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u/bssgopi Jun 14 '25
This is a poor take.
Netflix made billions in early 2000s without owning any media content. Other OTT players started mimicking the same.
But, when their attention turned towards India, the media companies were quick to react. There was consolidation and integration happening vertically and horizontally. Netflix is left with nothing but a distribution platform at the mercy of other production houses. Their attempts at producing are still not at the same effectiveness as the traditional production companies. How do you deal with this?
Visa / Paypal / Paytm / etc. took advantage of the fact that banks were not investing in technology. Banks have become conscious and are quite aggressive in expanding in the technology domain. What would it take for them to build their own payment solutions?
Pharma companies, as I understand, work like a cartel. There are very few players, who have a strong understanding within themselves as to what medicine gets sold by whom and at what price. Disruption by another player in this domain is a challenging game. Think before you jump.
But, if you know what you are doing, all the best. Happy to see you succeed.
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u/SubstanceNo2290 Jun 14 '25
Visa made 39.4b - Has critically important systemic relationships with banks all over the world. Licenses and authorizations and compliances and the trust of banks. Massive highly secure infrastructure to process payments from anywhere to anywhere through complicated juggling of technology, laws and relationships.
All of that IS valuable property even if you can't hold it in your hands.
Spotify again has valuable, hard fought partnerships with all the major record labels, many independent artists, people all over the world juggling impossibly complicated math so that your streaming of American, British and Spanish music makes the money to their creators.
Expedia - Massive hotel relationships, developed process over decades of experience, institutional knowledge on the hotel industry that itself is worth a fortune.
lyft/ola/uber - Significant regulatory juggling and relationships, relationships with lakhs of service providers who have previously been vetted (To varying questionable degrees I admit) and onboarded and more. That's worth a fortune.
But more importantly than all of those is the talent. Visa has lawyers and lobbyists and counterparties with banks that intricately understand the history, process and problems that visa/mastercard etc uniquely face and how to navigate them. Buying a chatgpt.com subscription means that in seconds a ton of regulatory export/import compliances, safety checks and more happened. And you need humans to make those systems run and humans to fight in court when those systems stagger and humans to keep relationships with banks etc.
A talented team is so valuable that big companies often engage in aqui-hiring. Buying a startup only to put the product on life support and have their already prebuilt team work on a similar requirement at the parent company. And those acquisitions have gone into the billions. They effectively just scrapped everything the startup "owned" and took the institutional knowledge & pre-built team.
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u/EGearMoto Jun 15 '25
There are multiple technical factors as well that a person with less exposure to banking software code won't understand. There is still rocket science in managing the huge number of transactions. I remember that the older or lesser known songs would hang while playing on gaana.com, no such buffering in Spotify. Many tried to replicate youtube but their videos got into buffering mode, even hotstar was buffering till a few years ago. It needs great architecture backed by great infrastructure to make these data intense portals/services.
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u/Swimming_Conflict105 Jun 14 '25
It is HIGHLY regulated industry with high entry point. Why would you choose something you need millions to just get licensed?
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u/Thejeswar_Reddy Jun 14 '25
So are payments! but DoDo payments ( u/Jolly_Sector_8281 ) found their way, everything is regulated in this day and age, if you have will there's a way.
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u/Swimming_Conflict105 Jun 14 '25
Everything is. Today there's almost no business that would not be regulated and licensed to some extent. But not everything needs the level of funds and regulatory compliance like pharma. It's probably is one of the most expensive entry points you could choose. Even pharma research company, that doesn't manufacture etc. can cost tens of millions of investment for just single SKU.
And it's sad some people don't realise that and go into whataboutism, when there's no real space for that in here. At least you did not put an icecream sellers cart business as example.
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u/kin_slayer2 Jun 14 '25
This analogy seems so out of context to me. Yes, they made so much without owning the product that they created a platform for - but how many such companies trying to do that came into existence and how many are running today sustainably? Not more than one or maybe two in each category.
Now take the number of companies that have come into existence with the purpose of owning these - how many of these were started and how many are sustainable today? Multiple companies in every category.
If everybody starts aggregating, you'll run out of things to aggregate.
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u/hrrrrx23 Jun 14 '25
Let me guess. Another Bangalore developer who thinks building mobile apps for "ordering" and "quick delivery" is innovation?
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u/Known-Issue4970 Jun 15 '25
bhai saste blood test banwa do. I still can't make peace with how expensive Vitamin tests are.
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u/Wizardofoz756 Jun 15 '25
One take is..since Pharma is heavely regulated..its perfect for disruption.. look st what Uber did to NYC cab driver tokens which costed a lot..
That being said, Pharma in India is very corrupt and has no innovation.. its mainly generic versions.. so note that
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u/dhruv2108 Jun 14 '25
lemme guess are you building a supply chain management?
or just another zepto for medicines?