aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
Dear Concerned Indian Doctors,
I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points
to make:
1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D.
2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run.
3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck.
4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table.
5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up.
6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public.
7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use.
Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭
Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗
I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points
to make:
1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D.
2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run.
3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck.
4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table.
5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up.
6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public.
7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use.
Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭
Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗
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Compelling product! Esp for AI power users.
What if your devices, apps and agents knew what you wanted?
You finish breakfast, and your Uber is booked.
Running late, your agent sends a “Running late” text.
You reach home, and your lights turn on.
AI is proactive now. But it still needs your yes. It waits, for you to an app and tap approve. Every time, hundreds of times a day.
AI needs its own interface.
Aina is a ring with a screen that predicts and shows you the three things you’ll need next. One flick of your thumb, and it’s done. For everything.
✦ Cues: proactive suggestions, ready before you need them
✦ Voice: talk to your agents, take notes, dictate
✦ Remote: control your music, Mac and TV
✦ Calls: right from your hand
Pre-orders open now
aina.com
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aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
OH from a GP last night:
“I have a company doing $15m revenue and I can’t raise capital. It is going to be a zero.”
And:
“ triple triple double double doesn’t get the Series A meeting anymore. I want 10-10-5.”
Founders: the bar for follow on capital has never been higher. If you don’t have the outlier traction that others are delivering get to profitability as fast as you can.
And compound some advantage
“I have a company doing $15m revenue and I can’t raise capital. It is going to be a zero.”
And:
“ triple triple double double doesn’t get the Series A meeting anymore. I want 10-10-5.”
Founders: the bar for follow on capital has never been higher. If you don’t have the outlier traction that others are delivering get to profitability as fast as you can.
And compound some advantage
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aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
Whenever you get excited about AI, remember that your competitors will also have access to the same models and workflows sooner or later.
So AI is less of an edge, and more of a disposable resource that you may use in the interim to build or strengthen non-AI related moats.
So AI is less of an edge, and more of a disposable resource that you may use in the interim to build or strengthen non-AI related moats.
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Bang on the message. By far the best fund raise announcement video!
We just raised $120M, with a $1B valuation, to build software that keeps itself running.
AI is writing more code than ever. It’s also making production less reliable: more code, shipped faster, understood by few.
@traversal_ai understands how production systems fit together, incidents, and helps prevent the next one.
Engineers at Nubank, Harvey, PepsiCo, DigitalOcean, and a growing list of Fortune 100 companies use Traversal every day.
Here’s production without the drama 👇
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aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
it's all about timing one's current AI psychosis to the appropriate stage of whats *actually* technologically possible
you need to be possessed of the right kind of AI craze at the right time, not too early or too late
you need to be possessed of the right kind of AI craze at the right time, not too early or too late
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aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
The reason Databricks is the largest open source company in history is both structural and execution focused. Ben gives a great overview but as an open source founder I’ll try my hand as well.
Databricks is at its core a compute company. Their project Spark beat out all the other distributed data processing architectures like Hadoop and Cassandra to emerge victorious in the big data wars of the 2010s.
Partially this was because the other architectures were flawed and partially because they invested more in fixing them through hiring incredible engineers. This company did come out of a Berkeley PhD lab.
Still they struggled to make money. So in the mid 2010s they began making their next investment in a proprietary execution engine for Spark they called Photon.
As if building the leading distributing data processing library wasn’t hard enough they also shipped a native C++ vectorized query engine and continued both the public Spark roadmap and an internal proprietary roadmap as well.
It’s worth pointing out that this company is a decent example of the a16z thesis that you can kingmake with capital. Ben dropped a $10m check on a company that only asked for $250k, which is how the company had the war chest to make these investments.
If that’s all they had done, my guess is they’d be a $20B or $30B company today. I’ve made the point before that open source infrastructure expands forever.
That said there was a big second act. Circa 2018 they pioneered lakehouse architectures. The way to think about it that the traditional way you provision databases is you reserve some bucket on specialized compute and storage for them on your infrastructure. This made sense in a pre-cloud world where you had separate special-purpose servers, but less so in a world where you have scalable services like S3, EC2 etc.
So instead of reserving expensive DB compute and storage you reserve cheap S3 storage and compute that can spin up and down based on variable usage.
And now there’s a third act, namely building a cloud with AI primitives. The new gateway is a big piece of that but last month they also released a backend as a service with the primitives for building agents.
So again, why is it such a big company? Again, I think this is both structural and execution oriented.
The structural reasons: they started in an extremely lucrative market with a barrier to entry (it is very difficult to create popular open source projects in valuable markets!), that expands forever.
Second, they are a general purpose orchestration framework.
What I mean here is that every open source / devtools market is split between general purpose orchestration and specialized single purpose utilities. Think auth (Clerk) or email (Resend) for web apps (Next.js), or integrations (Composio) and sandboxes for agents (Mastra). While it is simpler from a product execution standpoint to build a single purpose utility, it is usually more valuable to build the general purpose orchestration framework and Databricks bears that out when you compare them to single purpose utilities doing things like ingestion and transformation (dbt, Airbyte).
Lastly as an orchestration framework / compute company, unlike database companies they are not limited to a particular workload (Supabase etc for transactional data, Clickhouse etc for columnar data), and they are in the core infra layer as opposed to being stuck on the client (Vercel/Next.js). It’s the $10B vs $200b difference
The execution reasons: they are technical geniuses who really want to win. I’ve spent the last decade building open source companies (Gatsby and now Mastra) and the typical open source founders are brilliant tinkerers and, in the best case, it takes a while to develop a ruthlessly efficient competitive commercial DNA. With Databricks they had both sets of DNA within the founding team — incredibly rare.
Congrats to @alighodsi and team on everything they’ve built so far!
Databricks is at its core a compute company. Their project Spark beat out all the other distributed data processing architectures like Hadoop and Cassandra to emerge victorious in the big data wars of the 2010s.
Partially this was because the other architectures were flawed and partially because they invested more in fixing them through hiring incredible engineers. This company did come out of a Berkeley PhD lab.
Still they struggled to make money. So in the mid 2010s they began making their next investment in a proprietary execution engine for Spark they called Photon.
As if building the leading distributing data processing library wasn’t hard enough they also shipped a native C++ vectorized query engine and continued both the public Spark roadmap and an internal proprietary roadmap as well.
It’s worth pointing out that this company is a decent example of the a16z thesis that you can kingmake with capital. Ben dropped a $10m check on a company that only asked for $250k, which is how the company had the war chest to make these investments.
If that’s all they had done, my guess is they’d be a $20B or $30B company today. I’ve made the point before that open source infrastructure expands forever.
That said there was a big second act. Circa 2018 they pioneered lakehouse architectures. The way to think about it that the traditional way you provision databases is you reserve some bucket on specialized compute and storage for them on your infrastructure. This made sense in a pre-cloud world where you had separate special-purpose servers, but less so in a world where you have scalable services like S3, EC2 etc.
So instead of reserving expensive DB compute and storage you reserve cheap S3 storage and compute that can spin up and down based on variable usage.
And now there’s a third act, namely building a cloud with AI primitives. The new gateway is a big piece of that but last month they also released a backend as a service with the primitives for building agents.
So again, why is it such a big company? Again, I think this is both structural and execution oriented.
The structural reasons: they started in an extremely lucrative market with a barrier to entry (it is very difficult to create popular open source projects in valuable markets!), that expands forever.
Second, they are a general purpose orchestration framework.
What I mean here is that every open source / devtools market is split between general purpose orchestration and specialized single purpose utilities. Think auth (Clerk) or email (Resend) for web apps (Next.js), or integrations (Composio) and sandboxes for agents (Mastra). While it is simpler from a product execution standpoint to build a single purpose utility, it is usually more valuable to build the general purpose orchestration framework and Databricks bears that out when you compare them to single purpose utilities doing things like ingestion and transformation (dbt, Airbyte).
Lastly as an orchestration framework / compute company, unlike database companies they are not limited to a particular workload (Supabase etc for transactional data, Clickhouse etc for columnar data), and they are in the core infra layer as opposed to being stuck on the client (Vercel/Next.js). It’s the $10B vs $200b difference
The execution reasons: they are technical geniuses who really want to win. I’ve spent the last decade building open source companies (Gatsby and now Mastra) and the typical open source founders are brilliant tinkerers and, in the best case, it takes a while to develop a ruthlessly efficient competitive commercial DNA. With Databricks they had both sets of DNA within the founding team — incredibly rare.
Congrats to @alighodsi and team on everything they’ve built so far!
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“This sh*t is hard!” - frame that and hang it on a wall if you are a founder
One of our competitors recently shutdown, and their founder is now CXO one of the world's largest software company. They were funded and advised by the top venture capital firms.
They had less than $1M in ARR in 5 years of competing with us.
This sh*t is hard.
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Don’t want to worry about TTFT, ITL, TPOT and how you are doing on SLOs, while paying the right cost for inference? Just @useRouterPlus
These guys will just nail it for you! And that is just the start. A lot more goodness to solve goodput coming up! 🚀
These guys will just nail it for you! And that is just the start. A lot more goodness to solve goodput coming up! 🚀
AI teams overpay for inference twice: once for models bigger than they need, and again for idle capacity they don’t use. @useRouterPlus is the extended inference team for fast-growing AI companies. We test models and providers on your traffic and get providers to compete for nference better. Go to routerplus.com
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THIS is Indian entrepreneurship! And it’ll only keep compounding 🙌🏽
The builders will build, the innovators will innovate, and the self proclaimed stewards of entrepreneurship who think externalising and professing how capitalism participants should run their business, shall ..well keep doing that. To each their own! Lfg
From Narsinatha Street in Masjid Bunder to this second feat at Dalal Street, was a ~70 year journey of three generations!
Current and future founders will do it in 1/2 and then 1/3rd and then 1/4 th time! LFG
One Mukstar boy has generated 30B+ value in <20 already, and not stopping. Many more on the path.
The builders will build, the innovators will innovate, and the self proclaimed stewards of entrepreneurship who think externalising and professing how capitalism participants should run their business, shall ..well keep doing that. To each their own! Lfg
From Narsinatha Street in Masjid Bunder to this second feat at Dalal Street, was a ~70 year journey of three generations!
Current and future founders will do it in 1/2 and then 1/3rd and then 1/4 th time! LFG
One Mukstar boy has generated 30B+ value in <20 already, and not stopping. Many more on the path.
Speech by Shri Anant Ambani, Director, Jio Platforms, at the listing ceremony of JPL IPO
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“ Stay hungry, stay foolish” : ✅
Foundership is a long journey and you need to be energised : also ✅
“Go big or go home” : ⚖️
Hungry != starved
Founder’s primary job is to generate resources !
If you can’t generate resources to fuel your hunger, you aren’t meant to play the game you chose! You are just plain foolish.
And if your modus operandi for generating resources is cribbing: Go home! cos you surely can’t go big (for that matter go anywhere as a founder)
Don’t blame the game!
Foundership is a long journey and you need to be energised : also ✅
“Go big or go home” : ⚖️
Hungry != starved
Founder’s primary job is to generate resources !
If you can’t generate resources to fuel your hunger, you aren’t meant to play the game you chose! You are just plain foolish.
And if your modus operandi for generating resources is cribbing: Go home! cos you surely can’t go big (for that matter go anywhere as a founder)
Don’t blame the game!
Unpopular opinion: this narrative works a LOT better for VCs than for founders.
A VC can back twenty moonshots and be fine if one lands. A founder gets one shot and spends at least a decade on it.
A better strategy for founders imo might be to build a solid core first and then keep expanding, evolving and investing in moonshots.
Sometimes a “here and now” dried fish trading business transforms itself into world’s largest marker of memory chip and mobile phones.
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Success in the game = 80% skill 20% luck. Skill is to generate the luck.
Your luck got a a starting point with the ovarian lottery you drew. You can’t change it, your problem and your skill gap!
Your luck got a a starting point with the ovarian lottery you drew. You can’t change it, your problem and your skill gap!
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“Capitalism will reward the Ambani, for crying shoulder and hugs to your Nani!” - a hungry fool who has been playing the game since 2008!
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aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar retweeted
Every time we discover P=NP they just reset the universe.
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AFAIK (and honestly I know very little) venture capital is a business where a group of principals try and monetise their ability to underwrite risk to generate economic rewards for investors, who willingly gave them the money to manage…
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But who am I to say anything, I know far too little than the girl next door with many Ks of followers ..
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As for my meaningless and follower less world view: as someone who is in the business of venture investing I’ll price my risk and do my best to generate returns. Thats my ‘dhando’ and as a humble response to all critics, as a pleb I take my inspiration from favourite tag line of a hostel tee at iitb : “Tu 13 dekh” 🙏🏼
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