Osborne Saldanha

Microsoft: we COULD try to make LinkedIn more useful, given the wild amount of data it has... Naw, let's just add puzzles and redesign the icons, good enough!

Few VC firms are mentioned in Anthropic's S-1, except Spark, which invested ~$800M across six rounds and whose GP Yasmin Razavi is the sole VC on its board (@kateclarktweets / Wall Street Journal) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

all vc stories coming out are shocking but known by everyone. same names, same firms. unfortunately, no consequence, because no incentive to change founders have to pitch/raise from lesser evils. power dynamics continue. bar is low. the best indian vc is yet to be built!

Robinhood Ventures massively underrated for the work they’re doing

The EDF (Export Declaration Form) rules are now in effect, and it seems like RBI and banks have conspired to create a new hell. Or actually 5 hells. I consult for an American company. Raised October invoice. Received the Inward remittance. And bang! Mail from @HDFC_Bank detailing everything needed before the payment can be processed. Let me tell you what the 5 hells are: 1. The hell of confusion – RBI clarified last month that the EDF rules do not apply to individuals. But looks like they haven’t told the banks. And CAs also don’t seem to know. There’s no official communication on who is exempt. Last I checked, I was an individual. No company, no LLP. But HDFC still wants me to file the EDF to credit my payment. 2. The hell of complexity – See the attached pic of the form the bank has sent in excel. It has 5 sheets. To be filled and submitted. Some abstruse acronyms like “AD” - no clue what it means. Some fields are mandatory. Some fields are to be filled by the bank. No idea which is what. And it needs a physical signature. Which leads to... 3. The hell of paperwork - They also sent a pdf with a bunch of request letters. I’m supposed to choose the right letter, print, sign, scan and submit. Creating more paper today is incredibly silly. And, I suppose, someone in the bank will have to upload all this somewhere. Reminds me of those hand-filled immigration forms. Pointless. 4. The hell of repetition – At least for me, most of the details are constant. One client, one payment. If it’s a one-time exercise, fine. I’ll grit my teeth and get it done. But no. These details have to be given month after month. Else… no payment will be credited. 5. The hell of unpreparedness – It would have been simple enough for RBI or HDFC to create an online portal for this. With dropdowns, saved formats, contextual help, etc. to at least make this easy. But that would be too convenient, no? So, they’ve chosen to dump the entire burden on the taxpayer. I have no opinion or understanding of why this is needed. Maybe it is critical information. Okay! But why make the process so confusing and painful? And poor communication has meant that the banks have just passed on the pain to the exporter, and even CAs can’t help. Basically RBI & HDFC feel I should consult less, and comply more. Maybe my client will also agree :)

Pitching with two months of runway 💚

I'm not a VC, I'm a forward deployed capital delivery engineer

We've decided to sunset Arc on December 22, 2026. That's not an easy sentence to write. We spent years building Arc and celebrating each and every release along the way: we have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community. Our priority is to deliver best-in-class security for our members. Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI. Dia was built from the ground up to meet today’s security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward. We've worked to make switching to @diabrowser as easy as possible for Arc members. Here's how: · Your passwords, bookmarks, extensions and history come over to Dia seamlessly. · Spaces, Folders, and Tab Groups are in Dia and import over with your data intact. · Dia now surpasses Arc benchmarks in stability, speed, and security. · The browser features you use in Arc are free in Dia, and the AI is optional. Thank you for using Arc, for pushing us to make it better, and for building alongside us. The team that made Arc is the same team behind Dia, and some of our most ambitious work is just ahead. We'd love for you to be there with us when it lands.

I used to be a Microsoft Copilot hater. Then I had to learn it for real, inside a major law firm. Nobody on X talks about Copilot. But a lot of lawyers will meet AI there first. I started working with Ice Miller recently, a Copilot (M365 + Agent Builder) firm, through our joint AI lab with my law students at IU Maurer, and I had to actually learn it. Three things are changing my mind a bit: 1. Its “weakness” is the feature. Copilot is less creative and pushes back on unconventional ideas - this use to bother me a lot and still does. But then I realized it does exactly what you tell it. I used to see that as a flaw. Now I see steerability: it drifts less, so you get more control and more accuracy. For a law firm, that’s not a bug. But it does demand high performance prompting - still rare in lawyers. 2. Clippy’s ghost is actually useful. Hit a guardrail and it doesn’t just refuse. It tells you what to do next. Ask for current research with web search off, and it doesn’t explain its knowledge cutoff. It tells you to turn web search on. That’s small, but most lawyers are still beginners, and it teaches as it goes. 3. The integration is the point. Not just searching your inbox. Scheduled agents in Outlook that brief you, flag things and prep you, set up for a specific matter or case, across Outlook, SharePoint and Teams. That’s all about showing up where lawyers already work instead of porting things into a frontier model. One gripe: “agent” and “skill” don’t mean in Copilot what they mean elsewhere. In Agent Builder, I’ve found a skill file is almost redundant next to explicit custom instructions. Microsoft is reportedly changing that. Today my students, who live in Claude, ChatGPT and Grok, start building inside a firm’s Copilot stack. That’s the real job: not picking the favorite model, but making the firm’s model work for them.