About 12 years back, I first came to Bangalore to join my first job in IT industry. Known as city of lakes and the silicon valley of India, Bangalore was the place to be in.

However, the initial euphoria soon evaporated when I was told by the real estate agent that renting a house required me to deposit an advance. What added insult to the injury was the size of security deposit amount. It was supposed to be 10 months of rent.

Holy cow! That was several times more than my monthly salary at that time.

But it turned out that the practice was pretty common in Bangalore, and still is, which I suppose is not the case in other metros.

It infuriated me that the house owner would conveniently put that advance money in his bank and pocket the interest income too. So in effect he wasn’t just making money from rent, but from free deposit also.

Now here is an interesting question to puzzle over. The security deposit which in effect was a borrowing for the house owner – can we call that money as debt for him?

Yes and No. ‘Yes’ because it’s not his money and he would have to return that money sometime in future and ‘No’ because he doesn’t have to pay any interest on this borrowing.

So it’s a debt but quite different from a traditional debt. Let’s see how.

When I moved out from his house, the money which he returned to me was replenished by the new tenant. So it was a revolving fund. Effectively he would never have to return that money to his tenant, provided he doesn’t run out of tenants, which is unlikely because his house was in busy locality in Bangalore.

The deposit was an income generating asset which costed the landlord nothing. He could very well be using that money for making other investments too, like buying stocks or making down payment for another house.

So this is a very interesting type of debt. It’s called Float.

[Read more…] about Latticework of Mental Models: Float

I clearly remember the day, it was in July 1999, when I was first introduced to the internet. I was so excited to get a brand new email address. I could now send and receive emails.

However, the excitement didn’t last very long. I quickly realized that the email address wasn’t of much use to me because none of my family or friends had any email addresses at that time. Who would I mail?

But slowly as more and more people started using internet, my email address became increasingly valuable.

Similarly, I remember the time when the social networking bug bit me and I signed up for Orkut. But within few years when all my friends had moved to Facebook, I was forced to abandon Orkut and climb on the Facebook bandwagon.

So you’d notice that the utility of certain products and services is directly proportional to its number of users. Another recent example that comes to mind is the social messaging app Whatsapp. There are quite a few other messaging services which offer better features than Whatsapp but majority of people continue to use Whatsapp because all their friends are on Whatsapp.

This is called Network Effect. Now the idea may sound very simple, but it’s actually fairly unusual.

When you board an airplane, do you get excited when you see that the flight is completely full? Or when you visit your favourite restaurant, do you prefer it to be crowded? In these cases, as a consumer you don’t get any benefit if the product or service is also being used by others.

But when it comes to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, members join these networks because other members are in this network.

[Read more…] about Latticework of Mental Models: Network Effect