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In today’s newsletter:

• The dark side of Kota's coaching factory
• Dunzo salary woes continue
• Namita Thapar reigns as Shark Tank's deal queen

P.S. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is humming a song these days. Any guesses which one? Scroll below for more deets!

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It’s one thing to watch the “Kota Factory”, it's another to live in it. 

The dusty old town in Rajasthan sees lakhs of students flocking in every year to chase their dreams of cracking the golden JEE and NEET exams. 

• Unfortunately, the coaching hub is also where many of these aspirations are snuffed out

As many as 17 lives have been lost to date this year, compared to a similar count in all of 2022.

• This comes a year after a high-pitched battle broke out between legacy coaching academies and a scrum of heavily funded edtech startups

More than a million students compete for about 17,400 available seats across all 23 IITs in India. In 2022, over 1,50,000 of these students went to Kota, which is a two-fold increase from 2019 levels.

While institutes in the city have been doubling down on student counselling, psychologist Alha Matra told us that this is an incomplete approach to the issue.

"The mental health conversation should focus on prevention, not just intervention," Matra said. 

Go deeper

Contrary to its tagline, “helping you get things dun”, Dunzo seems to be doing little for its employees, who have to now wait longer for their pending salaries. 

The quick commerce player has announced a significant delay in salary payments to its employees due to its ongoing cash flow challenges. 

The remaining portion of salaries that were capped starting June, and which were due on July 20, will now be deferred until September 4.

• This deferral affects around 500 employees, representing half of Dunzo’s workforce

Dunzo has now implemented a salary cap of Rs 75,000 per month for all employees, regardless of their previous pay packages. 

• Focus is on “streamlining our cash flow so we can build a more sustainable business for the future,” the Payroll team’s email said, which we accessed

Several employees at the Bengaluru-based startup are bracing for more layoffs as the company looks to trim costs and raise more money.

Go deeper

Shark Tank India has been one of the popular TV shows, but it has recently come under fire for a reason: some sharks have promised money to founders but never invested.

• The sharks say that deals take time to close and that people are jumping to conclusions. However, after about 18 months, there is a clear winner. 

“Isme meri expertise nahi hai, issliye I am out.” (This is not my expertise, so I'm out)

Yes, you’ve guessed it right: that is what Namita Thapar, ED at Emcure Pharmaceuticals, typically said for most deals. However, PrivateCircle’s data showed that she honoured the most deals during the first edition of the show (only equity deals considered).  

• She funded 13 out of the 22 startups she committed to, resulting in a conversion rate of 59%, the highest among the seven sharks.

• She also invested the most amount, Rs 7 crore

Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com was at the bottom of the table because data showed that he honoured just 7 of the 24 deals he had committed to.

• His conversion rate was 29%, and he had invested a total of Rs 2 crore 

What about the other sharks? PrivateCircle had initially placed Ashneer Grover at the bottom of the list as well, but Grover later took to Twitter to clarify that he was the second-best-performing shark with 11 deals. 

Find out more

Poor last-mile connectivity to metro rail networks in India has resulted in lower-than-anticipated ridership, leading to the underutilisation of over $25 billion in investments. This revelation is from a survey conducted by WRI India and the Toyota Mobility Foundation across three cities: Nagpur, Delhi and Bengaluru. 

• Women, in particular, are often reluctant to endure long waits and resort to costlier alternatives to avoid the inconvenience

• This means that women generally do not prefer to wait for long, so they take the soonest available transportation option, which could be a regular auto or a cab. Unlike men, bike taxis are not a preferred mode of transportation for many women commuters

Go deeper

• Meta is open-sourcing Llama 2, the next generation of its AI model, giving startups and other businesses a free-of-charge alternative.
   
• More than 8,500 authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry are asking generative AI companies to get consent, credit, and fairly compensate writers for the use of copyrighted materials in training AI systems.

Mere do anmol ratan, Ek hai Mark (Zuckerberg) toh ek Sam (Altman)

This is probably what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is humming to himself right now, as he expects partnerships with two major AI leaders to help the company in the ongoing cloud computing wars and the AI arms race.

• No wonder Wall Street was happy yesterday, as Microsoft's shares jumped 4% to close at a record $359.49

Nadella also celebrated this by joining Meta's Twitter rival Threads. 

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