The Contrarian
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor
Founding Fuel
NS Ramnath is a member of the founding team & Lead - Newsroom Innovation at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book, The Aadhaar Effect. His main interests lie in technology, business, society, and how they interact and influence each other. He writes a regular column on disruptive technologies, and takes regular stock of key news and perspectives from across the world.
Ram, as everybody calls him, experiments with newer story-telling formats, tailored for the smartphone and social media as well, the outcomes of which he shares with everybody on the team. It then becomes part of a knowledge repository at Founding Fuel and is continuously used to implement and experiment with content formats across all platforms.
He is also involved with data analysis and visualisation at a startup, How India Lives.
Prior to Founding Fuel, Ramnath was with Forbes India and Economic Times as a business journalist. He has also written for The Hindu, Quartz and Scroll. He has degrees in economics and financial management from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.
He tweets at @rmnth and spends his spare time reading on philosophy.
My contributions
160 articles written
FF Life: Understanding Sri Lanka
May 21, 2022: Four books and two films that help us decode what is causing a crisis this harsh in the island nation
FF Life: How to make beautiful presentations
Five apps and ideas to create decks that are both beautiful and functional
Facebook’s new avatar in 10 images
Renaming Facebook as Meta indicates a big bet on the metaverse, as well as an “escape hatch” from the issues and scrutiny Facebook has been facing. The entire industry is at the beginning of a big wave and Mark Zuckerberg has been building capacity for some years now. However, the key to Meta’s success will depend on whether and how fast customers adopt it to work, learn, play, build and live.
The Art of Inversion
The Account Aggregator framework is aimed at giving control of data back to users; but the road will be rough and full of resistance
How to take videos that don’t shake
October 16, 2021 | FF Daily #500: FF Recommends handheld gimbals
Behind Infosys’ struggles to deliver the income tax project
Why did the IT major mess up the high-profile government project? No one quite knows the answer. The clues, however, lie in the inherent difficulties in executing tech projects for the government
How to make governments smart
A podcast with Jaideep Prabhu, professor at Cambridge Judge Business School and author of ‘How Should A Government Be? The New Levers of State Power’
Tim Harford on sensemaking and storytelling
How to make meaning from data and the deluge of information
The ant and the elephant
Designing for 100 million users is different from designing for 100 users and scaling it up for 100 million, says Shankar Maruwada, co-founder of EkStep Foundation