Coffee snob| Amateur Runner| Mental health over any damn thing.
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Joined September 2009
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Bangalore needs more places like Humming Tree. Attended the 90s hip hop vinyl listening session. What a feeling to listen to NY state of mind on Vinyl. :)
Vardhman Jain retweeted
hello, I'm looking to play pickleball a little more regularly. is there a group in JP Nagar or Jayanagar I could play with and is looking for someone to share a court with?
IG is hands down the best way to discover new music, every new band or album recommendation that I see on a reel I save it under the " music " collection.
Happy Sunday folks. Drinking this beautiful coffee on filter from Orb coffee roasters, South Korea. It's lychee juice in a cup. On espresso, drinking this funky and clean, Julith blend. Cheers!
Vardhman Jain retweeted
My secret sauce for anyone building, growing, or scaling anything:
Get physically fit.
People talk about courses, podcasts, AI tools, skills, books, mentors, and playbooks.
Very few people talk about what happens when you sleep well, train consistently, eat properly, and feel good in your body.
I started running every day 5 years ago, and at some point it became addictive.
Your brain just lights up differently.
You begin to think differently about discipline, about work, about people, and about what you are actually capable of doing.
I discovered two coffee shops in Calicut, with zero food and only coffee menu. Super impressed:
Beewmorphia and underblu
Vardhman Jain retweeted
Recently, I wrote about how serious our water problem is getting. This year's weak monsoon has made it worse, and in Bengaluru, for example, that means dry borewells and expensive tankers. But we're also wasting water we've already cleaned.
Large apartments have to treat their own sewage, but only 20–30% of that water gets used. The rest goes down the drain. Meanwhile, IT parks and factories a few kilometers away are buying tanker water for their cooling towers.
@BosonWhitewater takes the treated water apartments don't use, cleans it up for industrial use, and supplies it to these businesses. More importantly, they've made a business out of it.
Boson sets up and runs the plant, so the apartment pays nothing, and industries pay less than they would for tankers. Today, Boson supplies over 12 lakh liters a day.
This isn't just a Bengaluru problem. Every growing Indian city has apartments and industries close to each other, and reusing treated water is one of the easiest wins we have.
We need more people working on hard problems like this. That's also why we've backed Boson and Vikas Brahmavar through @Rainmatterin.
If your apartment is letting treated water go down the drain, this is worth a watch🙂
Vardhman Jain retweeted
Update: in ~10 days, the site is unrecognisable.
Trash has been fully cleared, the wall repainted, and a road curb laid down.
Footpath is also being built now.
Incredible work GBA (@GBA_office), Virendra Suryawanshi (@Virendra0698), Arun Pai (@arunpaiblrwalks) and team.
Vardhman Jain retweeted
Every few years there is a new current thing in tech. Sometimes, India will fall behind, and whenever that happens, everyone around: those in the government or adjacent (ministers, regulators, other bureaucrats, etc.), those in the industry (investors, founders, engineers, etc.), and miscellaneous thought leaders (billionaires, policy think-tank people, influencers) all inevitably panic and start asking how India will catch up. Today, the current thing is AI, India has fallen behind and the same questions are coming up again.
With this begins a very predictable sequence of events. The whole ecosystem goes through the seven stages of tech grief.
1. Disbelief ("India is obviously the IT capital of the world"), 2. Denial ("India has cheap labour, so we don't need AI"), 3. Anger ("All because of bloody brain-drain and Indian founders just doing D2C and grocery delivery"), 4. Bargaining ("India should build on top of existing AI, be the use-case capital of the world"), 5. Depression ("Maybe we should all just move to SF, invest in founders with a US visa or in American companies"), 6. Testing (India AI Summit, India AI Mission, Government starts investing in companies like Sarvam, funds invest in international brown people), 7. Acceptance ("Indic AI will be the global frontier tech leader of the Global South").
The saga ends with everyone coping, and hoping India will be a different place soon, fully ready for the next wave.
But nothing much changes. The real answer, especially for a democracy with India's scale, is that if you know you need to catch up, it's already too late. Meta can go founder-mode, spend big, hire big and make a great attempt. China can redirect a bunch of human capital (smart people) and corporate capital (balance sheets) to solve it and get close too. But what do you do in a country like India?
What the India should do is let the market, with all its messy constituents: individuals, founders, talent, institutions, universities, investors; both good and bad -- run free. The most well-meaning panel of bureaucrats cannot optimally allocate compute, a conference of regulators and incumbents will not bring frontier talent to the country, government handouts to already quite large funds are a waste of taxpayer money, and governments investing in early stage companies causes premature king-making and throttles competition. The State can do a lot, but it has start with doing less.
What does that mean? It means taking a step back, and removing all hurdles to increase the flow of capital, talent, and risk. It's the only way India will retain capital, technical talent, and risk-takers for long enough for compounding to kick in, and benefit from it as a country. You make capitalism easier. This includes reducing the compliance burden pushed onto a company (further outsourcing to CAs and lawyers doesn't count), but also making it easier to raise as a company, easier to invest as an investor, reducing paperwork for everyone (digital disclosure forms are also paperwork), etc. Startups are not unique kinds of entities requiring any special laws, registration and benefits. Startups are just companies. The same kind of ease of doing business should apply for everyone.
If you're worried about tax evasion, remove all tax breaks. When it matters the most, startups don't make a profit anyway. Will some bad apples try to game the system and get away with it? Sure. There will always be bad apples. You let it go, because the long-term benefits outweigh all short term costs by orders of magnitude. Even the IPL -- our one crown jewel in the world of sport, had corruption, match fixing, auction rigging, and a bunch of other shady business early on. You fix it later. No sane person would go back in time and shut down IPL before the second season because of problems at the time. Innovation is delicate. If we think in decades, progress will follow.
Many of these things are already solved elsewhere, there are global benchmarks we should strive to beat. Our competition is not just an India of 20 years ago, but every other country we lose innovation to. We are losing, make it easier for those who will help us win. In case this is too vague, here is what we should aim for:
1) bring down company incorporation time to <1 week,
2) bring down time to close investments <1 day,
3) bring down time to open a corporate bank accounts to <1 day,
4) minimise the total number of hours a month a promoter has to spend in non-tax compliance,
5) bring down the number of hurdles to export goods and services.
Part 2 to follow soon, where I will try to list out a hundred small things that will help fix this. My DMs & comments below are open: for any recommendations from those facing adjacent problems, for anyone who would want to collaborate on these, and especially for anyone inside the Government interested in our feedback.
Why are people rating speciality cafes in Bangalore basis " Spanish iced latte" taste and flavor. I mean what happened to rating it basis: Quality of beans, offering speciality coffee drinks like pour over, signature drinks.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been listening to jazz on my daily drives. Japanese jazz some days, Bill Evans on others, and a mix of incredible artists in between.
When everything outside is chaos : traffic, trash, endless honking, jazz somehow slows me down. It creates a little world of its own, where the chaos fades into the background and I can just be.
Maybe that’s the beauty of music.
Vardhman Jain retweeted
He's right, and the gap is bigger than the salary numbers show. Look at what happens to an Indian founder's wealth after it's created.
ESOPs get taxed at exercise, on a paper valuation, years before any liquidity. Deferral relief covers only a narrow set of DPIIT recognised startups. So the engineer who took the risk pays tax on money he may never see. In the US, an option grant is upside. Here it's a tax bill.
Capital is the bigger problem. Indian venture money is still mostly foreign LPs.
EPFO, NPS and insurers sit on lakhs of crores and put almost nothing into venture. So Indian startups raise in dollars, from US funds, on US terms, and the holding company ends up in Delaware or Singapore. The flip isn't vanity. It's where the cheque gets written.
Then exits. Zomato proved the Indian IPO route works. But it took over a decade, and the multiples are lower. Founder IRR suffers, and talent follows IRR.
Patriotism doesn't pay EMIs. Asking a 28 year old to leave $1M a year on the table for a slogan is not policy.
Possible solutions:
Tax ESOPs at sale, not at exercise. For every startup, not only DPIIT recognised.
Let EPFO, NPS and insurers put even 1-2% of fresh inflows into SEBI registered VC funds. Domestic rupee capital at that scale changes valuations overnight.
Make reverse flipping a single window, tax neutral process.
Turn GIFT City into a real listing venue for dollar denominated tech IPOs.
Fix the money and founders come home on their own. PhonePe, Groww and Zepto already re domiciled to India once Indian public markets started paying.
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.
Happy Sunday folks, drinking this beautiful espresso blend by Nightjar dubai. For my second cup, I am drinking this beautiful Tanzanian coffee by Cypher coffee roasters. It's floral with a very sweet finish.
Vardhman Jain retweeted
i genuinely feel like replying to these Godi bhakts sometimes, but they all seem to follow the same pattern: zero knowledge, unlimited confidence, and the ability to defend literally anything. no matter what happens or how obvious the facts are, they’ll always find a way to justify it. you try to have a logical conversation, but it quickly turns into an endless argument where facts don’t matter and blind loyalty comes first. honestly, arguing with people who refuse to question anything is just a waste of time and energy. sometimes, it’s better to stay silent and protect your peace than waste your energy trying to explain reality to people who have already decided not to see it.
Vardhman Jain retweeted
Almost every BJP supporter I know who rushes to list Modi’s “economic achievements” comes from a family with a long-standing hatred of Muslims and Christians ( primarily Muslims).
Whether they are religious or not, that hostility toward other religions seems to be a common thread.
I am yet to meet a Modi supporter who doesn’t harbour some degree of prejudice against other religions.
The intensity may vary, but the underlying sentiment seems remarkably consistent.
#modi #bjp