For six years, the only reader of my 100 million transactions was the tax department.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
When we wound down, the team got three months of salary. The data went into AWS storage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
More than 100 million transactions about how small-town India shops, and its only reader was the tax department.<\/p>\n
Nobody asked what it was worth. Including me. Back in 2018, a dead company’s data was a compliance requirement, not an asset.<\/p>\n
Last week Spirit Airlines went through the same funeral. Planes to auction. Slots to auction. Then something that has never happened before.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here is what changed between 2018 and now.<\/p>\n
For a hundred years, intelligence was the expensive thing in a company. Smart people. Good analysis. You paid for it in salaries and fees.<\/p>\n
AI made intelligence cheap. You can rent a brilliant analyst for dollars an hour now.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Intelligence became the commodity. Data became the asset.<\/p>\n
I had the asset the whole time. I was paying to store it. I just had no way to make it think.<\/p>\n
Every founder is sitting on the same thing right now, filed under compliance.<\/p>\n
What is worth more in your company today, the people doing the thinking, or the data they think with?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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