One important thing: The Indian government is not leaving any loose ends when it comes to curbing the menace of fake predatory lending apps.

Even as the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) is on the money trail, Google has been asked by the Indian government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to introduce more stringent checks to help curb the use of illegal digital lending applications, according to a Reuters report.

• Google had recently said it blocked 2,000 personal loan providers from its app marketplace in India from January to July, after they were found to be in violation of its policies.

In today's newsletter:

• Layoffs at Ola
• Oyo keeps IPO dreams alive
• A small bakery vs Amazon

Also, is Sima Taparia of Netflix's Indian Matchmaking a data scientist? Scroll down for more deets!

One must be starting to wonder if layoffs are the new normal for startups as they restructure and get ready for the road to profitability by this point.

Ola, an EV manufacturer and ride-hailing major, has cut its workforce especially from its app development and engineering teams. This one, though, is significant and unique!

While Ola has announced massive growth plans, including plans to bring an electric car to India by 2024, as well as a new S1 bike, the company has decided to reduce staff.

In the past, Ola only laid off employees when a business was failing. For example, it laid off nearly 2,000 employees as a result of the closure of the pre-owned car business, Ola Cars, and the quick commerce business, Ola Dash. But why lay off now, when the plans are ambitious? Poor human resource management or consistently low EV sales?

Ola says it is centralising its operations and is undertaking a restructuring exercise to minimize redundancy. They have also said that only 10% of its overall workforce is let go, which comes up to around 200.

Almost a year after filing its IPO prospectus, hotel aggregator Oyo is making renewed efforts to go public. And that may be as soon as January 2023.

Oyo was forced to abandon its listing plans earlier this year after a prolonged pandemic hampered its growth and forced the company to lay off thousands of employees.

Although the company has taken big strides towards profitability, its revenue is yet to recover from pandemic pangs.

• Oyo’s revenue rose 18 percent to Rs 4,905 crore in FY22 from the previous year, while net loss narrowed 45 percent to Rs 1,851 crore
  
  
• The SoftBank-backed company was still far behind its pre-Covid annual revenue of Rs 13,413 crore in FY20
  
  
• Oyo also claimed to have hit EBITDA (earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation)-level profitability of Rs 10.6 crore for the June quarter

Oyo’s employee stock option (ESOP) expenses rose 344 percent from Rs 153 crore in FY21 to Rs 680 crore in FY22.

• This at a time when the company brought down salary and bonus expenses by 27 percent to Rs 1,117 crore during the period
  
  
• Oyo founder and chief executive officer Ritesh Agarwal received a remuneration of Rs 5.6 crore in FY22, up 250 percent from Rs 1.6 crore in FY21

Things might have started getting better in the June quarter this year as travel resumed. Here’s why:

• The company said that its gross booking value (GBV) per storefront per month only improved marginally from Rs 2 lakh in FY21 to Rs 2.2 lakh in FY22
  
  
• This number shot up to Rs 3.25 lakh in the April-June period
  
  
• Oyo employees also got a payday bonanza in the June quarter with ESOP payouts of Rs 260 crore

It’s a story that often repeats with Amazon: small businesses usually get the short end of the stick. In a scene that doesn’t come around too often, a bakery in Bengaluru found itself going up against Amazon in court — and won!

Bengaluru-based Happy Belly Bakes, which has been in business since 2008 and has a trademark for its name and mark, began getting phone calls in 2017 asking if they were now selling online.

It wasn’t them. It was Amazon selling products under a private label called ‘Happy Belly’.

Happy Belly is one of Amazon’s several private labels that it launched in 2016, and it sells bakery items, dairy, crackers, snacks, spices, and other items under this label in some markets where it operates.

In court, Amazon claimed there was no infringement, and while the bakery was restricted to Bengaluru only, they have been using "Happy Belly" for their products worldwide.

An attempt to get a trademark for ‘Happy Belly’ was also unsuccessful.

After four years of the matter being in court, Amazon was found to have violated the Happy Belly Bakes trademark.

According to the ruling, Amazon even claimed in court that Happy Belly Bakes lacked goodwill and reputation. The court rejected this assertion, and said the “contention shows the arrogance of defendants”.

• Amazon has now been permanently restrained from using ‘Happy Belly’ in India.

Go deeper

Amazon’s India chief Manish Tiwary gives us the inside view of the brand's festive season campaigns. He also talks about what categories are working for the e-tailer

“We have a very large base of Prime customers and this base has accelerated during the pandemic. So Prime customers are comfortable not only shopping online but they use our payment services, our other products like Kindle and music. These are what we would call Pinnacle customers and they shop across not only for events” he says.

Since the jazzy listings of a slew of tech unicorns in 2021, retail investors have had a few complaints. It does not help that most of these newly listed tech and startup stocks have nosedived this year.

One perennial question for these startups is – when will you be profitable?

But in a case of 'how the tables turn', Yashish Dahiya, CEO of PB Fintech which listed in November last year has some complaints with retail investors too.

In an interview with Moneycontrol for the series Life After Listing, Dahiya said that public investors don’t give credibility to future execution.

“In my opinion, we should have gone public four years later. That's my learning from this because I think markets change their view very quickly. And they will always assume they're rational,” he said.

Read the story

• The second-largest token, Ether, continued to fall on Monday, and there was also the possibility of a global wave of monetary tightening this week extending from the US to Europe.
  
  
• Prosecutors in South Korea highlighted the possibility that Do Kwon, the person responsible for the $60 billion cryptocurrency crash, is attempting to avoid accountability for the disaster that jolted global markets for digital assets. Kwon had relocated to Singapore from South Korea, but the city-state claims he is no longer there.
  
  
• UK’s financial watchdog Financial Conduct Authority has issued a warning to Bahama-based crypto exchange FTX, claiming it operates without authorization.

Sima Taparia in Netflix's Indian Matchmaking was like viewing a real-life version of a matrimony website. It's nothing short of a guilty pleasure to watch the show, yet behind her aunty glare are the techniques of a data scientist.

Perhaps you're wondering why?

She gathers information in an effort to lessen market knowledge asymmetry. Her next step is to optimise for a match using probabilities. Unexpectedly, this matches the worldview of statisticians and economists. She manages her data in a ledger with rows and columns, her own spreadsheet, and a database of bio-data much like a data analyst would.