Vaibhav Bhargava
@vb_speak
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Figuring it out. I tweet about startups, tech, people. Uber | Meesho | Grab
Bengaluru, India
Joined March 2016
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Funny thing about Bangalore is, neither are migrants powerful enough to convert it into a city with completely new identity (like Mumbai’s Jain Gujju businessmen) nor the locals aggressive enough like Chennai to force cultural compliance. So you have 2 cities with no city centre
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Saw a Bangalore policeman collect hafta on phonepe. We have reached peak digitisation in urban India 🙌
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Life update : Moved back to the Indian startup scene - joined
@Meesho_Official
@meeshotech
as Sr. Director Product, will be leading content commerce efforts.
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Okay now that Bangalore’s weather is like any other city and hooliganism is on the rise, can we all agree that the only reason for immigrants to stay is the city gives you hopes of getting rich with startup equity, and lower competition in dating life? Not bad reasons at all imo.
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@shivabhakt_
As someone who spent his childhood here (lived in old Bangalore )and now also works here (living in the IT corridor) just sharing my observation on how the city’s culture has shaped up — nothing more to be interpreted.
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If you are someone who uses a computer for work, earns over 1 lakh a month, and are still not subscribed to ChatGPT pro, Copilot or any premium intelligence - it’s honestly time to wake up and question your life decisions.
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@paraschopra
It’s like asking Budget Android users will they shift to iPhone and 40% say no “Android is better”. Yet behavioural science says most will shift moment they get a chance . We are an English speaking nation of coders, it’s quite easy to leave for top talent :)
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The biggest handicap founders with IIT backgrounds face is the lack of exposure to true middle class life. See so many high salaried guys (non business family) following YC advice, building to solve personal problems only to find their problems are far away from the masses.
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I recently moved back to Bangalore tech scene after 6 years away. Here are 5 big changes that I have noticed in the startup ecosystem 👎
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Good reminder by
@naval
on the Creator economy CH room - The society has always been run by creators. Scientists, Entrepreneurs, Entertainers. The society has always been the
#creatoreconomy
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I am entrepreneur with humble beginnings hailing from a small town (dad owns the biggest hospital of that town, but it is a small town 😛)
The best competitive advantage one can have is rich parents.
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India’s per capita GDP today is equal to America’s per capita GDP in 1870. Barring a few places like education, healthcare, loans, weddings, to build a large business would be foolish to ignore US and focus on just India. Tally with all its market dominance still does <$100M ARR
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@Anand_datta
I would expect that to be be the same for all non tech business like Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart. Tech is only a moat when it’s not accessible to all. Moats around brand, money, supply and IP are more durable as with Apple, McDonald’s or even Disney if it does gen-AI based content
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All time ODI XI by GPT-4o
1. Tendulkar
2. Gilchrist
3. Kohli
4. Ponting
5. de Villiers
6. Bevan
7. Kallis
8. Akram
9. Warne
10. Muralitharan
11. McGrath
Bench:
12. Rohit Sharma
13. Chris Gayle
14. MS Dhoni
15. Brett Lee
Honestly can’t think of an argument against this one!
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Overall , I’m quite positive about the future of the Indian startup scene. We are building for the world and not just India, and things will only get better.
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Looks like an honest attempt to hedge careers imo. A regular failed startup vs a failed startup where the founder got famous (30 under 30, conferences) are 2 very different career outcomes. The latter opens up options like EB1A, Influencer, VC and so on.
🇮🇳founders are spending an *unprecedented* amount of time on events and podcasts --- am not sure how they are measuring the outcome and if it is better than everything else they could dedicate that time too.
often the content is *about them and their company* instead of about
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A beautiful aspect of working in any form of retail is the highs you hit at special times of the year. It’s an emotional roller coaster, for the the employees and the consumers. Here’s a snap from the entrance to our floor in
@meeshotech
office today 🎉
#MeeshoBlockbusterSale
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Caught these guys first thing after flying in, turns out they have an AI roast copilot now -
@techroastshow
!
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@aviralbhat
This is true at every level of granularity. Almost all US billionaires had multi millionaire parents. In case of US though, it is possible to just go there, much like it’s possible to get to IIT from a small town. Owning assets or equity is the way to go if living in a poor place
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Been donning these for 5 years straight . But I’m also the guy who buys Vision Pro . So 50:50
If your co-founder wears these, your company can survive any recession.
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Spoke to 25 year old repeat founder this weekend. He mentioned “I have learnt to derive happiness from the input and not from the output, it’s an easier way to live life” . Folks these days have so much more clarity at a younger age!
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Google feels like a country which was a great peace time democracy but needs to become a war time dictatorship. I have met a few googlers who quit because “nothing moves”and then a few who spent so much time there that they can’t succeed anywhere else.
BREAKING: Google employees were arrested after occupying their boss's office for more than 8 hours to demand that the company sever ties with Israel.
WATCH:
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@vaibhavbetter
@zomato
We thought of this at Grab, realised it may not be a big enough delta. There are only finite number of food options that have acceptable ETA. Personalised AI will tend to give the exact same results as the ranking on home page or searchin 2 scrolls. Better feature for Amazon imo
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The current Indian team is going to repeat a 2007 World Cup performance at the Caribbean . So much infighting , players losing form at key juncture. So who is the next Dhoni here ?
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As bad as the H1B system is for Indians, it's probably the one thing that has given the Indian startup ecosystem a good fighting chance. I don't see how we would retain so many good people here in their 20s otherwise.
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Tech led vs tech enabled. Most startups in India operate in the O2O space and are what one would called tech-enabled. Meaning the business and its PMF depend more on operational decisions than technology decisions. However they all seem to have hired like they are tech firms 1/4
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Most content and edtech startups can be replaced by a single YouTube channel with premium access. Community, curation, feedback, interaction is the only way to justify any payment.
#edtech
#byju
#community
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Quick commerce has shown that Indians who have made enough money to live inside a gated community, will pay 40% extra on essentials to never step back into real India. This is such a revealing insight that seems obvious in hindsight. What are some others ?
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Before gyms and salad can find true PMF in India, we will need more divorces.
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3. People are solving real problems ⛏
We are well past the era of random Uber of X, and now the conversations revolve around a specific TG, size of problem and founder market fit (even gross margins)
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Happy Diwali everyone 🪔. May the year bring new growth in all forms. The last few have been rough on many.
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First we had the Steve jobs effect - startup CEOs being closed to opinion thinking they are visionaries. Now we have a Musk effect, CEOs being total jerks while laying off people to fix their mess. Just as the fake Jobs realised so will fake Musks- PMF eats attitude for breakfast
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Forget Bangalore. Even APR has enough network effects to keep people glued despite the traffic.
@narayananh
Since we're taking bets, mine is on Bangalore to continue as the city of choice for young people to move to. Infra notwithstanding, the network effects are too strong. No other city has put in the coordinated effort required to move the best jobs and people to themselves.
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I’m a tiny investor at Figure through a syndicate. So rooting for humanoid robots to free us of work and take us to the stars.
2024 is going to be big for robotics
the Figure team is now 4x bigger than when we designed the robot in this video, the rate of engineering acceleration is hard to put in words
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How else do I trap you into not outright refusing my totally unreasonable request because Indian culture teaches us to not be straightforward? You need to listen to my ask, say “I will get back” instead of “wtf” and then after 30 days I will accept the rejection :/
I didn't think it needed to be said in 2024, but unless you're family or a close friend, don't ask for people's time on the phone without specifying what you want to talk about.
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5. It's okay to tell your in laws you work at a startup 🙌
A string of successful exits and Forbes 30 under 30 nominations have made it easier for your relatives and in laws to ignore your lack of green card or fancy office. They can finally flex.
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Rise of quick commerce and the increasingly bullish sentiment around it makes it clear that the smartest minds know that sharp income inequality isn't going away for the next 20 years in India. Please do not try to build saas for SMBs here thinking this will change- go abroad.
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Don’t sell productivity to people whose employees cost less than GPT-4 tokens ✅
Why I am still pessimistic about building business software for India market?
1. We are a very small market for B2B software, just $18B.
2. Probably $16B out of $18B is taken by MS, AWS, Google, IBM, Cisco, SAP, Dell, Oracle and few more.
3. We need $30K to $40K per capita
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4. People have gotten.. ahem.. rich 💰
You can make close to a million dollars before 30 by working in Bangalore. Engineers demand salary in dollars, and even interns understand ESOPs.
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@szymonkopec
@deepigoyal
@rrakesh_15
We had a similar problem at Grab where Muslim drivers in Malaysia and Singapore would not deliver food from non halal certified restaurants, and Muslim customers wanted a halal certification label on the restaurant listing. Had to design whole discovery and logistics around it
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Every success story needs a cheat code. Be it an Anu Malik with access to resources and western music in the 90s or an ex googler scaling an internal product that they built for the world. Unfair advantage is the rule of the game, some are easier to build though.
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The Schengen visa application is the most humiliating process smart people from low per capita GDP countries go through. Yes, please ask me to book every flight and hotel in advance and print out 500 papers so that I can use my money to help prop up your decaying economies 🤷♂️
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Made my dad a whisky sour yesterday. He took a sip, I asked how it was. He said it’s good but also that he doesn’t have a baseline because it’s his 1st cocktail ever - out of budget when he was young. Feels good to give your parents some things they never had, no matter how small
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Most cringe pitch 101 on Shark Tank: “Sir Mai Marwadi hu!” . Bro show us your numbers and plans, mai marwari hu is not relevant.
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Here’s a bias I have : Tech Founders who incubate their teams/ offices in lifestyle places like Shimla, Goa, Bahamas, Bali are in it for fun and tend to have zero downside (already wealthy) if the idea doesn’t work. Any counter examples ?
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Last week has got to be one of the most unproductive weeks in India ever. You could sense the grief and disappointment in every meeting room. Would love to put a dollar figure on it.
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1. Friends who were struggling entrepreneurs are now unicorn founders (or soon to be) 🦄
I vividly recount conversations with folks who started their journeys in 2014-15 and had to shut shop or pivot multiple times. Today a good number of them are celebrated founders.
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If only companies encouraged truth seeking and saying it like it is by their own employees, consultants would be out of job. Need that MBB stamp to tell your boss what everyone has known for 3 years 🤷♂️
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What I always tell people. If you start from middle class, aim to be Elon Musk's father. Or his father - that's the best way to have rich future generations. There's no away someone can go from zero to multi-billionaire in 1 lifespan. Mentorship and network compound over decades.
The Khosrowshahis are one of the most high-achieving families of all time.
Despite losing a $500M+ biz in the Iranian revolution in 1977, they moved all over the world and—
Went to elite universities
Became elite entrepreneurs, execs or investors
Have $10M to $1B+ net worth
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If you are a former naturally workaholic person who suddenly feels a need for work life balance, change your work. And find something that can make you a obsessed again.
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6. People seem more ready to ride the downturn. Yes, the private valuations are high and might come down - but there is enough resilience and experience now to do the right things.
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Bangalore traffic is like Mumbai rains. You know it sucks, you know you are angry. But you are also so sure of things never changing that you distract yourself by memeing about it 🤷♂️
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Man just made a 100M dollar company all on his own.
✨ New [ 👗 Try On 2.0 ] on
Finally it works REALLY WELL:
- pick any clothing, from a screenshot or laid out photo, upload it
- click take photo, you can prompt the location of model, light (sunset), time, anything like normal etc.
- AI model will wear
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I understand the hate towards
#HardikPandya
at
#IPL2024
. But "chapri" is a casteist slur, so is bhangi, chamar, kanjar, bhand. The fact that people don't know this or use it in daily life tells you how axiomatically ingrained casteism and classism is in India. PS:
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Starting your career as a junior PM at a startup is probably a bad idea. You learn nothing about good PMing, you don’t own P&L and you don’t actually develop any hard skills which makes you quite disposable. Be a developer, data scientist or if you can’t do tech just do ops
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Erm. So the senior engineer at Oracle got Kohli out first ball. Can we all just agree that some humans are at a different level, and that Yashasvi Jaiswal should be opening the batting ?
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So I owned this cool domain from a past startup attempt. Sold it to a buyer on Godaddy for a price I thought was a good deal (4x of my cost, was afraid to ask more ). Turns out the buyer is
@GordonRamsay
for his new food media brand . Nice, but also FML!
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16 years later, it’s time to move on… Ee saala bahut nikamma team hai 😅
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What I absolutely love about Apple’s
#VisionPro
is that most people are dismissive of it. That is exactly the setup startups need to build the winners of the next decade. It’s stupid until it isn’t
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Never raise a seed fund for your time bound microsaas. Just make some cash and move on.
Youtube is slowly adding video summaries to popular videos!
Was a killer use case for lot of GPT-powered Chrome extensions. I suspect they'll add Q&A too in few quarters.
Pichai going "Your product is my feature"
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Yes Bangalore traffic sucks, but the energy at every table of a Third wave coffee makes you forget about it momentarily. So many dreams.
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Was talking to a founder yesterday who bootstrapped his business to 150k arr. When asked if he wants to take external funds the answer - if it’s clear this can become a 100M ARR business with VC funds then yes, else I can get to 5-10M myself. Dhandha> glamour.
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Not YC. But definitely some profitable companies that don’t need seed
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Targeting the rich people of Tier 2 cities is a good opportunity area.
This also makes large physical retail harder. India is so fragmented, almost a pseudo feudal economy that there’s no one large area that’s full of affluence. For every luxury apartment there’s a slum nearby.
Blume’s Indus Valley report 2024 estimates that India’s true consumption class (or the age-old question of what’s the true TAM) to be ~30M households or ~120M people. But there are a lot of misconceptions of who these people are. 1/n
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After a decade of building B2C apps. I can say that an app redesign for the sake of consistency is one of the most useless ways a PM org can spend their time. It happens when there are not enough real problems to solve and often leads to a new redesign when the incumbent leaves.
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@sajithpai
Gurgaon founders tend to come from families in NCR. Or from consulting firms that had offices there.
Also competition in Delhi dating pool is from generationally rich Punjabi boys, competition in Bangalore is with middle class IIT grads who have only recently seen some money.
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An approach to UX I developed after building for customers in markets that had per capita GDP of USD 60k as well as those that had 2k -- a one size fits all approach that aims to offer consistent UX to all, often does more harm than good. (1/4)
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Okay here’s the thing.
@BlueTokaiCoffee
in Bangalore is turning out to be far superior to Third wave. Cheaper coffee (and better?) , more healthy food options and atleast for now, less crowded
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I feel quite bad receiving so many DMs every week about junior PMs looking for roles in India. There are not enough openings buddy for non hard skill roles. Those with 10+ experience are expected to be hands on now and can't hire for atleast a year. Wish I had a better answer :(
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This is also the best way to know if you are a Me-too app or an actually different app
If you can't explain your app in fewer than 5 words, do you think your users will ever bother telling anyone about the app?
Before you have product-market fit, product development is not about "adding features"—but distilling a product to a simple marketable sentence. Adding
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@nofiltermayank
People who want to make startup money deliberately stay in Bangalore, pay rent and bear traffic because it's worth it - even if their office allows work from home or they have a bigger house or comfortable life elsewhere.
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Was a good one. Thanks for having me
@monagandhi
!
Join us for a Fireside Chat with
@vb_speak
where he will talk about building a career as a Product Manager at startups with a special focus on 0-to-1 Product Building!
Register here:
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Life goal : get rich, and open a club where hardworking and smart middle class kids unlearn everything their parents teach them. Bad advice sets you back by at least 10 years!
It bothers me that schools—as well as parents—rarely tell kids about careers with uncapped upside, like tech or real estate. And instead, kids end up entering college thinking the best outcome is that they become a lawyer, a consultant or—even worse—thinking it would be cool to
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I like lazy intelligent people. They build wheels and light fires (Sehwag). Driven humble people are reliable but often just keep running fast and chew harder (Pujara). The combination leads to legends (Tendulkar)
Given a choice, who would u rather have in ur team, 1) Super intelligent but lazy or 2) Not so intelligent but highly self driven/ desire to prove? While I have used the word 'intelligent', I am using it in broader context of sharp/ smart/ high intellect/ knowledgeable etc.
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Heard of a top 10 market company that banned Chatgpt for employees on office wifi. Might as well ban excel and word too.
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Oh how much I want the suing culture to start in India. 1) Lawyers will get better job than to issue affidavits . 2) Companies will learn to behave.
All discussion about class aside, does (or should) a company have any right to make a private person (a minor no less), a matter of public discussion and use their name for an ad?
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17 people in flight to SF have taken a wheel chair on arrival. All are Indian, aged above 50 with no real disability . We really need to work on the fitness level of Indians post age 40.
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Participant : Papa gave me 3 cr to start a business
Sharks : Yaar aap solid founder ho yaar
The India to US college pipeline often ends up with:
1) running a "startup" within papa's empire
2) running an organic skincare / women's health brand on Instagram
Fantastic way to be a founder with no downside risk.
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2. Those who were clueless are now mentors ☕️
2015 was about people raising money off an idea, and also the year where not many, knew what they were doing. This time it's different, you have friends who have failed and iterated enough to be able to guide you in early days.
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Conservatively speaking, the world still has 25 years of Zuck, 15 years of Elon and 8 years of Jasprit Bumrah left. Lots to look forward to.
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“Make an image of a puppy eyed golden retriever having the best time of his life with a ball”. For absolutely zero likes I will make him have an even better time
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An important investing lesson I learnt in last 30 days: Put your money in things people will desperately want to buy few years from now. Be it real estate, companies, fashion. Luxury appreciates fast, utility's only good for dividends. Both have their place.
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Great catching up with everyone!
What a day, yesterday with a few amazing folks joining us for the product edition of The Secret Soirée!
Some amazing connections uncovered deep insights into consumer products, B2B, Fintech and disruptive technologies.
Loved the connections and camaraderie - seems like we’re
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Have a startup idea , here’s a pro tip. Go to
@ycombinator
site and try to fill the form, don’t apply just fill the form. You will know about half way through if you are on to something or not. Thank you
@paulg
and now
@mwseibel
for this 🙏
#startups
#creatoreconomy
#startup
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Hard pill but likely true: You don't learn much by working at a failed startup. Success teaches a lot, it gives you frameworks and templates to replicate. Failure just teaches 1 of the 100 ways one could fail. So be grateful if you were employee at a startup that got big :)
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Most hard working Indians aspire to leave India. Some do it by buying a house in a premium gated society and turning a blind eye to the masses, some do it through immigration. The area in between is not so good for mental health :D
"Punjabis for whatever reason, want to get the hell out of the country."
This was an interesting passage from the
@IdeasofIndia
podcast featuring Tom Easton and
@arjun_ramani3
- the last two (the prev one was with Rohit Lamba) that give you a good overview of the current and
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It's funny how in product design most websites that American users call beautiful, Asian users call boring. White space, thin text lack of motion simply does not reflect the natural Asian environment.
#productdesign
#productmanagement
#ux
#uxdesign
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Same reason I got here. Singapore is great, but it’s like a really well maintained zoo. The animals are safe, they are well fed, but no one is trying to be the new king of pride rock. Ambitious people should choose forest - be it Rich forest (USA) or poor forest(India).
Partly we are shifting to Bangalore to get my daughter used to uncertainties of life. Singapore is just way too perfect, and we thought it’s making her soft. Unfortunately we also had forgotten what the Indian chaos feels like.. turns out we have also become soft 😂
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Quite an immature product decision by Urban Company here. A company could get into legal problems with this in markets like EU that protect common citizens. Emotionally toying with customers to move short term metrics - how did this get approved ?
My dad (late 60s, not tech savvy) got confused by one of the worst dark patterns I've ever seen inside the Urban Company app, and ended up paying for UC plus even though he didn't mean to. They automatically add a 6 month membership to your cart and make it confusing to remove
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I think a very clear indicator that a country is gonna make it (barring the sudden discovery of a rare natural resource ) is how many women you see in the public - managing cafes, working in factories, heading to office. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh all excel at this.
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I would like KKR to win this final just to get a reassurance that god doesn’t take everything he has and gives it to pretty boys like Pat Cummins. Like there is some reward out there for us Narine looking ones.
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