Smartphone, IoT & Mobility Landscape with Chirayu Wadke

Chirayu Wadke, partner from Seedplus joined us in a two part conversation to discuss the most important trends in smartphone, internet of things (IoT) and mobility landscape and why the recent Broadcom acquisition of Qualcomm failed. In the first part, we discussed his current role and coverage as a venture capitalist with Seedplus and his central investment thesis and branched into a deeper conversation on smartphone, IoT and mobility (autonomous vehicles) landscape and how it shifts the calculus of putting investments into those emerging technologies.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Chirayu Wadke, Partner, SeedPlus (@chirayuwadke , LinkedIn) [0:38]
  • How did you start your career? [1:15]
  • Throughout your career journey, what are the interesting lessons you can share with my audience? [5:22]
  • Can you talk about what your day is like as a venture capitalist? [6:25]
  • What’s your current role and coverage with SeedPlus? [7:20]
  • Any interesting companies which you have invested with your portfolio? [8:06]
    • Coveiot
    • Qopper
• Smartphone, IoT & Mobility Landscape [11:06]
  • Given that we live in a duopoly world now with iOS and Android, where do you see the mobility landscape evolving? [11:29]
  • We have seen interesting business models such as Reliance Jio in India and Xiaomi over the past these two years, what are the factors that will drive the growth of the emerging markets with mobile? [15:46]
  • How Reliance Jio taught all the other telcos the correct pricing for an individual user by giving unlimited free for the Indian users during their trials last year. [17:26]
  • Given that we see wearables and IoT hovering around the mobile smartphone, do you see them as an augmentation to the smartphone or can they be a foreshadow to something coming up such as VR and AR (for example, we have Google Glass, Apple Airpods)? Will the smartphone still be the centre of the universe for wearables?  [18:19]
  • We are seeing Google and Apple are building their own semiconductor chips now focusing on the AI processing. Do you see the semiconductors industry will move in different direction due to this new demand from the tech giants? [19:53]
  • What are the trendlines for autonomous vehicles given the massive IoT deployments and applies to both drones and self-driving cars? [23:53]
  • Should startups enter the autonomous vehicles starting from a service model or a different business model first? [26:48]

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The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bernardleong & weibo) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.