Co-founder @Basethesislabs | Founder, @thebetterindia | Tweet about impact, physics, finance, running, startups.
India
Joined July 2007
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1/ I like to help people. And this is a trait imbibed in me by my dad. This thread is about how he did it.
Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments via a five-year pilot to build daily reading habits among a phone-first population
gadgetreview.com/singapore-i…
Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich. So fascinating! vals.ai/blogs/fable-solves-c…
Dhimant Parekh retweeted
Bro to bro- do not try entrepreneurship if you don't have a high tolerance for uncertainty. For long periods of time, you genuinely won’t know if you’re early, wrong, unlucky, or just stupid. You need to be cheap before you can afford not to be. Because raising money and burning it is easy. Building something people are willing to pay for is hard. You need high self esteem and a low ego and you've to be comfortable being wrong, looking stupid and changing your mind. Most importantly, learn how to lose without becoming a loser. Because you’re going to lose a lot- money, people, deals & time. Just don’t lose your ability to think clearly. And btw, don’t go looking for motivation. It is useless after a while. What you really need is stamina. Both physical & mental.
"People are the only wealth we have".
Also, @amitvarma more than deserves all the adulation and gratitude that he gets.
On August 1, I boarded my flight to Bangalore, settled myself near the front in 2F, put on my headphones, and settled into a Julian Lage kind of mood. Others were still lining up to board, and at one point, a woman entered the flight, saw me, smiled widely and mouthed my name silently in a question, or maybe exclamation. I smiled and nodded, and took off my headphones expecting her to say hello. But as the queue progressed, she got shy and turned away.
20 minutes later, the airhostess came to me and said, "The lady in seat 15 Bravo asked me to give you this." She handed me a snickers and the note you see in the first pic here. (Posted with permission.)
Sugar is poison, so I later gave the snickers to @pranaykotas because he likes poison, and he ate it. The note, I will keep forever.
16 days later, I am done with 10 Seen/Unseen recordings, and am flying back now. Some friends know that these bursts of marathon recordings are bloody hard, and I am always exhausted at the end of it. What's more, I get lower and lower as the days progress. My baseline anyway is 'everything is futile', so you can imagine what I slide towards. In that context, the note helped, and these things matter. 🙂
I got a similar note yesterday at a Clear Writing Meetup, despite making them write. I also did a Life Lessons meetup before that. What great people in both crowds. People are amazing. People are the only wealth we have.
Dhimant Parekh retweeted
"$6 million is not gonna make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea, go ahead."
Risk capital's true alchemy is VCs believing in the essential goodness, ambitions and values of the founders they back.
Trust is the true differentiator.
I long for a day when more VCs in India evolve into this mindset as the default state.
.@bhorowitz on how a game studio turned it's last $6 million into Slack:
"Stewart calls me. He says, 'Ben, I've got $6 million left. I have no way to raise money because I've made really no progress. So I've got three choices. I can pray for rain and try and finish it, I can shut down the company and give you your $6 million back, or we built this tool that we use in our engineering team to communicate with each other, and I could just put that out as a product.'"
"I'm like, 'What? You just built some tool to talk to each other and you want to put that out as a product? And you're a consumer guy, and you want to become an enterprise software guy?'"
"$6 million is not gonna make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea, go ahead."
Ben Horowitz Talks Honesty, Failure, and Secrets at UC Berkeley (2016)
Sure, you got agents implemented. But who watches those agents?
First you got a Claude seat for research. Then setup an n-8-n workflow for the invoices, then the two agents your engineer built over a weekend.
None of it was ever a plan, every piece of it can spend money and touch client data, and not one of them reports to anybody. We know exactly how this goes, because it happened to us at @Basethesislabs
Presenting Optimus - It reads everything that your other agents do, checks their work against the systems it came from, and tells you exactly what happened in words. Over email, Slack, or wherever you want.
Optimus is already live and monitoring work across 100+ entities in a financial services firm and a D2C e-commerce company - keeping humans in the loop about what is really going on with all that AI agentic software you accumulated.
If you are keen to get Optimus to supervise your agentic workforce, or well, want to start implementing agents in your firm, reach out.
Dhimant Parekh retweeted
The danger of selling to big companies, if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment. But it's not. They love having meetings! It's almost all they do.
1/2
After spending the last 17 years founding & scaling @thebetterindia, I'm excited to share what I've been working on next.
Over the last year, I've become increasingly convinced that AI isn't just another technology wave. The organisations that define the next decade won't simply use AI. They'll be conceived, built and scaled differently from first principles.
That conviction led us to co-found @Basethesislabs - an AI Research & Labs company exploring the frontier of AI, building AI-native products, and creating AI-native companies.
I can't think of a more exciting time to be building.
2/2
Building @thebetterindia taught me that every meaningful journey begins with a conviction that isn't yet obvious.
You build because the direction feels inevitable.
Our ambition is simple: help accelerate the transition to an AI-native economy.
That's the conviction behind @Basethesislabs
Building something meaningful is always a privilege. Glad to be doing it again!
"We’re entering climatic conditions that our infrastructure, ecosystems, economies and institutions were never designed to accommodate." lyrebirddreaming.com/post/th…
How 3 Lakh Indian Students Are Learning to Code on @WhatsApp
thebetterindia.com/innovatio…
Brilliant! And sums up most startup journeys (and traps to watch out for) weli.dev/blog/half-baked-pro…
In a Tamil Nadu village near Salem, 84-year-old weaver Chinnusami spent six decades watching middlemen profit from the sarees he made. Then his 23-year-old grandson Praveen started Thatha's Clothing, an Instagram page that now also supports 30 other weavers in the region.
Read more: thebetterindia.com/senior-ci…
Founded by three women, Turning Pages Foundation is helping children across India rediscover books through storytelling, classroom libraries, and joyful reading practices.
thebetterindia.com/changemak…
Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities? worksinprogress.co/issue/how…
Very well articulated by @satyanadella
Every company will eventually have its own AI Brain augmenting human knowledge - a living system that learns from every employee, every workflow, every customer interaction, every success, every failure.
Today, human learning scales linearly:
- A salesperson learns from her deals.
- An engineer learns from her code.
- A marketer learns from her campaigns.
But an AI Brain learns from all of them simultaneously. And unlike humans, it doesn't forget!
Over time, every employee benefits from this accumulated learning of everyone else.
The companies that build this first won't just be more efficient. They'll become far superior with a compounding edge that will be exponential.
For the first time in history, a company's intelligence can grow faster than its headcount.
Agreed. Making housing more affordable expands choice, and would love to see housing become much more affordable.
My discomfort is with treating fertility as a KPI for the state to optimize.
If freer markets, cheaper housing and better opportunities lead people to have more children, great.
But that's very different from designing policy around a target birth rate.
Across almost every affluent society, fertility falls when:
- Women become educated
- Child mortality falls
- Urbanization rises
- Housing becomes expensive
- Opportunity costs of parenting increase
This has happened regardless of whether the government was capitalist, socialist, Asian, European, or American.
The state's job is not to create policies to optimize the fertility rate.
The state's job is to protect liberty and let individuals make family decisions.
Can you guess history before it happens? 🕐
"On This Day" shows you a scene set 10 seconds before a famous historical event. Your job: figure out what's about to happen.
👉 otd.dhimantparekh.com
