureaucracy and corruption can eat away on the progress of any nation developed or developing. India stands at a point were in it needs to make an important decision to lead with good vibrant governance in order to become the new global super power.
India Must Shift to Entrepreneurial Regime, Rethink State Capacity
Grocery – Quality First Trends
Groceries have come a long way from going online to quick commerce and now quality first with transparency around chemical free farming, timely logistics, produce handled with care from farm to table, is the new trend. Consumers are willing to pay a premium to avail a service that checks the above parameters of quality first.
Ripe for growth: Why online grocers are keen to serve picky customers with premium produce
Ideas for Authors to Succeed with their Books
The book publishing industry is growing steadily over the years. But that is not the same for authors, especially those planning to start writing a book. New authors have to deal with the publishing part first, worrying about if any publisher will find the idea attractive enough and support the author to get the book out. Authors are self publishing books now more than ever. Earlier books were published only in the print medium, but now authors can publish digitally with eBooks and Audio books. Literary events, book clubs, online communities are a growing segment that authors can be a part of to promote their work.
How can an Author succeed these days?
Indian AI Roadmap
The central governments active role is developing a robust AI ecosystem in India that solves local as well as global challenges. Indian AI startup’s need promote local language integration, operate ethically, adhere data security, offer affordable and frugal innovations that helps the Indian demographic as well as the global.
PM Urges AI Startups to Focus on Local Languages & Content
Intentions
Setting intentions for the year is a process that involves thought and action, leading to fulfilment and happiness. Setting resolutions or manifestations are a common practice, the results are mostly broken or at best incomplete. Intention is action oriented and hence a result is guaranteed.
Forget resolutions, we’re setting New Year intentions this year
James Clear
James Clear’s ideas on taking action, control and obsessions – The only thing in one’s control is the next action. Results come from sustained focus and not casual interests, be obsessed with taking action. Even when uncertain be bold in taking action, there are unexpected forces that will help out. Growth depends on adding some or removing something that stimulates growth.
Martin Luther King Jr Day
Lessons from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
As an entrepreneur one must maintain total commitment towards once idea, goals, dreams and cause. No matter how big they may be for the current timeline, no matter if there is no understanding or support from the majority of the people. No matter if it is lonely fight, but fighting (not violently) with strong determination and discipline is the key to bringing the idea to life.
Being different with your actions is the key to evolution and innovation. Same actions will lead to same results. Different ideas and goals call for different actions. Challenge the status quo by taking actions differently and realise your vision.
Dreaming big needs to be supported with big action as well. Communicating your dreams with people, is the first step, following it with an action plan results in fulfilling it.
Mentorship
Receiving mentorship and giving mentorship is vital for sustained success and growth. It is the continual interpersonal exchange that guides one another in the good and bad times, Impersonal mediums such as learning from talks, speeches, videos and books is vital, but the interpersonal exchange via mentorship is powerful enough to succeed.
Why the Best Leaders Don’t Separate Mentorship From Execution
Scarcity Mindset
A scarcity mindset is not right or helpful. It only creates setbacks or holds one back despite the available abundant opportunities. Practising gratitude, journaling and following a goal oriented approach in life helps in cultivating an abundant mindset.
5 Signs That a ‘Scarcity Mindset’ Is Holding You Back, According to Experts
Side Hustling – One or Many?
It’s common advice to always focus on one thing until success. The word FOCUS itself is an abbreviation Follow One Course Until Success. So the best option is to start with one side hustle and give it all the focus and energy and succeed at it. Also as time is finite, and there is always more to do than there is the time for it, it makes common sense to on one side hustle at a time. There can be exceptions if you have another complimentary idea that can be run parallelly with the existing side hustle or business. Or if you have resources that can be used towards more than one side hustle. Ultimately it’s all about focus and managing time and resources well to succeed, whether that’s on side hustle or many.
Between One Side Hustle and Many
Side Hustle Success
Jessica Baumgart – Delicious Denver Food Tours
Jessica invested $3k on building a website, membership to the visitors bureau and in a couple of months had to hire assistants to manage the food tours. Doing 350 to 400 people food tours every month, the business generated $100k in profits currently.
Food Tour Guide makes $100k Profit
PancakeNow
Jeff Taylor Yauck and Ben Glick attribute the success with their side hustle PancakeNow a healthy pancake with four flavours, to Chat GPT, which they relied on for answers to a lot of questions they had to get their product right. Developing a package food business can get time consuming leading into years of trial and testing to get the flavour, packaging and the durability right.
Friends Used ChatGPT to Start a $45,000-a-Month Side Hustle
Spacing Out
Giving people the time and space to move around, helps them get to where they have planned for. Time and space is finite, processes and systems should also be fine, to ensure quality growth.
Starting 2026
Reflect on the rights and wrongs of 2025, and start 2026 fresh taking those learning’s and doing better in the year ahead.
Another Year Gone By. What have you done?
Startup’s IPO bound in 2026
E-commerce technology company Flipkart, Quick commerce player Zepto, Fintech players PhonePe, Razorpay and PayU India are going to be listed on the bourses in 2026. The companies have been around, heavily funded and incurring losses as per latest filings.
Outlook 2026: India’s oldest, youngest, biggest unicorns likely to go public
Startup’s in the AI Avatar
AI is set to change business models, hiring, core operations and starting up in 2026. Most founders, chief executives and investors are inclined towards AI related development.
Startups Expect to Pivot to an AI Avatar This Year
Startup Success
Chloe & Phil launched Nala with $200k of inner wear for women,with zero experience in the industry, using influencers and guerrilla marketing to selling across Australia and NZ.
Runpod
Ideas evolve with time. Sometimes they evolve beyond imagination. Pradeep Singh and Zhen Lu setup crypto mining systems in their respective basements, and over time they found it boring, they transitioned the system into AI servers, founding Runpod a platform for hosting AI apps long before ChatGPT. Not familiar on the business side of things, they posted ads in couple Reddit AI groups that got them J Tikal users and paying customers within the first year of operations. Quitting their jobs whilst generating a million dollars towards the end of the first year. Bootstrapping their way to multi million dollars in revenue over the next couple of years, they were picked by VC’s who invested $20 million in the business.
AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post
Training
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” – Benjamin Franklin. Entrepreneurs and generally all humans must train to face any adversity, as circumstances can change good times into adverse without notice.
Vision Boards
Visualisation is a cognitive technique to achieve our goals. A daily practice of visualisation, means the goals are constantly on our minds, activating the sub conscious mind to play it’s part in achieving those goals. A vision board compliments the visualisation technique by facilitating as a visual tool representing your goals. Visualisation happens in the mind, visual boards are in the physical senses.
Vision Board Ideas For Adults (And How To Make One)
Wall
A powerful tool, with the photo frame or poster of someone or something we believe in. A constant reminder of a story that motivates us, to show up, to work hard, to make the right choices.
We Are Falling Short – Falling short on our plans is normal. Its human. It’s an opportunity to learn what went wrong, what can be improved, what can be done better, and then going at it again.
Women Entrepreneurship
Launch Girls founded in 2020 by Averil Spencer and Neha Sahu, is skilling gals in 16 countries, so as to make them confident to challenge perceptions, confident to become independent financially, by pursuing economic opportunities. The programme has impacted 25k girls, 18k of which are from India. The ecosystem is growing with 32 partners, 750 girl boss advisors and 200 student leaders supporting girls developing leadership and entrepreneurial skills.
How Launch Girls is helping girls in 16 countries own their economic futures
Website Basics in the AI World
Entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs must treat websites as a sales person, that is able to sell effectively 24x7x365. This requires an understanding and an approach to building the website functionally right for the target customers across platforms and devices. Website that look good does not mean that they will sell well. To sell well one has to design a website using data and clearly highlight the offering, the validations and the call to action. Confusion does not create conversion, clarity does.
Build Websites as a full time sales engine, and not as a static digital billboard
Women Focused Venture Capital
Venture capitalists had traditionally been male dominated, leading to challenges for women entrepreneurs to get an understanding from the men about their product or service, let alone the funding. This resulted in opportunity for women to start a fund focused totally on women entrepreneurs. Male dominated VC funds don’t have the bandwidth to understand products or services around women, as they are not using the same, so they will not be able to see the problem or the solution for it.
Young Entrepreneur
Jigyasa Labroo – Slam Out Loud
Dreams are not meant only for the rich, anyone can have a dream and realise it by tapping into the opportunities available. Opportunities – that’s the bridge between dreaming something and realising it. Jigyasa’s journey is inspiring, especially that she comes from a small town, a humble background, finds her way through failures by redeeming it through succeeding with parallel opportunities, using inter-college fests, competitions, fellowships and internships in building her skills to eventually launching Slam Out Loud a social organisation empowering children through artistic mediums.
Taking Every Bet: How Jigyasa Found Her Calling
Sources
Daily Stoic
Economic Times
Entrepreneur
Foundr
Image
James Clear – 3 2 1 Newsletter
Self
Seth Godin
Side Hustle School Podcast by Chris Guillebeau
Tech Crunch
The Good Trade
The Road Ahead
YourStory
You Tube
