Roopak Venkatakrishnan

India is not just catching up in the AI race; we're innovating and leading in ways that are uniquely ours. The Economic Times recently highlighted how our approach to Generative AI goes beyond just Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing the specific challenges and opportunities within our diverse market. Rahul Agarwalla, Managing Partner at SenseAI Ventures, shared his invaluable insights into this AI revolution. His leadership and vision are truly driving innovation in the field, and it's an honour to be part of this journey with him. For anyone interested in the developments in AI and how India is making its mark on the global stage, this is a must-read.

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Just stumbled upon a tech-twitter discussion where someone working in Private Equity shared a screenshot and had mentioned in his mail that he will share the signed document via Legitt. One step closer to the vision. The vision is 36 months from now, any business, whether a single-person-show, a small team, a mid-size business or an enterprise business, will use Legitt AI in one form or the other. Legitt AI is no more just a Contract Management Platform. It's much more than that. Write to me for a demo and learn how you can super-charge your business with Legitt AI.

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YC is an accelerator. Faster networks, faster fundraising...it's about getting back to what you do best: BUILDING. Laduram Vishnoi isn't just talking the talk. Proof? He raised $6.5 million in his seed round, topping his entire YC batch in both funding and valuation. 💪 Could he have raised even MORE? Absolutely. But his focus? Scaling smart, with the resources to drive growth for years. YC success stories are inspiring...but THIS is the kind of outcome that gets founders REALLY paying attention. Want to hear the whole story? Watch the full episode here - https://lnkd.in/eqawwxcX . . . . . #startup #startups #founderstory #ycombinator #ycrejects #funding #seedfunding #venturecapital #entrepreneurship #techstartup #software #microservices #monitoring #observability #cloudcosts #saas #devops #cto #techfounder #middleware #lobstertalks

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While the IPO window still feels like it’s nailed shut, and some verticals (AI) are faring better than others (SaaS), the overall startup outlook (at least on the layoff front) has improved. When startup fundraising plummeted in the summer of 2022, the key measure of success shifted from rapid growth to a clear path to profitability. Tech layoffs overall are now at a two-year low, despite recent downsizing at Miro and Dropbox, suggesting a potential stabilization across the industry. It will be interesting to see how these numbers look in H1 2025 as innovation in AI continues. #startupoutlook #startuptrends

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Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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Here's why prompt engineering is one of today's most valuable skills. VentureBeat recently published an article by Deven Panchal of AT&T Labs. I applaud Deven for his vision. He says, "A well-crafted prompt can significantly impact the quality and relevance of the output of LLMs." So many are refusing to accept this. Mainly because prompting uses natural language. They are misguided, assuming AI can expertly prompt for them. Even if it can someday (which I doubt), it can’t today. The closest thing is SmartGPT 2.0, which still can’t compete with an expert prompt engineer. I recommend learning and practicing prompt engineering. 🟢 If you don't know where to learn, comment "START" and I'll point you in the right direction. --------------------------------------------- See comments for a link to the full article. 🔗 Follow 🔔Mark Fulton for more on #AI #Prompts #AIAgents

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Why Great Operators Often Make Terrible Founders Last week, while recording the Skip Podcast with Shreyas Doshi (https://lnkd.in/gja2PeuZ), I shared an insight that explains why some of the most successful operators struggle as founders, while others with seemingly less impressive track records thrive. It all comes down to two pens on your desk: black and red. 🖊️ The Red Pen Operator: - Excels at refining existing ideas - Masters the art of strategic improvement - Thrives in scaling environments - Commands high compensation - Builds on existing momentum 🖋️ The Black Pen Creator: - Faces the blank whiteboard fearlessly - Embraces the vulnerability of first drafts - Generates original hypotheses - Builds without existing tailwinds - Creates their own momentum Here's the career-defining insight: Your success as an operator might actually be inversely correlated with your potential as a founder. Why? Because large companies pay a premium for red pen skills. The higher you climb, the more you're rewarded for your ability to spot flaws, refine strategies, and optimize existing systems. You become masterful at surfing waves – but founding requires you to create the wave itself. A personal example: I've watched a brilliant CPO struggle mightily as a founder, while a "less polished" product manager built a $100M business. The difference? The CPO had mastered the red pen but feared the blank whiteboard. The PM embraced the messy first draft. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵: If you find yourself frustrated in large organizations because you prefer creating from scratch rather than refining others' work – you might have the founder gene. 🔑 Key Takeaway: Your success as a founder doesn't depend on your ability to perfect existing systems. It depends on your comfort with imperfect creation. Want to dive deeper into this framework? Join Shreyas and me as we unpack the complete matrix for operator-to-founder transitions. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gAdgtm3x 💡 Follow me for more insights on the intersection of product leadership and founding success.

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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The current YC Fall 2024 batch includes a lot of "AI startups" something like 87% based on data report by Gravity (https://lnkd.in/gxxJnGSV). The takeaway for a lot of people is "wow, AI focus is overheating," but I actually think something different is going on: the way software is being built has fundamentally changed. It makes sense to consider AI tooling and capabilities from day 1 for any company building in the software space, because it can make your product and operations better in an undeniable way. Practical use of AI is not a nice to have, but a requirement if you're going to build something new and novel moving forward...so I think this trend continues and maybe the new normal is 100% of companies are "AI startups" the way 100% of tech companies consider using the internet. 🤷‍♂️ Great chart/stats by Gravity below, which includes a number of YC companies from Fall 2024 using Rippling to build their business and make the administrative junk relative to payroll, benefits, IT, and spend happen in the background, so they can focus on product, sales, customers...rinse and repeat. Here's to everyone operating in Founder Mode! 🙂 🚀 "AI-focused" YC batches over the past 2 years: - 87% in Fall 2024 - 77% in Summer 2024 - 70% in Winter 2024 - 57% in Summer 2023 - 32% in Winter 2023

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Breakdown of startup funding across sectors in 2024: 1. #Fintech: - 18.3% of seed stage funding - 17.1% of growth stage funding - 23.8% of late stage funding - Total funding: $2.5 Bn (17% decline from 2023) 2. #EnterpriseTech: - Raised $1.8 Bn - 167 deals 3. #ConsumerServices: - Raised $1.8 Bn - 48 deals - Boosted by Zepto's $1.3 Bn funding 4. #Ecommerce: - Raised $1.5 Bn (42.3% decline from 2023) - 203 deals (highest number of deals) 5. #Cleantech: - $829 Mn - 75 deals 6. #Healthtech: - $716 Mn - 78 deals 7. #Deeptech: - $460 Mn - 78 deals #Source: [1] After rough ride in 2024, Indian startups look for a promising new year https://lnkd.in/dVjxwUGC [2] Over 1 lakh 40 thousand recognized Start Ups in the country, over ... - PIB https://lnkd.in/dU9UQCN9 [3] After rough ride in 2024, Indian startups look for a promising new year https://lnkd.in/dkmzBN4q [4] Startup Funding Recap: November 2024 - PrivateCircle Blog https://lnkd.in/dP4MUx3Y [5] Unveiling the Indian Startup Funding Landscape in 2024 - LinkedIn https://lnkd.in/dcUTBRYB

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Weekly Recap 1. Recorded an episode with Arun Antony of YE Stack - They have a very interesting hypothesis 2. Talked with Arav Behl building BuilderCast podcast 3. Talked with Adil building WeCrack Cohort 4. Preparing for a big episode today Ft. Co Founder of Blume Ventures 5. Received a really kind message from an upcoming guest 6. Received an encouraging message from Amrit Sheneva building Flashmates, Hiremart, and more Next week is going to be an interesting one

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3 takeaways for startups about monetization from Daniel Chalef, CEO/Founder of Zep AI (YC W24) 1️⃣ Know that your pricing & packaging will change. Plan for flexibility from day 1 so that you don't lose agility. 2️⃣ It’s necessary to separate entitlements from billing systems to enable monetization flexibility. Without a flexible entitlement service, startups get stuck, unable to innovate, and ultimately frustrate their customers and sales teams.  3️⃣ Don't build monetization infrastructure. It's not core to your product, and the result is almost always something hard-coded. Our conversation was packed with insights about building startups, LLMs, & SaaS monetization (full episode in the comments). Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Daniel's vision for Zep and the drive that comes from being highly curious & easily bored :-) 2️⃣ The power of small language models 3️⃣ How B2B SaaS companies should implement monetization to deliver flexible pricing & packaging from day 1 At Schematic, we've learned tons from Daniel over the last year. He's founded several companies and served in executive leadership roles across nearly every function at growth stage companies like SparkPost, a MessageBird company & Domino Data Lab. At Y Combinator-backed Zep, he's building against an huge vision to be the state layer LLM applications. If you're an enterprise building on LLMs, you have very specific needs around data retention (think integration into data lakes, integration to line of business applications, etc), and Zep allows you to instantly recall, understand, & extract data from chat histories, so that you can power personalized AI experiences.

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Vinod Khosla is considered as one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists ever 🌍 He's an indian-american billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures, with investments like Square, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and more. Mario Gabriele's Lessons from Vinod: - You may be closer to a yes than you think. - Get the goose, not the golden egg. - Expect resistance to innovative ideas - Do not forget: your job is to sell. Top resources from Khosla 👇 1. Pitch the way VCs think: https://lnkd.in/dVQ95uc5 2. How to solve the Pitch Problem: https://lnkd.in/dFKdTABy 3. Plausible tomorrows 2035-2049: https://lnkd.in/dGQdtA4b 4. Letters to a Young Founder: Vinod Khosla: https://lnkd.in/dX22Hxx7 Subscribe to my newsletter for more content about Startups & Venture Capital: https://lnkd.in/dczX2bya

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Enjoyable. As a Product Manager, you should obsess over that concept.   Yesterday, I chatted with my friend Abhishek Sinha, a senior product leader at NVIDIA, and ex Cohere and Amazon Web Services (AWS).   In front of 40+ Surge founders, we went deep into all things product management. Some insights worth sharing:   👉 “What is a developer?” - it’s important to go deep and specific on your ICP. For example, you can’t just say that your ICP is a developer. What is that? Frontend? Back-end? Data? In SME? Or Enterprise? There are 20+ different type of developers, each with different needs and motivations. Be specific. 👉 All about motivations- definition of personas and segments should not be done based on superficial demographics. Rather, understand the WHY? Understand the motivations, deeply. Why are they using your product? What drives them? Group them based on the WHY. 👉 60% rule. Product Management is not just about drafting PRD’s and project managing build & launch. It’s all about customers. Working backwards. Those motivations? You can only understand them when you spend at least 60% of you time speaking with customers. Anything less, and you’ll miss stuff. 👉 Storytelling is everything - a product can only succeed when the narrative is strong. Communication is key and product marketing should be joined at the hip and part of all key customer conversations. Again, work backwards from the customer and develop clear messaging and value prop, optimized for your different channels.   Which brings us back to enjoyable. That value proposition? It can only be about 3 things: faster, cheaper, more enjoyable. That last one is not the same as ‘easy-to-use’. Some products are not easy, but so unique, so powerful, so rich that they can be hugely enjoyable.   So aim for that. Aim for enjoyable. cc. Peak XV Partners Anuj Sahai Muharrem Derinkök Jon Woods Pieter-Paul Walraven Jascha Zittel Elliott Gibb Nellie Wartoft James Han Carla Penn-Kahn Nitish Tiwari Ajain Vivek

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This hard reset is required for all AI founders from India building global B2B products: Product Innovation > GTM muscle Product innovation is happening at a rapid pace in each of your categories, valley competitors are building thought through features that can help them win customers mid-long term, GTM muscle alone without product differentiation wont help you win in the first half of this AI decade. We are doing this hard reset within BoldCap on what we are looking for in AI founders. Ping us if you are tinkering in global AI B2B products. Shiv Tayal Pratham Chadha Aditi Gera

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As Peter Thiel says, there's been lots of progress in the world of bits but very little progress in the world of atoms. KP Reddy is working on changing that through his VC fund, Shadow Ventures . KP scaled his first startup to $350M+ in market cap after an IPO. He then went on to found multiple startups before becoming a VC. I got to interview him to talk about: 👉 How to build massive startups in traditional industries (especially if you're young) 👉 Why most of what you believe about startups is wrong 👉 How to come up with killer ideas & validate them the right way And much more... Watch the full thing here (clips coming soon): https://lnkd.in/dp5YdBEM

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"In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it. There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ. The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad. Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground." https://lnkd.in/gpAnbW4w

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Grammarly just acquired startup Coda (last valued at 1.2bn) with a goal of a possible IPO. This could be a big move in productivity, especially for product teams. Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra was recently on Lenny's podcast (first comment below). https://lnkd.in/gmgfcm2P

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Garry Tan, I became "infinite runway" even without YC money nor any investors other than myself. Without LLM either, though the product I offer is LLM-related (https://lnkd.in/gDZ2YXz5). I once applied for YC but got rejected. That said, the case you mention probably represents less than 5% of startups. Mine, probably less than 3%, at least in tech. But I don't mind getting VC funding, not for the money (I don't need it), but for the connections they bring. Is it the case that YC requires two co-founders? I don't remember. Also, my age could be a deterrent for YC. Not sure what proportion is above 50 years old.

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