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The Collection Wed, 19 Feb 25 |
Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time—every week. |
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For writers at The Ken looking for stories to explore, ideas that are counterintuitive rank among the top of the list.
These are the stories that go against the grain. That challenge conventional beliefs and thinking, and thus, make for some of the most insightful reads.
No wonder then that we’ve published an entire series of conversations with business leaders with counterintuitive takes—Counterthesis. My colleague Praveen Gopal Krishnan did a superb job breaking down the purpose of this series in one of our emails a while ago:
In his bestselling book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel writes about the single best interview question he usually asks candidates to decide on whether to hire or fund their company:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
According to Thiel, this is why he asks this question:
“This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
That is the essence of Counterthesis, the subject of this week’s edition of The Collection.
There’s conventional wisdom, and then there’s unconventional wisdom. And in each of these stories, we ask founders and CEOs a version of Thiel’s famous question—what is your counterthesis?
My colleague Rounak Kumar Gunjan wrote last week about how fixed and recurring deposits may be regaining some of their lost lustre, courtesy equity’s underwhelming recent record.
Many financial commentators have long ranked fixed deposits amongst the worst financial instruments.
But not Stable Money’s Saurabh Jain.
Jain, whose platform allows for investing in FDs from multiple banks with a single bank account, believes it’s the best mass product in the country. The Ken’s Anand Kalyanaraman spoke to Jain for this September 2023 story.
Party campaigns for the recent Delhi state elections were no different from any other election in India these past several years—replete with promises around welfare schemes.
But does more welfare schemes mean more welfare?
How many schemes does a country like India really need?
The Ken’s Seema Singh spoke to Aniket Doegar about this in a December 2022 story.
Doegar is the founder of Haqdarshak, a startup which has assisted hundreds of companies in getting these schemes to their workers. And he believes the number should be a fraction of 20,000-odd government initiatives in play right now.
Just 1,000.
Franchising is central to scaling a fast-food brand. Over nine in 10 McDonald’s outlets in India are run by franchisees, and Pizza Hut and KFC are not much different.
Sagar Daryani of Wow! Momo, however, took a radically different path.
He believes in owning each and every outlet that the brand runs. We explore why in this November 2022 story by Seetharaman G.
About 1.5–5% of people suffer from cardiac arrhythmia, i.e., irregular heartbeats. But a huge number of them go undiagnosed until they turn acute, because that’s what conventional testing and diagnosing practices allow.
Cardiac Design Labs’ Anand Madanagopal is trying to change this with a patch that can monitor heartbeats in real time continuously for 5–7 days. He spoke to The Ken for this August 2023 story.
This week, the state of Kerala collaborated with Remidio to launch the world’s first AI-assisted government screening programme for eye diseases.
Ever since the advent of AI large language models (LLM) entered mainstream discourse, a long line of Big Tech companies have begun introducing solutions for the healthcare sector.
But it’s relatively easy to build such models trained on retrospective data. To be truly useful in healthcare, we need solutions that are trained on prospective data, believes Remidio’s Anand Sivaraman. He elaborates in this September 2023 interview.
E-commerce, s-commerce, q-commerce, SaaS… all have matured these last couple of decades. And current wisdom holds that’s where the big internet wins are.
But the man who built India’s first e-commerce marketplace and SaaS company (yes, both!) believes differently. Recykal founder Abhay Deshpande thinks the opportunities in waste commerce are bigger than anywhere else. We explore in this June 2023 story.
You can browse our entire collection of Counterthesis articles below.
Happy reading, and write to [email protected] if you have any thoughts or feedback to share.
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Rahul leads the promotion and distribution efforts for the journalism produced by The Ken. He works at the intersection of the publication's editorial and business operations.
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