Invest Like The Best
Episode 207 Internet Scale Businesses
Invest Like The Best

Episode 207: Internet Scale Businesses

Invest Like The Best

Episode 207

Internet Scale Businesses

Ram Parameswaran is the founder of Octahedron Capital and previously a partner at Altimeter Capital. We cover the potential for internet scale business, explore the common characteristics of these businesses, and the most important qualities for 8 business models.

This episode is brought to you by:

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[00:03:45] – [First question] – The opportunity of the commercial internet

[00:11:18] – Identifying the companies that will take advantage of this shift to online commerce

[00:18:30] – How businesses build scale, in particular, internet vs non-internet businesses

[00:24:19] – The Carvana playbook

[00:30:11] – Using frequency of use as a factor in valuing a business

[00:33:55] – Evaluating ByteDance and what can others learn from them

[00:40:52] – Finding success in an experiment

[00:43:32] – How online commerce business will grow globally, with India in focus

[00:52:37] – How they approach and evaluate online advertising businesses

[00:54:50] – Evaluating direct content subscription online businesses

[00:55:42] – Biggest challenges in building ecommerce online businesses

[00:58:31] – The lens to evaluate online marketplace businesses

[00:59:43] – What distinct things matter for on-demand online businesses

[01:01:56] – The competition in the online payment space business

[01:06:35] – Rake/Take rates outside of the US

[01:08:25] – Things that matter for consumer software

[01:10:25] – How that compares to enterprise software

[01:11:44] – Evaluating developer companies

[01:13:53] – Advice to help people be successful early in their investing career

[01:17:22] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

Internet Scale Businesses

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Ram Parameswaran, founder of Octahedron Capital. Ram started Octahedron this year after more than five years as a partner at Altimeter Capital where he led investments in Square, ByteDance, Pinduoduo, and Udaan. In our conversation, we cover the potential for internet-scale businesses, explore the common characteristics of these businesses, and then go through a rapid-fire round of the most important qualities for eight different business models. This conversation was a blast of energy and could have gone on for two more hours. I hope to have Ram on again and can't imagine what his conversations are like at the dinner table with his wife and former podcast guest, Anu Hariharan. Please enjoy this awesome conversation with Ram Parameswaran.

So, Ram, I think we have to set the stage here with the broadest description of the opportunity that you see in front of us as you can. I'll call this the commercial internet, maybe you could just describe what that phrase means to you, why you think it represents the size of the opportunity that it does.

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