First off - apologies - this may be a distraction to the entire thread - feel free to flag and I will delete. Note that everything here is subjective opinion.
My very subjective view of a new-age company :
- a company, using technology, usually combined with a business model which drives convergence of market forces to non-physical market-places, network effects, movement from unorganized to organized sector, while driving or creating a difference in consumer behavior or consumption modes. Essentially what a good new age firm, which does all of the above, essentially does, is to cause a change in how the business domain operates. What an outstanding one does, is basically the same, but profitably, with profits scaling non linearly, preferably for a very long time.
Somewhat very complicated, also subjective. Also, there is possibly, in fact, most definitely, cause and effect relationships between some of the component parts I listed in there.
Edit - Also note that some of the component bits may be missing. For example, does tesla have an online market place?
Key elements, to me, being tech, market-place, network effects. Sahil has a wonderful thread on platform companies. A large number of those firms will fit this bill.
LalPath, Metro were among the first ones to do the above. Google did this around 20 yrs ago. That does not make them old age. Same goes for Naukri. If you think hard enough, you could argue about making a case for IEX and CDSL by the same lens. Also, new-age doesn’t mean someone newer-age cannot kill you. DigiSpice vs UPI illustrates the case in point. The DigiSpice theme seemed to be financialization of rural populacem which was quite cool, except that it ran into UPI and UPI pretty much disrupted the disruptor. Also, it did a burj khalifa sometime last year, but that is not the company’s fault.
Note that this is all pretty subjective, but it helps in deciding what questions to ask to determine whether a firm is new age or not. And when you follow it up with the primary question of investing, is this likely to keep making profits for a long time, or exponential profits after a certain time, you get - what can be argued as - your own personalized, individual list of new-age companies which you watch. So I watch Nykaa, Zomato, Thyrocare, Naukri and India-mart. Incidentally, also invested in CDSL and IEX.
This is just the way I think about this stuff. Not sure if it adds much value. But thanks for the question.
