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1/n Thank you 🙏🙏 @japanvyas @ipventures_in @RootsVentures for your continued faith and thank you @vijayshekhar @kunalb11 @BKartRed @arpiit @sameerpit for joining us as we bring #Bharat #online! @GetRaaho #MakeInIndia #ForABetterTomorrow
1/n Our #MondayMood is #FeelingAwesome with #Funding of Rs.20+Cr as an extension to Pre-series A from not just our existing investors @ipventures_in @RootsVentures but also from new investors @vijayshekhar @BlumeVentures @BKartRed @kunalb11 @sameerpit
#Raaho #ForABetterTomorrow
Imthiaz retweeted
No matter how many dance performances you have watched, what is happening in this small courtyard in Jamnagar, Gujarat, is in a league of its own.
Men circle a tall pole, each holding a wooden stick and a colorful ribbon hanging from above.
The beat of the folk drum starts, and they begin to move. They are rotating and weaving around one another in a rapid, continuous rhythm.
Within minutes, those loose ribbons weave into a stunning, tight geometric artwork around the pole.
Then comes the moment that actually catches your breath.
They don't pause to untie anything. Keeping the exact same tempo, they simply reverse every single step. Moving backward in coordinated loops, the entire intricate pattern gradually unravels, returning to free, hanging ribbons without a single knot anywhere.
Locally, this is known as the ‘Athingo Raas’ (or the Gof Gunthan braid dance), a tradition that the Ashapura Garbi Mandal in Jamnagar has kept alive for years.
Watching this, you realize it isn't just a dance; it is living mathematics. There is zero room for mistakes. If even one person misses a single beat, the whole pattern tangles up. Centuries before modern code or algorithms, these men mastered pure geometry purely on collective muscle memory.
In a world obsessed with solo spotlights, this performance teaches a quiet lesson in humility: individual ego has no place here. You might be the best dancer in the circle, but if you don't move with the person next to you, the whole thing falls apart.
Elders here see it as a metaphor for life. We spend years getting tangled up in our own messes and conflicts. But if we simply have the patience to retrace our steps with a calm head, even the tightest knots come undone.
Scenes like this in ancient courtyards remind us of something timeless: how disciplined, thoughtful, and deeply grounded traditional art can be.
Watch closely, this dance is centuries of tradition moving in absolute harmony.
#Navratri #Gujarat
Imthiaz retweeted
In Gurgaon MCG has started a 30 day challenge to transform 100 roads by Nov 7.
Citizens can report potholes, garbage, sewer overflow, dead streetlights & tree pruning here: mcg-sms.austere.biz/24hr-cha…
Complaints to be resolved in 24 to 72 hrs
Gurgaon walo koi kami na reh jaaye, nikaldo saari bhadaas!
Imthiaz retweeted
Some people would love to have your bad days.
Please be grateful for what you have now, and help others in need.
Imthiaz retweeted
Six years ago today, Unacademy became a unicorn. Today, Unacademy has closed its acquisition by UpGrad for just over $200M. We raised at a peak, but sold at a fraction of that. I'm not going to dress these facts up. But I am proud of what this team did between those two numbers.
When @RomanSaini and I started Unacademy with @hemezh and @sumjain, the mission was to democratise education. We didn't end up capturing all the economic value of that mission. But we changed what online education looks like in this country, and the products we built became the template for the entire sector.
Unacademy's free platform created a generation of celebrity educators. Educators are a cornerstone of any economy, and they should be celebrated, and our platform enabled that in our country. Their YouTube videos crossed 10 billion views. That's a milestone I am proud of. Airlearn, in under two years, became one of the top 3 most downloaded language learning apps in the world. We always wanted to build a global consumer product out of India. We did.
With a topline of around 400 crores, most businesses profitable or near-profitable, and 900 crores in the bank, we had every option to keep going independently. Nobody was forcing this. But sometimes, you are drawn towards a path that is more exciting than the one that makes you more money.
After meeting Ronnie over the years, understanding what he's built with UpGrad in higher education, and getting inspired by his vision for education in India (and more), I always walked away with the thought that it would be fantastic to work with him. And because there was no pressure of running out of money, we could take the time to actually think it through. The more we did, the clearer it got: this is a better path for the ecosystem, not just for us.
I'm looking forward to the path ahead, and I am very sure that our shareholders will create immense value from the merger hereon. My heartfelt thanks to every employee who stayed when it would have been easier to leave. To everyone who worked with us in the past. To our educators. To our investors. To my co-founders. We did four ESOP buybacks that created real value for our employees, even though the founders and investors didn't create much for themselves in the process.
A special note to a few people without whom I would have personally given up when things got really hard: Shailendra Singh, Deepinder Goyal, Bhavin Turakhia, Sujeet Kumar, Bhavish Aggarwal, Aakrit Vaish, Mukul Arora, Shantanu Rastogi and Karthik Reddy.
Also a huge shoutout to family and friends. And most importantly, my wife Reema, and my co-founder and close friend of almost 20 years, Roman. Thanks for sticking around during my lowest and my cockiest moments. You two make me better 🌞
Imthiaz retweeted
If you are an early-stage founder and genuinely believe you have a business (or product) that can win...
-> BUT you don't get any interest/response from investors
-> OR you are new to the world of fundraising & don't know what to do
You should check this out!!
We've taken 12 years of learnings from working with many of India's top startups on their investor narratives (Khatabook, Porter, Cars24, Seekho, Stage, Lokal, Cricheroes, etc). And we turned it into a coaching program, where the entire process is broken down into a science.
You will understand what works and why, what are your current gaps, what you need to do to fix them. You will walk away with highly useful output that actually maximizes your shot at fundraising at a valuation you deserve.
You commit a few hours per week for 5 weeks. And you will see how your story and your perspective transform at the end of it.
Imthiaz retweeted
#Urgent #blooddonation
A young girl needs B+ Blood Group
@Paras_Health in Gurgaon. Paras Hospital. Donor should not be under Antibiotics/Cold/Flu/Dengue. Please Contact- 9436142793. @BloodDonorsIn @BloodAid please RT
Imthiaz retweeted
India's real transformation isn't happening in corporate boardrooms but in the daily choices of ordinary Indians who refuse to give up. This film is inspired by one such true story. Narrated by Aamir Khan, who was moved enough to lend his voice. The first of many. Watch it. @Bajaj_Finserv
Imthiaz retweeted
“To my friend who isn't my friend anymore.
I used to know all your colours and share the same hues,
but now you've become a you I'm colourblind to”
I'm in love with this poem by Maxine Meixner 😭😭😭😭
Imthiaz retweeted
When we hosted @vijayshekhar during his recent visit to #Luxembourg , I already knew he was humble and grounded. I was wrong - he is profoundly unassuming.
A billionaire who wears Uniqlo, openly shares his mobile number and email address, and speaks in Hindi among people who may not understand the language, not out of disregard, but out of deep respect for his motherland and his countrymen.
Vijay left everyone inspired, young and old alike. The young European students who came to listen to him were visibly moved by his wisdom, vision, and, of course, his remarkable achievements.
He shared openly, spoke from the heart, and continued the conversation with a few of us over excellent Indian food at a modest Indian restaurant, something he clearly loves.
Vijay is deeply admired and respected in Luxembourg. He also mentioned how warmly the Indian community is regarded here, including by the Grand Duke himself.
For the last five years, I have hoped to see more Indian banks and fintech companies choose Luxembourg as their gateway to Europe. With @Paytm now licensed to expand from Luxembourg into the EU, having cleared one of the toughest regulatory hurdles, I wish Vijay and Paytm every success. As an investor, to me, his charisma alone would inspire confidence.
All the best, Vijay. I am sure we will meet often, share laughter, enjoy great Indian food, and continue bringing India and Luxembourg closer together.
Pic 1: Vijay addressing the audience
Pic 2: Vijay with the Grand Duke of Luxembourg 🇱🇺
Imthiaz retweeted
What better interview to summarize today, other than @kunalb11's classic interview with @lennysan from two years ago?
India Runs on Different Physics
Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of CRED, interviewed by Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Podcast)
Summary: Kunal Shah, philosophy major and CEO of a $6B fintech, argues that Indian markets operate on rules Western frameworks miss: low trust concentrates brand power, low per-capita income caps ARPU, no Indian has ever been paid hourly so time has no price, and a failed founder still struggles to land an arranged marriage. Take the frames seriously and you stop copying Western playbooks into a market with different physics.
1. The Delta 4 Threshold. A product earns adoption only when its efficiency over the old solution scores at least four points higher on a ten-point scale. Uber versus the old cab clocks nine versus three and passes. Online suit shopping scores roughly five versus offline at six or seven and fails, which is why nobody brags about it and everybody reverts. Hit Delta 4 and you get irreversibility, failure tolerance, and zero-CAC growth from people who cannot stop sharing; miss it and no amount of polish saves you.
2. The Failed-Founder Penalty. In India a failed founder still struggles to land an arranged marriage, and inside a CPG company the manager who held a stable brand for five years gets promoted over the colleague who took a 0-to-1 swing and missed. Risk aversion is the rational response when society punishes failure harder than it rewards attempts. Contrast Portugal, where the church buried Vasco da Gama and the other explorers next to royalty because risk-takers were given the highest social marker the country had. India is changing, but until the social penalty for failure shrinks, "all bad behavior comes from being short-term" applies to nations as much as people.
3. The MAU-Farm Trap. Global apps love India because data is cheap, smartphones are ubiquitous, and user counts dress up public-market slides; Shah estimates Meta makes three or four dollars per Indian user per year. Indian ARPU is capped by per-capita income of roughly $2,500/year, so the Western "few hundred million users" thesis forces founders to leave India to find revenue. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ all discovered this the hard way after launch. Treating an Indian user as the same currency as a US user is the canonical investor mistake.
4. The No-Hourly-Pay Civilization. No Indian has ever been paid an hourly wage in their life, which is why most Indians cannot tell you what their hourly income is at any salary level. Several Indian and other Asian languages do not have a word for "efficiency." A culture without a price on time will not pay for time-saving products, which is why Indians earning $100/hour in the West will still spend an hour to save $10 on a flight. Build for time-savings in India only after you have built a product whose value the customer can see directly in cash.
5. The Focus Inversion. In low-trust nations, weak institutions push consumers to concentrate trust in a handful of brands, which is why Tata sells salt, jewelry, and cars under one name and why super-apps exist almost exclusively outside the high-trust West. The US "focus on one thing, make it 10x better" advice inverts in India because trust earned in one place can be lent to the next, and low ARPU forces you to monetize across the basket. The oldest brand in the world is Chyawanprash, named after the person who made it, and Indian consumer trust still routes through human names. Build for trust concentration, not category purity.
6. CRED's 25-Million Bet. CRED's central insight, in Shah's framing, was that the value of time and per-capita income in India is concentrated in 25 million families that look more like global consumers than the average Indian, and building only for them paid off. The only thing India and China ever had in common was population size, so copying a country's profit pools without copying its values is how startups die. India is the rare market where men spend more on fashion than women, because female labor participation is low and the divorce rate is under 1%. Profit pools encode what a country actually values; build to the values, not the headcount.
7. The Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva Cycle. Every founder runs through create, sustain, and destroy, and the best ones cycle back to destruction periodically instead of staying in sustain mode for too long. Zuckerberg played Shiva over the last few years and tore Meta down to grow it back. The same founder is also an "uncertainty absorber" for employees, investors, and customers, and a seed investor wants the opposite kind of uncertainty than a sovereign-fund cap-table will tolerate. Evolving the absorption profile as the capital base evolves is most of what scaling a founder actually looks like.
8. Hyperlocal Envy. Indian founders get trolled in their own comment sections while Elon Musk gets adoration from the same accounts, because envy is hyperlocal: you don't envy people who feel far away, you envy the person who was just like you a few years ago. The defense is to ignore criticism from anyone who has not outperformed you and seek feedback only from those who have. Shah's framing: "elements with lower valencies are called noble gases because they are hardest to get a reaction from." Be noble in the comment threads that don't matter and reactive in the conversations that do.
9. The Crocodile Operating Manual. Species that have survived 100 million years unchanged share three traits: they can drop metabolism at will, they have the highest conversion rate per attempt at securing food, and they adapt across environments. When COVID hit, you either lowered metabolism and survived, or you burned cash and disappeared. A predator is whoever burns the fewest calories to earn the most calories; the senior person's job is to be the chief problem solver. Shah asks each direct report monthly what the hardest problem they solved was, and notes how few can answer.
10. Wealth as Stored Energy. Wealth is a way of storing energy, and energy is not zero-sum, so chasing wealth equality is fighting physics. Humans are the only species that has converted kinetic, thermal, solar, and nuclear energy to our advantage, which is why aggregate wealth has compounded since the Industrial Revolution and will compound further through AI and fusion. The practical move is to let people chase wealth and use the surplus to lift the floor. Information asymmetry is the entrepreneur's version of stored energy: collect dots, connect dots, repeat, and ChatGPT will make the world increasingly unfair to people who cannot ask great questions.
11. The Gift of Struggle. Successful parents can give their kids almost everything except the one gift that built them, which is real struggle. The chip-on-the-shoulder that drives immigrant CEOs and self-made founders has no substitute; Shah's deepest motivation is still escaping the financial crisis his family lived through when he started working at 15. The biggest profit-making scheme of the era is telling people to love themselves, and the antidote is to keep evolving. Wish for a life so full of content that when you are old you have endless stories.
Imthiaz retweeted
I don't know who else to tell this to, so I am going to tell my story here.
Every day is a struggle for a young business, but the last few months have been harder than usual.
We are a small Indian company. For more than ten years we have been building a homegrown brand in a product category dominated by big foreign players.
There are almost no Indian names in this space. We set out to be one.
We started in 2014. Over the years we began making parts in India instead of just importing, and we started selling in the US, Dubai, Nepal, Malaysia and South Africa.
We showed up at global trade fairs to represent an Indian brand on the world stage.
In 2023 we changed the import code we use for our product. We did not do this quietly. Every shipment was declared. Nothing was hidden. We didn't invent our approach.
We followed written professional advice and the way this product is treated in markets around the world.
And now we are facing a government demand running into tens of crores in duty recovery and penalties, plus personal penalties on the founders and even on an employee.
For a company our size, this is not a fine we can pay and move on from. This ends us.
We have not run from any of this. I am not built like that. It is not how I was raised. We have written to the authorities, met officials in person, and we have now filed a writ in the High Court.
All we are asking for is a fair treatment.
I set out to build in India and sell to the world. I am asking only that the system back honest founders trying to compete globally, instead of breaking them.
The process is the process, and it exists for a reason. But process should not feel like punishment.
From where I am standing today, it does.
I am not giving up. I have worked too hard for this. If you have read this far, please share it. If you know someone who can help, point them my way. Help me get the word out.
Imagine the scenario with Virtual meetings ..
have had scenarios where the other side kept the video off ..
add to it I was pitching to 3 ppl who logged in from one machine ..video off ..I didn’t know who was on the call and who wasn’t ..when someone asked a question I was like whose voice is it ..
Least a VC could do is value the time of a founder .
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.
Imthiaz retweeted
This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.
Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.
Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.
He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.
The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.
Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.
A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.
So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.
The tender was issued three times.
> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.
> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.
> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.
Here is what changed, one by one.
01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.
02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.
03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.
04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.
05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.
06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.
07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.
08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.
09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.
10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.
11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.
12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.
13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.
These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.
The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.
Following things need to happen immediately;
1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?
Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)
Imthiaz retweeted
What are your thoughts on this list?
Dr. Vonda Wright brings up a lot of interesting + helpful points.
If you enjoyed this thread, consider giving it a repost:
Imthiaz retweeted
My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:
And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.
1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.
2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.
3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.
4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.
5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.
6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.
7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.
8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.
9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has.
10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.
11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output.
12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category.
13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business.
14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.
15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting.
16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous.
17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing.
18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones.
19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed.
20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent.
21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product.
22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast.
23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet.
24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate.
25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated.
26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default.
27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses.
28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off.
29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away.
30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now.
31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win.
32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight?
I'll share more notes soon.
I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too.
What an incredible time to be building.
