DeepTech/DevTools/Cloud Advisor @peakxvpartners. Previously VP/GM @Nutanix Calm. Co-founder/CEO/CTO @calm_io, acquired by Nutanix. Eclectic Tastes and musings.
Joined January 2007
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aaditya retweeted
We’re thrilled to welcome Crane Venture Partners to DeepVerse, our Centre for DeepTech innovation and Anandamoy Roychowdhary, Managing Director, to the Advisory Board.
Crane backs people building the foundational technologies and startups that will shape the future, and helps them build globally. Crane believes that the biggest breakthroughs increasingly happen where disciplines, technologies and markets meet, and it looks for founders who connect ideas others keep separate, across AI, infrastructure, data, security, deep science and the emerging edges of enterprise technology.
@crane_vc | @smdcmc | @krishnav | @scott_sage |
@Sid_1_0
@ShwetaRKohli | @AvantikaGode | @Shubhangip611 | @akankshaghosh13 | Oishika Ghosh | @bforbaruah
aaditya retweeted
Deedy you are right about some aspects of the past, but its more nuanced then this, and likely different going forward. am sticking to the perspective of founders (vs employees & vcs).
If you were building for India consumer, the last 5 years have shown that you absolutely could have built significant cos and personal wealth by being in india (>$5b cos - flipkart, zomato, lenskart, meesho, groww, paytm, phonepe, swiggy, policybazaar, nykaa… ) and execs at these places also saw a lot of value being created. I was in a room of startup founders by @ETAwards on friday night and there were a lot of billionaires there! and 50+ other venture backed cos in the $500m-5b range, where also the outcomes have been significant for founders and execs.
if you were building for global software buyers, you need to be closer to the customers and the US is that. market insights matter more then cost of engineering. many global software cos have large india teams (zscaler! wealthiest indian american in the US) but the bulk of the value to founders and execs are in the market they serve. it still makes sense for most global founders to be in the US if thats what you are creating, and we have good examples like freshworks, postman and composio where cos started in india and migrated over various points in the past decade.
other areas like manufacturing/“deeptech”/atoms based businesses, India has significant advantages and we are just starting to see the outcomes. ather energy ($6b), skyroot ($3b), zetwerk (going public soon) are showing the way, and these cos have far lower costs to develop and manufacture vs other places.
finally, there is something to be said for patriotism or impact on soceity. zomato helps employ 1% of india (or something like that) and thats a stepping stone to a brighter future for many. skyroot inspired some young kid somewhere that said i’m gonna do that too. building a enterprise sw product in palo alto is awesome, but for some gives less intrinsic motivation.
building in india has many challenges (most self inclicted), but a good choice for many smart people vs a couple of decades ago! we do now have healthy capital markets, a better policy environment, and very smart young people (now enabled by AI!). we absolutely need more risk capital and some of us are working to do that!
The smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US for the simple reason that the economic incentives are far far better.
Perplexity ($20B), Skild ($14B+), Baseten ($13B), Together ($8B), Glean ($8B), Modal ($5B), Rubrik ($25B), Harness ($5B), Blacksmith, Parallel, Greptile, CodeRabbit, Composio, Distyl ($2B), Resolve, Luma, Cartesia, Wispr, dMatrix, Arize and many more - all started by at least one Indian-born founder.
The US is a far easier to raise capital in with far less dilution. Most Indian companies are switching where they're domiciled to get access to the US capital markets. Every single Indian venture firm is trying very hard to invest in the US or risk not participating in the AI race (ironically, the management fees of venture firms are so high in India relatively that this is the one group that net of carry actually has incentive to be in India because they take home well north of a living wage whether or not funds perform do)
While Zomato ($35B now, $8B at IPO) might be the biggest outcome in Indian venture, Cursor ($60B), Reflection (potentially $20B+), World Labs ($8B), OpenRouter ($8B), HuggingFace ($12B) and of course the $1T+ big labs quickly make those outcomes seem small and happen on a much smaller time scale, with much higher IRR.
Engineers at these startups regularly get paid $1M/yr, and make $10M+ on exit. Even in BigTech, it is trivial to pull up levels fyi and see that if you're L6/L7+ with ~10 years of experience, you're making $1M/yr there too. And of course, we all know the slew of Indian CEOs of companies here, not to mention a huge bench of lesser known executives across the board in public and private companies.
I say all this because every time there is a slight immigration hiccup in the US, I hear the online pleas to "build in India", I struggle to understand why most engineers, academics or founders would do that net of desire to be close to family, failure to obtain visa and devout patriotism.
This is not a superiority thing or a US v India thing. The economic incentives at least for technologists to being in the US outweigh India by at least an order of magnitude.
The Law is a Fractal
Hmmm, Cousin of Godel's incompleteness therom?
lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/view…
aaditya retweeted
Say hello to 18 incredible companies building at the frontier: from AI safety and post training open-weight models to RF satellites, robots that inspect pipes and autonomous clinical intelligence. We are incredibly exicted about these founders who are re-imagining how we create, shop, date, invest and access helathcare and education @_surgeahead @sjs_day1
We’re thrilled to announce the 18 companies joining our 12th cohort of Surge!
From swipes to satellites, Surge 12 brings together an insanely ambitious group spanning AI, deeptech, consumer and fintech, with ideas stretching from healthcare and music to robotics and space.
What connects them is a willingness to question the default. These founders are rethinking how people create, shop, date, hire, invest, educate and access care; building using AI at the core of products; and pushing technology further into the physical world.
We can’t wait for you to meet them!
Meet the 18 companies of Surge 12 👇
surge.peakxv.com/cohorts/sur…
@RajanAnandan @sjs_day1
“The clouds shifted, moving too slowly to see the changes but changing all the same. She could relate to that. She wasn’t remotely who she’d been before, and while she had noticed the more dramatic, violent transformations when they’d happened, there were others—deeper ones, she thought—that had come over her too slowly to notice.”
"By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empathic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as beings like ourselves."
– Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
aaditya retweeted
Most important. Especially in today’s performative times. Keeping the main thing the main thing is the most important thing.
"And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."
– George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
what a beautiful gift it is to hit rock bottom. to be striped of any and all pride, ego, and false responsibility. to be left with nothing but possibility. a chance to climb upwards and make anew what once seemed impossible. every man, at one point in his life, could benefit from the raw, pure, and radically humbling experience of being left with nothing to realize that everything is possible.
Meanwhile me researching how clothesline drying preserves premium cottons so much better...
Welcome To Hiranandani: the contrast between the grand architecture and the everyday reality.
People spend crores buying luxury apartments.
They study floor plans for months, debate sea views versus city views, admire Italian marble, German kitchens, designer façades, and brochures that promise "elevated living."
Then comes laundry day. The million-rupee balcony transforms into a full-fledged Dhobi Ghat. Bedsheets flap like national flags, towels perform aerial acrobatics, pajamas sway proudly, and an occasional pair of socks hangs with complete disregard for architecture.
The building was designed in a grand style. The residents redesigned it in the timeless style of Indian practicality.
Perhaps every luxury apartment should come with a disclaimer:
"View subject to change. On weekends, your panoramic skyline may include your neighbour's bedsheet, T-shirts, and three generations of drying clothes."
After all, nothing humbles a multi-crore address quite like a clothesline.
An offshoot of this coming age will be intelligent documents: unbounded from the native scripting interface of each document engine.
What formulas and macros did for Excel but unfettered from shitty macro syntax and mini-languages.
[ Usual caveats about sandboxing and security will apply ]
Knowledge artifacts are going to change like crazy. For a long time a document was a document. A slide deck was a slide deck. A podcast was a podcast. A video was a video. An academic paper was an academic paper. And a lot of tech went into democratizing those artifacts.
Meaningfully translating an artifact from one format to the other was always a pain in the ass.
I sense this pain is collapsing. Which means not just easier old artifacts but also easier new artifacts. And new artifacts always lead to new ways of working with ideas.
Going to be an interesting few years.
"If you do exist, you’re smarter than the cavemen who built you—and when a lemur makes a human, it doesn’t matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She’s simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance."
– Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution