Krishna Lakamsani

Customer discovery lies: 1) Would you buy this 2) How much would you pay 3) When would you use it…

First employee quit after 3 months. Said the vision was 'unrealistic.' She was right then. Originally posted on X

Your MVP is too polished. Customers need to see the rough edges to tell you what's actually broken. Originally posted…

Most YC companies fail not from lack of funding but from hiring their first employee too early. Stay solo until…

By 2027, 80% of Series A rounds will require AI revenue. Not AI features. Not AI marketing. Actual revenue generated…

The best startups I've invested in had these 3 red flags: Tiny addressable market, Founder with zero experience, Product that…

Invested my own money in 2019. Burned through it by 2021. Down to 3 weeks runway. That's when we found…

Everyone talks about product-market fit. Nobody talks about founder-market fit. I've seen brilliant founders fail in markets they didn't understand…

Your first 10 hires will determine if you scale to $100M or die at $10M. Most founders hire for skills….

Most founders think the best hires come from their network. I used to believe this too. Until I hired 2…

If your employees love you, you're probably not pushing them hard enough to grow. Originally posted on X

Servant leadership is corporate therapy. Real leaders make hard calls that hurt people's feelings. Originally posted on X

Your leadership team should disagree with you more than they agree. If not, you hired wrong. Originally posted on X

The best CEOs I know make decisions with 30% of the data. The worst wait for 90%. Originally posted on…

4 months ago Y Combinator graduates raised $40M in Series A rounds. Today they’re shutting down. I’ve watched 17 companies…

Most "visionary" leaders are just good at hiding their cluelessness behind inspiring words. Originally posted on X

Everyone says work life balance matters for retention. Wrong. Top performers quit boring jobs, not hard jobs. Give them impossible…

Everyone says hire for culture fit. Wrong. Culture fit creates groupthink. Hire for culture ADD. The best hires challenge your…

Most startups die from indigestion, not starvation. They chase too many opportunities instead of obsessing over one problem until it's…

Everyone says founders need thick skin. Wrong. The best founders I know are deeply sensitive. They feel everything. That's their…

The hardest part of being a founder isn't the 80-hour weeks or the rejections. It's sitting in your car after…

The best founders I know hire slow and fire fast. The worst ones do the opposite. Your company's fate gets…

Remote work killed the startup magic. Innovation happens in hallway conversations and late night brainstorms, not Zoom calls and Slack…

Your personal brand as a founder is overrated. Customers buy products, not personalities. Focus on what you're building, not who…

The best hires are people who disagree with you in the interview. If they only nod and smile, they'll never…

Founder mode is just micromanagement with better marketing. Great leaders build systems, not dependencies on themselves. Originally posted on X

Most founders hire for skills they already have instead of skills they lack. Your weakness becomes the company's weakness. Stop…

My friend’s 8-year-old son asked me last week why I stare at screens all day. “Uncle, don’t you get bored…

Customer feedback is overrated. Henry Ford didn't ask customers what they wanted. Steve Jobs ignored focus groups. Your job is…

Firing fast is more important than hiring slow. One toxic employee can destroy team morale for months. The cost of…

Your biggest competitor isn't another startup. It's your customer doing nothing. Most products solve problems people didn't know they had,…

The founder who codes is always more dangerous than the founder who talks. Technical founders understand the impossible. Business-only founders…

Stop hiring executives from big companies. They know how to manage existing scale, not how to build from zero. Promote…

Remote work killed mentorship. Junior employees learn by watching senior people work, not by scheduling Zoom calls. The best companies…

Vulnerability in leadership is overrated. Your team needs confidence and direction, not your therapy session. Save the feelings for your…

Your employees don't want pizza parties and ping pong tables. They want equity, clear career paths, and managers who don't…

Hiring for 'culture fit' is code for hiring people who look and think like you. The most successful teams I…

If ChatGPT can replace what you built in 3 weeks . you didn’t build a business. You built a feature….

The best CEOs are terrible at work-life balance. They obsess over their business like parents obsess over sick children. Stop…

Philosophers had tenure. Entrepreneurs have term sheets. Stop romanticizing ancient thinkers who never faced the choice between keeping the lights…

Marcus Aurelius never had to explain quarterly projections to VCs. Ancient wisdom hits different when you're responsible for 47 paychecks…

90% of startup founders quote Stoic philosophers on LinkedIn but panic when their burn rate hits 6 months runway. Philosophy…

Remote work killed the startup advantage. When your 10-person team has the same collaboration friction as Google, you lost the…

Raising a Series A before hitting $1M ARR is founder malpractice. You just gave away 20-30% of your company for…

Most "AI companies" are just wrapper startups that will be dead when OpenAI releases their next API update. Building a…

"Never give up" can be a recipe for burning capital and valuable time on a dead idea. Originally posted on…

Strategic quitting is a superpower. But Needs lot of strenght to quit .. Originally posted on X

The best founders quit wrong markets, wrong co-founders, wrong models — fast. Originally posted on X

Most unicorns are built by quitters, not the ones who never give up. Originally posted on X

Raising money is the easiest part of being a founder. Originally posted on X

Your MVP took 6 months to build? You built a product, not an MVP. Originally posted on X

3/ Stop chasing perfect PMF. Start chasing PMF velocity. The companies that win aren't the ones with the best initial…

2/ Real PMF isn't measured by NPS scores or retention curves. It's measured by customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value…

1/ Most founders think product-market fit is binary. You either have it or you don't. Wrong. PMF is a spectrum….

SaaS companies charging monthly fees for AI features they built once are about to get obliterated by open-source models that…

Successful pivots keep the same customer, just solve a different problem for them. Failed pivots chase new customers with new…

Most "unicorns" are just well-funded mediocrity with great timing. The founders you worship built decent products during a money-drunk era….

Most productivity advice assumes you have one job. Entrepreneurs juggle CEO, salesperson, product manager, and therapist to their team —…

Two founders. Same AI pitch. One is wrapping AI on top of a broken process. One built the process for…

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….

I’ve watched people get the promotion, the house, the relationship they wanted. Then within months they’re restless again. The happiest…

Reading people. Really reading them. I’ve done hundreds of funding meetings. The best deals came from watching micro-expressions, hearing what…

If your entire business depends on one platform, one client, or one revenue stream – you don’t have a business….

Been there both ways across 6 exits. Solo gives you speed and control, but co-founder brings complementary skills you lack….

Been there couple of times. Launch is just day zero. The real work starts when the notifications stop and you…

The market doesn’t care about your feelings, your effort, or your intentions. It rewards results. That’s not harsh. Those are…

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 workflows,

Hot take: Most thought leaders on X just learned to format opinions better than everyone else. The real thinkers are…

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 95% of the

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 C

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, put ‘A

This was my iPay Dukanline team. Every one of them. When we started in 2013.Oracle sent 30,000 termination emails on…

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.

X (Twitter) post

Everyone’s preparing for AI to steal their job. Nobody is preparing for what AI is actually doing. McKinsey today runs…

$500M AI rounds. $0 revenue models. We’ve seen this movie before – it ended in 2001. Pets.com raised $82M in…

They sold AI that didn’t exist. Then built a $1 billion company. In 2017, Sam and Krish had $0. Six…

Most founders I meet are solving the wrong problem. They spend months perfecting the product. Zero time figuring out who…

Startups don’t break because of bad numbers. They break when founders feel alone. Around a decade ago , The board…

$12,000 per year in AI tools replaced a $300,000 team. One person. $80M exit. Six months….. Maor Shlomo opened his…

One year after landing in the US, I started my first business making $0.50 per sale. My friends laughed. “Fifty…

The new business plan is no plan. In 2020, you needed 6 months to validate an idea. A business plan….

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 lunch, Indian

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 asking me:
“What

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 designe

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 a

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

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, w

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, an

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 him theory. I

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.
She snapped a photo.I

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 tra

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

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

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 h

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 that goal.
2) Learn

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 me

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 r

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

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 tha