When you use 96% of your bailout money for buybacks, you should be allowed to fail. w/ @sruhle @msnbc msnbc.com/stephanie-ruhle/wa…

Thanks Pravin - I don't think that's the implication here It simply is that anyone who goes through the fundraising process should 1) know what's happening at all times (yes/no) 2) be run with more efficiency To me it is more about respect for the founder / person

Happy to announce our new fund with over $550 million in commitments. We remain excited, humbled and privileged to be able to participate in the digital nation building of India. Watch for more: piped.video/watch?v=9AxrfCOY…

How does India become a $5T economy? We’ll need to close the $250B financing gap for India’s small businesses by attracting global, risk-tolerant pools of capital — and as iSPIRT details, the rapidly growing cryptoeconomy may be one of the key ways: pn.ispirt.in/can-digital-cur…

Hiring a cracked full-stack lead at Smallest AI Salary CTC - 1 Cr Salary Base - 60 LPA Salary ESOPs - 40 LPA Joining - Immediate Location - Bangalore (Indiranagar) Experience - 4-5 years minimum Languages - Next JS, Python, React JS Work from Office - 5 days a week (slightly flexible) College - Does not matter Resume - Not needed PS - Experience working with systems scaling systems from 0 to 100 will add a ton of bonus points PS PS - You need to be a hands on developer as well. This is not a 'managerial' position To apply - Send a small 100-word text introducing yourself + links to your best work to info@smallest.ai with the title 'Cracked Full Stack Lead'

Fundraise Announcement! We are proud to announce that we at @smallest_AI have raised 8M USD in an oversubscribed seed round led by @Sierra_Ventures with participation from @3one4Capital, @better_capital, @UpsparksCapital, @SchemaVentures, @DeVC_Global, @tinyvc, @peercheque, @shyamalanadkat, @missionstcap, @bwertz, @RaveenSastry, and many more angels to build the future of Enterprise Voice AI! We are transforming voice AI from the ground up - pushing agents to pass the Turing test in the coming years. We are also excited to build a research-first organization - diving into the depths of problems from first principles and doing things no one in the world is even thinking about. It was our dream to build a scientific team that pushes the boundaries of the frontier. We are privileged to have the support of some of the best early backers a founder could ever ask for. Thank you, everyone for supporting us - this is just the beginning!

It’s crazy how nobody says at their deathbed that they should have worked harder, and yet that’s the default societal expectation when one is alive.

Dukaan is becoming a go-to e-commerce platform for the D2C brands and the first time internet entrepreneurs. Super happy to see entrepreneurs getting funded on Shark Tank India - who stated their journey with Dukaan. Digital India 🇮🇳 is just getting started..

Announcing Purple Llama — A new project to help level the playing field for building safe & responsible generative AI experiences. Purple Llama includes permissively licensed tools, evals & models to enable both research & commercial use. More details ➡️ bit.ly/3ReRNHI

Launching <Name TBD> Research Fellowship :: For any student groups at IITs/BITs/NITs/IIITs (list to expand as this idea matures, for now, my money my random rules 🙏) who are working on foundational research on AGI, I’m pledging $10K grants for 10 of those projects.

Cope.Studio is joining hands with @0xpolygon, to become the world's biggest moonshot factory for the metaverse.

Made a tiny app for myself and reluctantly put it on the app store. Two weeks later it's being used by 4k people 😱..if you're into ambient sounds while working watch with sound on🔈

👉 28th June: Experimentation Frameworks and learnings from Housing and Hotstar with @RTinkslinger , Sr. VP at Hotstar

great companies are built when a core group of people dedicate a significant portion of their lives to crafting a institution around a business

Let's go! 🇮🇳🚀 #ParisAISummit

I am fortunate enough to have a cofounder like @subhashchy. Coz he was with me when we were struggling to get backlinks from TechCrunch for our clients (back in SEO agency days) - to getting featured on TechCrunch ;) Seems like we've come a long way!

Kuku FM has just crossed 1Mn active paid subs. 27x in 12 months! We're now India's biggest audio subscription platform. From 'India mein log pay nahi karte' to here it's been an amazing journey. 🔥🚀 On the way to becoming the go-to destination for aspirational Young India.

📚Founders: raising capital is a journey. Nail your pre-seed with a strong MVP, seed with market fit, Series A with scalable strategy, and Series B with market expansion. It's all about decreasing risk, increasing value, and growing! h/t @christottman1

Woohoo! In just 3 months we've helped more than 1 Million Businesses go online with @mydukaanapp Cheers to the 1 million Dukaandars and our badass team who always believed in the vision of making India go DIGITAL #DigitalIndia #Dukaan

🚀 Introducing Nugget—an AI-native, no-code customer support platform. Nugget helps businesses scale support effortlessly—highly customizable, low-cost, no dev team needed. No rigid workflows, just seamless automation. ✅ Resolves up to 80% of queries autonomously ✅ Learns & adapts in real-time ✅ Requires zero code Built over 3 years as an internal tool, Nugget now powers 15M+ support interactions/month for Zomato, Blinkit & Hyperpure. We’re now opening it up to businesses worldwide—90% of companies who’ve seen Nugget have signed up. 🔗 nugget.zomato.com 📢 Founders: Stuck in a contract with a legacy provider? We’ll give you Nugget for free for the remainder of your term. Email us: nugget@zomato.com Nugget is the first product from Zomato Labs, our incubator for in-house innovations. More exciting launches coming soon! 🚀

City I dislike: Gurgaon City I think is overrated: New York City I like: London City I love: Bangalore City I feel most myself in: Bangalore City I still need to visit: Jakarta, Seoul, Rome City I dream of living in: (only the young dream of living in cities)

Thrilled to announce that Mosaic Wellness raises $24M in a Series A. Their analytical rigor & customer backwards approach has truly set them apart- it's been a pleasure working w/ @RevantB & @DhyaneshShah9, & we're excited for the journey ahead! @avnish matrixpartners.in/news/135

Idea: a service that crawls my WhatsApp contacts and groups, and builds a searchable dashboard of my network. I should be able to type a problem I’m facing and it should pop up who from my network can help.

Today I’m announcing  Schema Ventures (@SchemaVentures) - a new early-stage fund backing exceptional outsiders building world-changing technology. Here’s why it’s personal 🧵

It is time that an Indian Stack is built for an appstore. Great things can happen when you're pushed to the wall; this is one of those times.

Dodo Payments now supports payment collection from 225 countries and regions - nearly the entire world. From 🇧🇷 Brazil to 🇸🇪 Sweden to 🇸🇬 Singapore, merchants can now go global with @dodopayments in just a few clicks. Global payments, truly global.

2/ Today on #Reflections, @RTinkslinger (Aakash) & @shanav_m (Shanav) talk about the Road ahead for Web3. Tune in to find out: bit.ly/3k59exK #blockchain #cryptocommunity #Web3

Powering businesses that are looking to migrate from @lemonsqueezy, come to @dodopayments 🚀🚀

This isn’t a crazy idea. India has shown the ability to ship national software projects. An open source foundation model could be the next step for IndiaStack.

1/ Excited to formally launch Bharat Founders Fund (BFF) along with @serarora 🚀 We've brought together 50+ legit founders and operators to come together and invest. Here are three reasons why we should become BFFs bit.ly/386CEFL

Democrats underestimated Republicans, and lost the meme war. Republicans underestimated China, and are unfortunately losing the trade war. And some in China may underestimate the free Internet, where choice can triumph over force. This requires some explanation. Let's go. (1) First, as a reality shill, we should stipulate that modern China is perhaps the most physically formidable country to ever exist. Visualize a young Bolo Yeung from Bloodsport. It's #1 in electricity, cars, steel, ships, and countless other industries. No country can realistically win a war against today's China, especially in its own backyard, especially over Taiwan. They can just outbuild everyone else: (2) And the US on some level now recognizes this. Secretary Hegseth noted on the Shawn Ryan pod that Chinese hypersonics can sink all US aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of any Taiwan straits conflict[1]. The CEO of Raytheon admitted[2] the US couldn't practically decouple from China. The former Secretary of the Navy, Carlos del Toro, stated[3] that one Chinese shipyard can produce more ships than the entire US Navy combined. And the Pentagon's own $400M study[4] showed that much of the US military is actually made in China: (3) This may be why the US is currently effecting a shouting retreat. Even as the military is rebranded to the Department of War, US troops are reportedly[5] being pulled back to actually focus on homeland defense and the war within. And even while there's posting about annexing Greenland and invading Canada, in reality European NATO is being asked to fend for itself. Basically, the words are about expanding American real estate, but the reality is that America is withdrawing from the world: (4) Now, some will say this isn't a bad thing. After all, America is a republic, not an empire! OK, but the business model of the US is money printing, which is premised on the continuation of global empire. That's because dollar inflation is global taxation, since the inflationary dilution is currently spread across billions of global dollar holders. However...as US troops come back and US tariffs go up, the de facto tax base for dollar inflation shrinks from ~1-3B globally to just 330M Americans. That 67-90% drop in tax base will cause a huge drop in American living standards. We're in the middle of this now; gold and digital gold are smashing all time highs[6], because the dollar is crashing through all-time lows. (5) Moreover, because the sovereign debt crisis is underway in America, Western Europe, and Japan at the same time, you're seeing a simultaneous fall of all parts of the empire at once. As you can see from the graphs below, yields are high in the US, Germany, Japan, UK, Italy, and France...even as they're falling in China...and even as the world economy has decisively moved to Asia: (6) So, we are essentially in the midst of the fall of Rome[7]. For the first time in 500+ years, the world's dominant military power is no longer Western. While the shift towards Europe took hundreds of years, the shift back to Asia took just a few decades. It happened so fast that many don't realize that the world economy has already moved back to Asia. (7) Many Westerners are still in various stages of denial about this fact, or the fact that the US government is insolvent. Elon is our best guy, and gave it his all, and he's already recognized[8] that it's over ("did my best"). But there's still residual romanticism about America's ability to re-industrialize. (8) In many ways, MAGA still identifies as a manufacturing superpower, and they just don't want to hear that it took 45+ years of grinding in factories for China to get where it is, and that 45% tariffs won't return America overnight to the economy (let alone the demographics) of 1945. There may be a post-dollar path to rebuilding, but it'd be like Russia's post-Soviet path. And the first step in that path would look more like deregulation and special economic zones[9], rather than tariffing away America's access to raw materials and machine tools. (9) Anyway, I want to skip over the dollar collapse part of all this, because it'll be an unfortunate denouement to what was once the greatest empire of all time. Let's skip ahead to the next question of: what force could possibly rise to balance China after the dollar ends? (10) Well, after the Roman Empire fell, Christianity endured, and was eventually the seed for civilizational rebirth. Similarly, after the dollar empire ends, the Internet will endure — and could be the seed for civilizational rebirth. (11) Think of the progression from European Christendom, to the West, to the Internet. Each such shift was a geographical and technological and demographic change[10]...but most of all it was a change in self-understanding. (12) We already know on some level that the Internet is the most powerful force in the world. It manages 99% of transactions and communications, it's upstream of every politician and election, it controls everything from smart locks to autonomous drones, and it's even in front of your face right now. (13) Nevertheless, because it's currently[11] intangible, the Internet is still underestimated. The Chinese state does actually get it on some level, which is why they built the Great Firewall as a hard digital border that keeps out foreign ideas (and foreign drones). But post-Maoist China doesn't really have an ideology that's built for export. Chinese nationalism does make intuitive sense to ~1.4B Chinese, so it has sufficient scale to coordinate huge numbers of productive people domestically...but the other 7B+ globally will need something else. (14) That is: China is a goods exporter, but an idea importer. After all, its three major operating systems of Buddhism, Communism, and Technocapitalism were imported from India, Europe, and America respectively. To be fair, China did fork these operating systems, and made them their own (eg: communism with Chinese characteristics), and China does have an impressive 5000+ year history of arts and literature. But for whatever reason, Chinese culture mainly exports visual vibes (eg TikTok, Hong Kong cinema, glowing cities) rather than verbal ideas. (15) So, because China doesn't export a conceptual operating system that anyone in the world can adopt and fork, there will be a post-dollar ideological vacuum that's only incompletely filled by a return to nationalism. Many need something higher than the mere earth, and the cloud is something higher. The next Rome, the next Britain, the next America, the next universalist society — that will arise from the Internet, which after all is uniform rule-of-code. (16) Finally, to @JZ281C's point...these Internet societies cannot and should not physically confront China or (as they put it) interfere in China's internal affairs. Against the Chinese drone armada, you'll still need some residual local deterrence, but the Internet will mainly need to rely on Gandhian non-violence, invisibility, agility, encryption, and decentralization. You just can't take on a superior physical force in the physical world. (17) Still, because the Internet is intangible it will be underestimated, and this underestimation is itself a strength. The invisibility of the Internet, the dismissibility of it, is the English-compatible version of hide your strength and bide your time. Despite the fact that billions spend much of their waking lives on the Internet, it's still not thought of as the primary organizing principle of their life. This underestimation gives us room for the long rebuild on Internet First[12] principles. (18) Specifically: the Internet will not be able to take on China in the physical world, but it will generate universalist ideas that appeal to many Chinese (and non-Chinese) people. It will therefore provide many alternative ideologies to Chinese nationalism outside China, whose collective strength may balance (not beat) China. (19) How does this play out? We could see a billion-person Chinese superstate, and a thousand million-person network states. If one is a vegan village and the second a carnivore community and the third is a biohacker borough, these societies are mutually incompatible with each other. Moreover, their governing ideas can't all be imported into China as their moral premises are different from Chinese nationalism. So these network states become alternatives to China, balances to China, without needing to fight China. (20) We'll know they're a balance if Chinese nationals voluntarily choose to exit to one of these 1000 startup societies, as an alternative to the 100s of polished Chinese cities. They might do this for much the same reason one chooses a startup over Google: because of the upside, the choice, the variety, the editability. (21) Yet at the same time the mere existence of these alternative societies around the world wouldn't provoke China. And China wouldn't gain from conquering them, as they'd want to avoid the expensive Roman/British/French/Soviet/American failure mode of endless military intervention. Even if it did conquer some, it couldn't really conquer one thousand, if new startup societies kept popping up every day. (22) In other words: ideas are upstream of men, code is upstream of drones, private property is private keys, and the keyboard may yet prove on par with the sword. The creation of alternative societies is one model for how the Internet may eventually balance China.

If we look around, everything we see began with a single person who had an idea and acted on it. This film is an expression of it. If you can have an idea, you can make it real @invideoOfficial

Introducing Flowise 3.0 For the first time, anyone can build AI agents from just an idea. Simply describe what you want to create, and a draft will be generated for you.

Hola Bay Area 👋 We’re back in town to host DugOut - this time in a salon format to address the burning question: “(how) does GTM change in the AI era? We have incredible 2 guest speakers:

Little story on how I met Suumit and invested in one of the fastest growing companies I’ve ever seen

4/9 Organic innovation is the beauty and strength of Ethereum, but its side effect is an unstructured, hard to navigate scaling/infra landscape. Polygon SDK aims to introduce structure to the ecosystem and provide a framework for Multi-chain Ethereum to grow further and faster.

On this day in 2011, Steve Jobs tragically passed away. One of the best speeches ever delivered was by Jobs at Stanford's graduation in 2005. Revisiting those 15 minutes can truly change your perspective on life. In memory of Steve Jobs – a man who changed the world 🍏

Say hello to Obvious! web3 at its core is empowering individuals but it is far from being as usable as web2. We are bridging that gap at @itsobvioustech

India has the market size to do a serious Android fork, with a mobile OS and App Store controlled by neither Apple nor Google. Xiaomi, KaiOS, Cyanogen, and the history of Chinese Android forks show there is a path here. beebom.com/android-alternati…

Social #commerce platform @TrellApp raises $45 Million in Series B round led by @miraeasset, @hm and LB Investments. @pulkitagrwl talks to @ShrutiMishra_ about doubling down on #regional videos, adding new #brands and scaling up #community led commerce in India. #StartupStreet

DECOUPLING FROM DOLLARS The US sends India billions in printed dollars for valuable goods. This is actually the US government ripping off India, like it does Vietnam, and everyone else, including its own citizens...not vice versa. To be precise: last year India exported $87B of valuable goods to the US for $42B of goods plus $45B worth of increasingly worthless dollars: That difference of $45B was, effectively, made up by money printing, which the Fed does at will: The current administration incorrectly thinks this is a bad deal for America, because they haven’t fully thought through the fact that the US can print dollars. India was giving America something that's always valuable (namely goods) for something that America can just print out of thin air (namely US dollars): So...who was really ripping off whom? As mentioned, this is the same trade America had with Vietnam. Vietnam worked hard to send America shoes, while America sent Vietnam printed dollars. And it’s the same trade America had with many countries, before the trade war. The world sends the US valuable goods, and gets mere Federal Reserve database entries in return: The only reason the US had the right to do that — to run the financial database of the world, to print trillions for itself, and to freeze and seize the funds of billions — is because it set up what we call the rules-based order, what is in reality the American Empire. And of course it profited from that empire tremendously, but so did most of the empire's participants. But now MAGA is dismantling that empire. It’s cutting off trade, talent, and even tourism. It’s abandoning its military commitments and telling allies to fend for themselves. It’s cutting off foreign aid and domestic universities. It is, in short, becoming a country not an empire. The reason is because MAGA is fundamentally confused. It romanticizes 1945 America (the manufacturing country) without fully admitting that 2025 America makes its money in a completely different way, by managing the hub of a global financial empire. Because the US is in denial about what it is — a money printer, not a manufacturer — it's currently on track to lose both the money-printing and the manufacturing. For example, the tariffs target the entire world (thereby reducing demand for the dollar in global trade) while also cutting off machine tools and raw materials from US entrepreneurs (thereby inhibiting the buildout of domestic manufacturing). Anyway, I won't linger on the outlook for the US. It's made its decision and will live with it. Perhaps it will indeed be a Golden Age of Reindustrialization. And perhaps the transition to a "republic, not an empire" will go much better than the similar imperial climbdown of the UK or the USSR. What should countries like India and Vietnam do? They should turn a necessity into a virtue. The trade war has provided a powerful Schelling Point for the entire world to simultaneously stop using the dollar at the same time. This is also what America says it wants, for foreigners to stop "exploiting" it by accepting its printed dollars for hard goods. So: abide by America's wishes and stop trading goods with America for dollars. Instead, trade goods with each other for local currencies (rather than USDs) and use gold for storing value (rather than USTs). Because there is no global reserve currency issued by a single country, trade remains roughly balanced over time. Singapore's former PM calls this "world minus one." It's the continuation of global capitalism, just without America, who has voluntarily taken itself out of the game. Yes, there's a short-term adaptation cost, but the quicker that a country can decouple from the dollar the better. Start saving in hard money instead.

Cotool (@cotoolai) is an agentic security platform that eliminates manual and repetitive work for security teams. It helps teams investigate faster, automates common tasks, and documents work in seconds. ycombinator.com/launches/NW2… Congrats on the launch, @maxpollard415, @eddieconkml, and @endorseurgirl!

Tonight! We have @DVF and @fidjissimo taking the stage on @GoodTimeShowCH with me and @sriramk - we’ll cover DVF’s journey, being a fashion pioneer, a philanthropist and a trailblazer when it comes to empowering women. Join us now!

Here's a list of go-to guys from VC funds, Investing in 🇮🇳 #Web3 Startups👇 Let's dive in 🧵 (1/12)

Some reasons to build your startup in web3 🧵

being nontechnical in SF is like being ugly in LA

I am delighted to announce our Series A fund raise of $25M led by @khoslaventures and @z47_vc along with @BatteryVentures @BlumeVentures @peakxvpartners @neon_fund and @stormventures. Very grateful to our incredible mission oriented team at @atomicworkhq, passionate customers, early partners and super angels who believed in our journey. We’re thrilled to be driving the future of IT with AI agents designed to empower Enterprise IT teams, "Unlock Tomorrow's IT, Today!"✨🚀

Join us for a conversation on navigating volatile markets and growth strategies with @mayank_kmr, @dhruvilsanghvi, @naiyyasaggi, @vishalgondal and @RTinkslinger in partnership with DeVC India Friday, 24th Feb, 4:00pm - 6:00pm RSVP here: lu.ma/mij0r9l5

When I first became an entrepreneur I was surprised to learn my #1 expense wasn't contractor or ads – it was taxes. So after the $250M @Teachable acquisition, I was in a unique position to go all in on a bigger mission.. Enter Kick: self-driving bookkeeping 😎

Gap btw deposits & borrows is major problem of deFi in general, not of any specific app.. Until we figure out how to use off-chain collaterals on chain & how to make loans for real life purposes, deFi overtaking tradFi remains a daydream.