the school of future
the school of future
four days on the most Indian of all business questions: what do you build when the thing missing isn't a product, but the institution underneath it?
Ayan Biswasmentor · institutional & market voids
why does every indian junction have a gold-loan shop? it's not about the gold.
a segment the market serves, thinly. the market works; it's just small.
premium ayurvedic skincarea product missing inside a market that otherwise works fine.
no good affordable office chair, in a furniture market that worksthe institution itself is missing, so the market can't even form. no trust rail, no information rail, no credit rail.
no credit history → no small-ticket lending, however good your productin india, the gap is the market.
the market for cheap data didn't exist because the infrastructure for it didn't exist. so the infrastructure was built first, at full scale, before a single rupee of revenue.
rule for the whole module: wherever you find an elaborate workaround, someone has already proven the void for you.
pick a market you actually know: your town's used bikes, hostel food, tuition teachers, wedding photographers. find the information asymmetry inside it: who knows what the other side doesn't, and what the not-knowing costs. bring one real example where you, or someone you know, got burned by it.
not a void from a case study. one from your own town, family trade, or first job. proof means evidence: a named person who lives inside it, and the workaround they use today.
nine days, because proving takes conversations you can't rush. start this week.
akerlof's used-car market. now swap in: used bikes, rental flats, matrimonial profiles, small-business loans. same collapse, everywhere one side knows and the other can't.
before anyone in india could sell to a stranger online, someone had to answer: why would I pay money to a website for a box I haven't seen, from a company I can't visit, with no shopkeeper to shout at if it never comes?
no answer to that question, no e-commerce. whatever answered it would be infrastructure, not feature.
a country of cash. barely 20 million credit cards for a billion people. online payment fails half the time it's tried, and the customer has been cheated by enough strangers to assume the worst by default.
what institution is missing here?
COD let the customer keep the power: see the box, then pay. flipkart absorbed the risk, the return logistics and the cash handling, because that cost WAS the price of manufacturing trust at national scale.
a farmer arrives with his crop. the arhatiya runs the auction, pays him cash on the spot, and buys even in a glut year. months ago, the same arhatiya advanced him money for seeds. and he's the one who told him what prices were doing three mandis away.
a middleman, yes. but what is he, really?
this is why "just remove the middleman" keeps failing: you're not removing a person, you're removing three institutions at once. whoever replaces him must replace all three.
when the institutions around you are weak, every deal with an outsider is expensive: verifying them, contracting them, enforcing against them. the classic indian answer was to internalise: your own capital pool, your own talent pipeline, your own trusted name stamped on salt and software alike.
the conglomerate is a machine for doing internally what the missing institutions won't do externally. as the institutions arrive, watch what conglomerates stop needing to own.
rural india buys tractors, pumps, seeds and phones on credit that banks won't underwrite: no income proof, no credit file, no branch nearby. teams: name this void precisely, using today's vocabulary, and defend your naming. then sketch who could fill it, and what they'd have to become to do it.
every case today is one of these three, chosen well or badly.
for most indians, proving who you are was itself the void: no document a bank would accept, no address a system could verify. identity had to be built as public infrastructure before anyone could build on it.
broking ran on opacity: percentage commissions, hidden charges, advice that paid the advisor. the information problem wasn't unsolvable, it was profitable. zerodha's response was to publish the price: flat ₹20, zero on delivery, no relationship manager whispering.
by the time incumbents matched it, transparent pricing had become what broking IS. filling an information void resets the category's definition, not just its prices.
lockdown made screen-based tutoring look like india's new education institution, and capital priced it as permanent. schools reopened. the demand walked back to the classroom. the underlying void, unequal access to quality teaching, was real. the signal, that paid app-based tutoring at scale would fill it, was noise.
the test the category skipped: does the workaround survive when the emergency ends? a void is proven by behaviour under normal conditions, not under lockdown.
every trust institution you've met this week, COD, the arhatiya, eKYC, is some weighting of these three. skin in the game is highlighted because it's the one founders most often skip.
tomorrow you defend each other's voids.
each team presents the void they've been working. challenges from the room are welcome, and bound by one rule: a critique must name the void type it's disputing. not "I don't think this works", but "you've called this a trust void; I think it's information asymmetry, and here's why the fix changes if I'm right."
the rule is the lesson: naming the void precisely is most of the work.
friday, anant: the intelligence layer. what changes who can fill a void, and how fast.