For six years, the only reader of my 100 million transactions was the tax department.

When my fourth startup died at the end of 2018, nobody bid on the data. Last week Google paid $10 million for a dead airline's.

Dukanline had 15 million customers. More than 100 million transactions. A few hundred crores in sales. Six years of what Indians in small towns actually buy, at what price, through which shopkeeper they trusted.

When we wound down, the team got three months of salary. The data went into AWS storage.

It sat there for years. I paid the bill every month. In all that time, it was opened for exactly one purpose. Tax and government filings.

More than 100 million transactions about how small-town India shops, and its only reader was the tax department.

Nobody asked what it was worth. Including me. Back in 2018, a dead company's data was a compliance requirement, not an asset.

Last week Spirit Airlines went through the same funeral. Planes to auction. Slots to auction. Then something that has never happened before.

Google paid $10 million for the inbox. 100 million emails. 500 million Teams messages. Employee records back to 1986. Another AI company bid $7.5 million for the same files and lost.

Here is what changed between 2018 and now.

For a hundred years, intelligence was the expensive thing in a company. Smart people. Good analysis. You paid for it in salaries and fees.

AI made intelligence cheap. You can rent a brilliant analyst for dollars an hour now.

But that analyst is only as good as what it reads. And nobody can rent the record of how your company actually ran. What worked. What quietly failed.

Intelligence became the commodity. Data became the asset.

I had the asset the whole time. I was paying to store it. I just had no way to make it think.

Every founder is sitting on the same thing right now, filed under compliance.

What is worth more in your company today, the people doing the thinking, or the data they think with?

Krishna Lakamsani | Building A Foundery | We build cash-positive companies, not valuations| I write at the intersection of AI, capital, and the future of human work: lessons, reflections, and honest takes from the founder-investor seat.