Kunal Shah (Founder, Cred) & Shailendra Singh (PeakXV MD) on Business Models & Moats

1. Capital is not a moat most of the time, until it is a few times. So capital can be a deterrent, a moat is basically a deterrent. If your competitor raises $500 billion and is hell bent on discounting, other people will be scared to enter your market and territory and so on.

2. The way to think about moats is, no moat is permanent and no moat can give you a multi-decade advantage, but moat gives you a point in time advantage to build a company. Like all models will eventually get copied, and Kunal and I always say this, ‘Rarely are there any new ideas.’

3. A lot of things will happen through serendipity. Most people are not mentally ready to embrace serendipity, which is that there is that accidental innovation in every company. You thought you were doing X, but the second, third order effect that you did not expect suddenly starts to play out

4. One of the underrated things about improving decision making is time to think, because long-term decisions are scary, and you need time to think and mull over it and sleep over it for it to get formed in your head. And most people are just way too busy to make great decisions

5. Many times we do not like random curiosity… You will find extraordinarily great ideas that you can apply… One practice that you should do across the company is to understand other businesses by letting the team present, ‘Well, why don’t you deep dive on Stripe, why don’t you deep dive on Peloton. Why don’t you deep dive on something else?’ And then, end the session by asking, ‘What can we apply from this in our business?

6. Every single customer, every single employee, every single investor, regulator, anybody you deal with, are all humans. And unless you do not spend time and understand how human behavior works, you will nearly not progress much. And don’t rely on instincts to figure this out. There is enough science out there to understand how humans behave how humans get motivated to do what they do, and how humans change their behavior

7. Attachment is a great way to find the most important decisions to make. Detachment is a great way of building a good conviction on decisions I should make because attachment will never allow you to make good decisions.

8. We are only as good as our next decision… Everything, all of our success, everything we did yesterday is in the past. But today, if you look to the future, you’re only as good as your next decision

9. Every single company is a FinTech company. If you have not figured it out by now. My request is to process every single company. Gaming companies are extraordinary FinTech companies. They run on the coin economy as a core concept and they hire economists who run the best games.

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Kunal Shah & Shailendra Singh on Business Models & Moats