I write this as an optimist. Over the last 20+ years since the Indian economy opened up, we’ve been closing the gap between us and the western nations. That gap is widening once again, thanks to AI. We are at a point in the global innovation cycle that it is clear to me what has brought India so far won’t take us much further. We need to rethink our approach to entrepreneurship and investing if we are to compete. Below is a short diagnosis, and a strawman proposal ⬇️ 1. Innovation cycles, like the one we are entering, favor larger, developed economies over emerging ones. The incumbent vs. newcomer dynamic in startups applies to nations too, especially when countries move at startup speed. China and the US are.

One of the things we hear often about AI is how it’ll bring a productivity surge to society and have a deflationary impact on GDP. Technical revolutions, over a long enough horizon, do tend to make societies better off economically but we wanted to go deeper into what is the nature of productivity today, where does it come from, what do the productivity curves for large tech & non-tech categories look like, and then understand exactly where, and how will AI have the most impact on these productivity curves. @AbhiramTarimala and I dug into some of these core concepts in today's piece and a lot of python code & charting later, we present to you "AI - the last employee, How bigtech AI CAPEX spending will reshape future corporate cost structures" - link at the end of the 🧵: Productivity = Automation + Specialization. Nations grow GDP/capita by automating (do more with the same people) or specializing (create higher-margin products). AI supercharges both. Taiwan going from an agrarian economy with a GDP/capita of ~150$ in the 1950s to a semiconductor powerhouse with a GDP/capita of $7000 by the 1980s is an example. Also worth noting that without automation, it’s hard to free up enough resources to move up the specialization curve. We’ll see later in the article that the same logic would apply to businesses — improving specialization & automation is directly related to productivity.

~12yrs ago, I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇 By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

So now that Nvidia has far outstripped the market cap of AMD and Intel, I thought this would be a fun story to tell. I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today. Back then it was unimaginable for AMD to beat Intel in market-cap (we did in 2020!) and for Nvidia to beat both! In fact, AMD almost bought Nvidia but Jensen wasn’t ready to sell unless he replace Hector Ruiz of AMD as the CEO of the joint company. The world would have looked very different had that happened. Here’s the inside scoop of how & why AMD saw the GPU oppty, lost it, and then won it back in the backdrop of Nvidia’s far more insane trajectory, & lessons I still carry from those heady days: After my MS, I had an offer from Intel & AMD. I chose AMD at 20% lower pay. Growing up in India, AMD was always the hacker’s choice - they allowed overclocking, were cheaper, noisier, grungier and somehow just felt like the underdog david to back against the Intel goliath!

Speed of execution is the moat inside which live all other moats. Speed is your best strategy. Speed is your strongest weapon. Speed has THE highest correlation to mammoth outcomes. Those who conflate speed w/ 'thoughtlessness' haven't seen world class execution @ speed. E.g.: Many confuse speed w/ impatience. Impatience is your boss pinging you @ 9pm then calling @ 6am to check if a task is done. Speed is strategic. It is a permeated sense of urgency built w/ a shared belief that what you are doing is important & if you don’t do it, someone else will.

For those of you following anything SaaS, you'll note there have been a lot of calls around 'saas is dead' lately. If you are wondering why, I wrote about this last yr here👇. This isn't just about saas but rather a 50yr macro CAPEX/OPEX cycle at play under the hood. : shorturl.at/sJ4IZ Over the last 20yrs, both the cost of building and distributing software has COMPLETELY crashed. 20 years ago, it’d take a 4yr CS degree to write software, today thanks to internet anyone who wants to work hard can learn to code. In 20yrs world has gone from 5-6M software developers to 60M+ today. Second, the cost of distribution has gone to zero thanks to SaaS. I remember the days MSFT used to ship us a new MSDN CD monthly; imagine if you had to burn 60M CDs monthly as MSFT today? Software is shipped hourly, globally, all at once to everyone now.

This is for SaaS & esp India-SaaS but applies more broadly as well. I’ve been investing in India-SaaS since '18 & harping abt this endlessly to anyone who’d listen. I’ll say it again: the age of “business model innovation” in SaaS is over. It’s done. What does this mean? 🧵1/20 If you don’t have a fundamental product or tech innovation at the heart of your company, you are looking at a 10yr slog ending in a $5-10M ARR plateau → a [10-20]% CAGR lifestyle biz; a sub-$50M M&A by the category leader; or a slow death to $0. What changed, you may ask? 2/20

gm! We are pumped to release v1.0 of Lightspeed's India & SEA Crypto market map spanning L1 & L2s, devtools, CeFi & DeFi, NFT & P2E gaming, DAOs, analytics & more across India+SEA. See shorturl.at/lwJQ4 for the full blog & what we are looking to invest actively behind: 🧵 Circa Nov'20 we were seeing 1-2 crypto cos/mo. Today we see 2-3 crypto cos/day! India & SEA are fast emerging global epicenters for crypto. Lightspeed has invested in 50+ crypto cos since 2013 - most of it in 2021 e.g. @FTX_Official @AaveAave @OffchainLabs @solana @PintuID & more

The 2010s were all about the Cloud wars. The 2020s might just be about Chain wars. Before chain maxies, there were cloud maxies. I know because I was one while @Google. We ended up in a precarious race to the pricing bottom before learning few hard lessons & innovating out of it: In early days of a stack, innovation first concentrates & then moves up. The 1970-80s were about the processor wars. The 90-00 were about the OS wars. Early days of cloud were about basic storage, compute, networks, before moving to higher level services e.g DB-aaS.

Oxygen vendors for Banglore (23 total). All are verified today. Please RT (multiple tweets / thread):

Contacts
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2. Ganesh
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7. Company Name: Peenya Industrial Gases Pvt. Ltd.
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9. Contact: Bhuruka Gases Pvt. Ltd.
Mahesh
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It was great to talk to my friend @balajis a few weeks ago. He is a quintessential futurist, living maybe 10-20 yrs in the future & has been right about so many things that sounded ridiculous back in the day. Genomics, Crypto, DeFi, Covid. Highlights in thread. #EE21 (1/11) We asked Balaji - why is he the way he is? He responded by explaining that there are 2 types of CEOs - a COO type (those who ensure the trains run on time) & a CTO type (those who think & live in the future). While both have their merits, he gravitates towards the latter.

We @LightspeedIndia are thrilled to host Frank Slootman, CEO of @SnowflakeDB as the inaugural speaker for our #MastersOfSaaS fireside chat series w/ global SaaS leaders: RSVP@ shorturl.at/hDMZ8. As a fan, I've collected Frank's quotes ("Slootisms"? :-) for yrs; some favs👇: Frank is an absolute master of speed. As the CEO of Data Domain (acqd:EMC), ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), & Snowflake, Frank’s track record of execution + strategic vision is globally in the company of one. There are none like him. shorturl.at/avzL4. Img credit: @patrick_oshag

Speed of execution is the moat inside which live all other moats. Speed is your best strategy. Speed is your strongest weapon. Speed has THE highest correlation to mammoth outcomes. Those who conflate speed w/ 'thoughtlessness' haven't seen world class execution @ speed. E.g.: Many confuse speed w/ impatience. Impatience is your boss pinging you @ 9pm then calling @ 6am to check if a task is done. Speed is strategic. It is a permeated sense of urgency built w/ a shared belief that what you are doing is important & if you don’t do it, someone else will.

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇 By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

SaaS growth investing is on 🔥 the last few quarters. If you are a SaaS founder in the market to raise a growth round, here’s a quick summary of what to expect & how to prepare for these conversations, based on chats we’ve had w/ a bunch of growth funds in US and SEA recently👇 Some highlights:
+ SaaS public mkt multiples are, for the 1st time, ahead of private mkts; we are seeing >20x NTM rev, 30-40x ARR, pretty regularly
+ Y/Y rev growth & mkt leadership valued a lot
+ 1st check DD down from 90d to 2wks!
+ Clear post-covid narrative v. imp to raise

🤯 chat w Snowflake founding investor @laserlikemike last night - some gems: compounding effects of doing just *1* thing right over & over; 0 tolerance on ethics; look for 100x better solns* then ignore non believers; & conversational "gradient descent" to build conviction. 🙏 * as an example: snowflake could do a computational job in 2mins what took ORCL 30 days 😲. Conventional wisdom: "database is a solved problem".

We @LightspeedIndia are thrilled @Rephrase_AI is coming out of stealth. One of the smartest most iterative teams bldg AI-powered synthetic media solutions globally. Last yr, we met 3 geniuses w/ lip-sync AI; today you meet 3 geniuses w/ AI that mimics FULL FACES in 40 languages👇 .@Rephrase_AI founders @ashray_malhotra, @shivammangla09 & #NisheethLahoti are changing the way videos are created. Their generative AI can create personalized videos @ scale, w/o the cost & effort involved in video production. Think Mailchimp for videos w/ infinite variations.

Happy 73rd India! Around for 1000s of yrs, but in charge of our destiny as a modern nation only since ‘47. In last 20 yrs, we’ve 6x-ed our GDP, touched the moon, left for mars, gone nuclear, digital & truly entrepreneurial. Major challenges yet to fix, but much to celebrate too👇 For most of the last 2000 yrs, India was ~25% of the world’s GDP (& pop). Under Mughal empire, we crossed Qing China & Western Europe as the world's largest economy. However, by end of british rule we were 1-2% of world GDP; a number we breached again in 1991 thx to “license raj”

Today is my 4yr anniversary on twitter. I started using it only mid 2018 & had maybe ~150 friends then. I've since come to appreciate how valuable it is to just be able to snoop & learn from the back/forth b/w smart ppl. I'm no expert but few things helped me use twitter better: The most important was to talk more about 'lived experiences' rather than 'learned experiences'. You are unique; people want to hear *your* story. This also helps avoid meaningless arguments (the 'yes, But...' kind) while you stay authentic to what you have personally experienced

Fall campus/MBA hiring is in full swing. 2020 is a tough year for jobseekers. I felt the pain of job-hunting post MBA in 2011-12 right when the fin crisis hit the EU hard. Took me 8mos to land a role @Google, where, over 5yrs, I learned what truly matters in a career; my 2c👇 1/ Career is a long game: before I got into Google, I was jobless for 8+mos & had been rejected by quite a few companies. I was v. close to overstaying my UK visa. One interview can change everything. If you are in the job market, keep learning, & keep meeting potential employers

So @nvidia briefly overtook @intel market-cap last week - GPUs FTW! I spent 6yrs @AMD engineering & it was unfathomable to beat Intel back then. Here’s the inside story of how & why AMD saw the GPU oppty, lost it, & then won it back & lessons I still carry from those heady days👇 After my MS, I had an offer from Intel & AMD. I chose AMD at 20% lower pay. Growing up in India, AMD was always the hacker’s choice - they allowed overclocking, were cheaper, noisier, grungier and somehow just felt like the underdog david to back against the Intel goliath!