Serial entrepreneur, AFoundery venture studio founder, angel investor, mentor, and public speaker. Harvard Business School alumnus. 20+ years building ventures across USA, Mexico, India & Nepal. 30+ startup investments via TheSeedFund.vc.
199 posts
Airtel Money has 334 employees, 2.3 million agents and a $7 billion valuation. In 2012 I left the US to build the same thing in India. It listed in London on October 14. Revenue $1.35…
In the early 2000s, I was running an ecommerce business when most websites were measured by one metric: eyeballs. How many people visited your site? That was the scoreboard. Revenue and profit got far less…
AI’s biggest spenders may be its least typical customers. That matters when founders use today’s spending to imagine tomorrow’s market. Ramp’s October report says 1% of firms account for 80% of observed spending on OpenAI…
Everyone is talking about AI taking software engineering jobs. But the hiring data tells another story. September 2026 vs. September 2025: Overall tech job postings: +17% AI/ML job postings: +88% AI/ML postings are growing more…
Your employees learn your priorities by watching what you tolerate. You say quality matters, then approve work you know is poor. You say deadlines matter, then accept the same excuses. You say people matter, then…
Monday morning. I opened X, and a post stopped me. Elon Musk says he plans to give every child in America one of his SpaceX shares next year. It is a pledge. We still need…
The customer repaid us in one year. The project stayed with us for five. We won it by agreeing to something a much larger competitor could not accommodate. The customer needed an onsite team for…
A founder can now rebuild an entire product over a weekend. And still postpone one customer call for a month. Monday, a better website. Tuesday, a new feature. Friday, the pricing page changes for the…
When a client is unhappy and the deadline is tonight, we call the person we trust most. Often, that person already has more than enough to do. As founders, the decision makes sense. We need…
He raised billions. Then he lost sight of what he was building, on a 36-block walk. Adam Neumann. Co-founder of WeWork. On The Diary of a CEO, released September 28, he described a day in…
Years of experience is the wrong question for AI engineers. We are hiring AI engineers right now.Almost Every one shows 3+ years of AI experience. Now look at the calendar. ChatGPT launched in November 2022.…
By the age of four, my daughter knew one of my senior team members in India by name. They had never met. That is how often she heard me on the phone. This photograph was…
For 20 years, more revenue meant more payroll. That's how services work. More people, more work, more billing. Then I read about stan.store. $40 million ARR. Around 60 employees. Only 10 engineers. Stan builds online…
If you are looking for a job right now, one number deserves your attention. Tech job postings grew about 13% this year. Postings for one role grew more than 1,000%. The role is called Forward…
Somewhere in our neighbourhood tonight, a 17 year old is learning to solve a problem faster. Something happened on September 8 that his syllabus does not cover. Not his. Not any student's. The textbook chose…
This company is worth around $5 billion. It raised just $1.3 million in outside capital. Not $1.3 billion.... $1.3 million.... And now it has more AI agents than employees. A $5 billion company. $1.3 million…
Dario says AI development must slow down. , Sam agrees. Elon says, "Dario is right." My reaction may surprise some people. But here it is... Then slow down. Who is stoping you You are the…
Apple has never launched anything the world had not seen before. MP3 players → iPod, 2001 Smartphones → iPhone, 2007 Wireless earbuds → AirPods, 2016 Folding phones → iPhone Duo, this Wednesday Every one existed…
A few hundred founder meetings in ten weeks. Nobody brought a co-founder. Almost every non technical founder walked in with a working MVP. Not a deck. Not a Figma file. A product. Built by them,…
He made me a maharaja. Two minutes. Zero rupees. Dhanaraj drives me in Hyderabad works for us. Last November he sent this photo on WhatsApp. No caption. Rajasthani turban, hotel lobby, throne chair. Made on…
The same intelligence now costs two different prices, depending on how fast you want it. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will all charge you half if you can wait until tomorrow. Same model. Same answer. The…
A company nobody would call an AI lab just built its own frontier model for forty million dollars. Thomson Reuters announced it on Monday. The model is called Thomson. Developed in house, fully owned and…
Reliance launched at two cents a minute. My purchase price alone was eight. No version of that business survived. Every customer I had was an Indian in America calling home. Exactly who Reliance had come…
Every AI company is underwriting a price cut it never negotiated. a16z calls it LLMflation. For a model of equivalent performance, inference cost has been falling roughly tenfold a year. What was expensive in 2023…
The scoreboard most founders optimize for is the wrong one. August 2026. Quiet wave of shutdowns. Well-funded AI startups. Seed rounds closed. Teams hired. Decks polished. Zero paying customers. Gone. Meanwhile, a bootstrapped operator with…
Stripe reportedly paid $7.5 billion for a company that never built a frontier AI model. Look at how it makes money. No margin on the models. None. Provider prices pass through at list. OpenRouter charges…
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…
Everyone I studied with went to engineering college. I went to work. Eighteen years old, a diploma in computer engineering, and no money in the family for the next step. So I took a job…
The whole internet is funded by impulse. Agents do not have any. I learned the first half of that in 2002, selling calling cards to Indians in America. Prepaid PINs, ten dollars for so many…
The internet just stopped being a human business. For thirty years the web ran on one trade. Publish something free. A human arrives. They see an ad, or buy, or leave an email address you…
No resume ever crossed my desk. She still became Infovision's first employee. Early 2000s, New York. I was building my second company and needed help. A dear friend and coworker's wife was at home. A…
A founder I backed ten years ago sent me an SOS. He wasn’t asking for more money. He was asking for permission to quit even if it meant booking the loss. The business had stopped…
Over the last 10 days, I spoke with more than 100 founders. One thing surprised me. Almost everyone has suddenly become a coder. They're building apps. They're vibe coding. They're launching software with AI. It…
Every year on my birthday, messages arrive from a company that no longer exists. This photo is from that dinner two months ago. The cake was cut. And like every year, the calls came. Dukanline.…
The future belongs to people who invest their intelligence ... not just rent it. For more than a century, we've built careers by renting our intelligence. We join a company. We solve problems. We create…
Here is what 48 years of jumping without a net looks like. Six companies. Six industries I had no business being in. At 20 — landed in Sydney with two cheap suits and no idea…
Last night, past midnight. Founder application number 972. One line stopped me cold: "I have the idea. I have the fire. What I don't have is anyone who believes me." Had to put the laptop…
Most startups don't die from bad ideas. They die from the 18 months before they find their first customer. I've watched it very closely over the years ,As a hands-on builder and as an investor.…
Billion ₹ in sales in our first year. I still lost millions of my own money. That contradiction taught me everything. The metrics I worshipped were GMV and valuation. The metric that mattered was Positive…
"I'll quit my job the day you fund me." For over a decade, that line made me close the deck. My logic was simple. If you can't bet on yourself, why should I bet on…
When I started, there was no one beside me. No one to hand a task to. No one to catch what I dropped. No mentor. No team. Just me, and the mistakes I couldn't see…
Ninety days. That is all it takes to know if your startup is real. Yes, some businesses truly need years. Deep science. Hard infrastructure. Real R&D. But far fewer than the founders who claim it.…
Six years of uncertainty. Or ninety days of clarity. That is the only real choice a founder makes. Six years chasing a valuation = Six years chasing funny money on a term sheet. Ninety days…
My pager beeped in the middle of a meeting at 1-800-FLOWERS. I knew exactly what it was. Another order on my own website. This was 2001. I was 22. A DBA in their Long Island…
I want to admit something most founders never will. In my fourth startup, I called employees co-founders. Not because they took the risk with me. Because investors felt better when the deck said co-founders instead…
Most business plans die in the planning. Not because the idea was wrong. Because the planning never ends. One more market study. One more projection. One more version of the deck. It feels like progress.…
A 22-year-old was ready to turn down two job offers to start a company. I told him he was making a mistake. Last Winter, India. Sharp kid, fresh out of college. His parents are senior…
The other day my son and I were talking about the difference between VC and PE. He is majoring in Finance and Business at NYU Stern. His interest in finance is growing fast, but he…
"Hire slow, fire fast" almost killed my startup. I had 3 weeks of runway left to launch. Traditional wisdom said take 8 weeks to find the perfect and expensive senior developer . I ignored it.…
80% of job applications get auto-rejected before a human even sees them. The ATS filters killed your resume in 12 seconds. Here's what actually works in 2025: Skip the job boards. They're graveyards. Find the…
Everyone chases the unicorn. Less than 1% of startups ever raise venture capital. Of those, fewer than 1 in 40 becomes a unicorn. Across the whole field, the odds are 1 in 1,500. Let that…
The AI hiring wave is creating an unexpected problem. Companies are drowning in applications. One startup I know got 15,000 applications for 3 roles last month. All AI-generated resumes. All perfectly optimized. All completely useless.…
Everyone thinks raising money validates your startup. It doesn't. It validates your pitch deck. In 20+ years as entrepreneur and investor, I've watched countless founders measure success by funding rounds. I've never raised external money…
I genuinely don't enjoy LinkedIn anymore. And that makes me sad. Because I remember when this place felt real. Real people sharing real wins. Real failures. Real advice. Now open your feed. "I'm humbled and…
Anthropic just burned through $2.7 billion in 18 months. Google spent $13 billion on AI infrastructure last quarter alone. OpenAI is raising at a $150 billion valuation which is higher than most Fortune 500 companies.…
The AI hiring wave is over. Companies hired AI teams in 2024-2025 like they were collecting Pokemon cards. Head of AI. VP of AI Strategy. Chief AI Officer. Most didn't know what these people would…
The founder’s pitch deck had 47 slides.I hung up after 7 minutes.That was March 2026. Another Tuesday, another overproduced presentation.The deck looked like a design masterpiece. Every animation perfect. Every transition smooth. Every font choice…
Most founders think the best hires come from their network.I used to believe this too.Until I hired 2 people from my inner circle for my one of the business few yearsback.All two were talented. All…
4 months ago Y Combinator graduates raised $40M in Series A rounds. Today they're shutting down. I've watched 17 companies go from "we're the next unicorn" to "we're out of runway" in under 6 months.…
My friend's 8-year-old son asked me last week why I stare at screens all day. "Uncle, don't you get bored talking to computers?" I paused mid-email. This kid spends hours building Lego cities, racing bikes,…
If ChatGPT can replace what you built in 3 weeks . you didn't build a business. You built a feature. Klarna proved it. Fired Salesforce. Built their own AI stack. Then rehired hundreds of people…
Two founders. Same AI pitch.One is wrapping AI on top of a broken process.One built the process for AI from day one.Same market. Same service. Completely different destiny.The first will always carry the old cost…
Same market. Same product. Same customers.One company: 2,442 employees. $2.4B revenue. 5.5% margin.Other company: 2 employee. $1.8B projected. 16.2% margin.Launched 18 months ago. A living room in Los Angeles. $20,000.Matthew Gallagher ,A self-taught entrepreneur from…
It's been a while since I wrote an article. I spent years in financial services. Acquired and scaled a 40-year-old NBFC - 10x in 8 years. So when AI started showing up inside real business…
The 5% Rule - Why Entrepreneurs Will Win the AI Era Last weeked I was listening to Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) said something on Nikhil Kamath's podcast that hit hard. "Even if AI does…
The two biggest clients we ever landed almost took the whole company down. This was 2008. Infovision was growing fast. Our team had started IT consulting assignments with Lehman Brothers and Circuit City at almost…
AI washing is the new way to get funded. A similar thing happened during the dot.com bubble in 2000. Companies added ‘.com’ to their name and the valuation doubled. Today you connect a GPT API,…
This was my iPay Dukanline team. Every one of them. When we started in 2013.Oracle sent 30,000 termination emails on March 31.The math is simple.Every month Oracle paid salaries.Now that same money pays for AI…
A few years ago, if someone said, “I am building a company alone,” most people would think it was just a freelance side hustle. Not anymore. Look at Midjourney. Nearly $500 million in annual revenue.…
Everyone's preparing for AI to steal their job.Nobody is preparing for what AI is actually doing.McKinsey today runs 20,000 AI agents alongside 40,000 humans.One year ago they had 3,000 agents.Their human headcount did not shrink.It…
$500M AI rounds. $0 revenue models. We've seen this movie before - it ended in 2001.Pets.com raised $82M in 2000.Spent $11.8M on a Super Bowl ad.Dead 9 months after IPO.Sound familiar?Today's $500M AI rounds are…
They sold AI that didn't exist. Then built a $1 billion company.In 2017, Sam and Krish had $0. Six failed startups behind them. Backs against the wall in San Francisco.They had an idea - an…
Most founders I meet are solving the wrong problem.They spend months perfecting the product. Zero time figuring out who is actually going to buy it.I have built five companies.The ones that struggled - we fell…
Startups don’t break because of bad numbers.They break when founders feel alone.Around a decade ago , The board call ended. Every investor logged off uncomfortable.Quarterly update. The numbers were bad.The startup was burning double what…
$12,000 per year in AI tools replaced a $300,000 team. One person. $80M exit. Six months.....Maor Shlomo opened his laptop in December 2024 and built alone. No co-founder. No pitch deck. No funding.Six months later:…
One year after landing in the US, I started my first business making $0.50 per sale.My friends laughed."Fifty cents? That's it? What are you going to do with that?"I didn't argue.Maybe because I wasn't looking…
The new business plan is no plan.In 2020, you needed 6 months to validate an idea. A business plan. A pitch deck. A market research report.In 2026? You need a Tuesday afternoon.AI has collapsed the…
While I’m excited about what AI can do to software… I’m concerned about what it can do to software jobs. Last Sunday morning, I walked into my home office with a simple business idea. By…
I have books in almost every corner of my home. Coffee tables. Stair corners. Random stacks near the TVs. If you walk into any room, you’ll find a book waiting for you. So people keep…
There’s a difference between running a startup and building a business. When you operate with a startup mindset, you focus on valuation. Every decision, from the tech stack to the branding, is designed to look…
You are unable to scale your business because you keep optimizing your workflows. I see many founders obsessed with the idea of efficiency and improving ROI that they keep experimenting with systems and fixing things…
If you’re bootstrapping and feel small next to funding headlines, read this… Some days it feels like everyone is raising money except you. Your feed starts to look like a funding scoreboard. LinkedIn will show…
Build a $1M business in 90 days. No money. Start from zero… Sounds insane, right? That was the challenge on a reality show I watched .. During the 2021 lockdown in Hyderabad ,Undercover Billionaire, where…
If your team doesn’t lose sleep like you, nothing is broken. It just means they’re employees. You’re the founder. You chose to start a business. You signed up for financial risk, reputational risk, and the…
I once spent thousands of dollars on a business coach who had never built anything real. A founder friend once asked me: “Should I hire a business coach or find a mentor?” I didn’t give…
When I was 27, I sold my first company in New York. Right after signing docs in Jackson Heights. I called my father from the car. My wife beside me, driving home to Long Island.…
From Keyboard to Dashboard: BlackBerry’s Comeback story...... What I Learned from it... Late ’90s, I was on a pager. Then came my first BlackBerry... "A small phone, tiny physical keyboard, little trackball. Tap-tap, scroll, send.…
India’s Next Digital Highway Is Here... It’s Called Bima Sugam Every few years, India quietly builds another digital highway ..... each one changing how an entire industry works. ✳️ RuPay India’s own card network to…
Forget Investors. The Smart Founders Are Raising AI Leverage. The next wave of entrepreneurs won’t chase investors. They won’t start with a business plan. Every great founder used to build a team that could execute.…
Oracle’s Trillion-Dollar Turnaround Larry Ellison Surpasses Elon Musk Here’s how it happened and why Oracle still cut jobs the same week: Oracle stock soared 40% in one day (+$300B market cap). With his 41% stake,…
Align your interview prep with your career goals - A simple guide 1) Start with your dream Write your 1–2 year goal and the kind of work you want. List 3 target companies that fit…
Great leaders don’t copy AI. They challenge it. Use AI to: · Stress-test your ideas · Ask it to find holes: “What could go wrong? What breaks first?” · Clean up your thinking · Turn messy notes into 5…
Real Estate Meets Culture: The Untapped Indian American Senior Market. The first wave of Indian immigrants to the U.S. came here to build careers and raise families. Today, many of them are entering retirement —…
Most people sell shovels. A few dig the mine. Founders keep building “AI tools” for old workflows because it feels safe. That’s yesterday’s playbook. Don’t sell GPS to taxi companies—build Uber. Don’t sell an “AI…
Starting a business can be a tough ride that requires a lot of hard work and dedication. We often believe that success comes from pushing ourselves harder and harder, but it's important to realise that…
Sometimes, misunderstandings arise, and we feel the need to explain ourselves or defend our actions. However, not every situation requires our defense. It's essential to trust the process and let time do the talking. Time…
Life is more than just reaching our goals. It's about the journey that gets us there. Every step we take, every twist and turn we encounter, contributes to our story. So, take a moment to…
It's easy to fall into the trap of depending on others and blaming them when things go wrong. But this approach will never lead to success. True achievement requires self-reliance, not dependency. Think of a…
Direction is more important than speed when it comes to achieving success. Rushing into things without a proper plan could lead you off course, far from where you intended to be. It's better to move…
Focusing too much on the future can distract us from the present's focus and opportunities. It's natural to worry about what's to come or to dwell on past mistakes, but doing so can prevent us…
