Joji Philip Thomas

At a public restroom! I want to meet the guys who can do this….

A bit late to this podcast featuring everyone's fave venture industry analyst @credistick (Dan Gray) Interesting one for venture nerds / VC GPs. Below from @credistick - LPs making fewer commitments, but when they commit, have a larger share of the fund (fund sizes have got smaller); net net fewer LPs per fund but each matters more. - Top 1-10% of the funds chugging along, raising at will; rest struggling - Fund of Funds, and HNWIs have reduced commitments to venture. Because they were bigger backers of emerging funds (more experimental, willing to back newer managers), their withdrawal hurts emerging managers (Funds I-III) more. - Bay Area's network effects have hit saturation. Beginning to see venture funds from outside SF/BA outperform. Likely to see newer hubs emerge. One interesting observation from @Beezer232 : In the '70s-90s; companies were going IPO in 2-4 yrs (Amazon was 3 yrs, Google was 5 yrs fm launch to IPO); so an LP could back Fund I, see liquidity, and reinvest in Fund II. Today, 12-15 year hold periods are not uncommon for early stage. That means an LP might back five consecutive funds from the same manager before seeing a single dollar back; effectively treating five funds as one giant commitment.

What a great read....

Wow!

Citadel elegantly murders the Citrini post here citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insig…

The best part of my mornings - dropping our kid to school…no greater joy…

8,000+ words essay on selecting emerging VC managers in 2026. Our first guest post at @murphcapital by @cupazhou.

Agree with @bgurley.

Incredible profile. I mean, just read this paragraph from it: "In the meantime, Palantir as a whole, which began as a mix between the brainchild of Thiel, the creation of Cohen, and the cult of Karp, had started more and more to become the culture of Shyam, who’d slipped off the chain of a boy scout personality. Teams of engineers working on a new product got used to him stopping by to use it, build a demo, break it, and write a report on what was wrong with it. Ten-thousand-word critiques of products or ideas, which came to be known as “Shyam Bombs,” would get emailed to every person in the company in the middle of the night, on weekend afternoons, or when everyone thought he was at a dinner he’d apparently decided to skip. “Fatwas” were new Shyam-issued rules or ideas followed by an invitation to argue with him about it with the whole company cc’d. To prove the “flatness” of the organization, he began a practice of prompting junior hires to tell him, with his face inches away, to go fuck himself. “Save the Shire,” “Metabolize pain, excrete product,” “There are no silver bullets, just millions of lead ones,” and other enduring Palantir memes began as Shyam-isms. He had each of the company’s lawyers officially retitled “Legal Ninja.” He started wearing the blazer with the hoodie sewn in." Now go read the whole thing. I'm biased, but it's excellent.

Astoundingly lazy, shoddy journalism in this @NYTmag interview with Jay Shetty. The Times let Shetty get away with the same bullshit lies I debunked in my Guardian exposé on him. His lawyers said his story is legit? Gee, no kidding. nytimes.com/2026/02/21/mag…

Good one - why should a Malayali fall for Modi’s stupidity?

Hello Tuluva Techie with zero critical thinking skills. This is a frequently cited statistic that often gets misinterpreted as "Kerala has the worst cancer problem." It is not like that. Yours and that useless man Rajeev's (who calls himself an Oncologist in the reel), ignorance is known as Simpson's Paradox Analogy. Let me explain. Kerala has the most mature and extensive population-based cancer registries in India, operating for decades. States with poor registry coverage (UP, Bihar, many northeastern states) massively undercount cases. You cannot report what you do not detect. High incidence on paper often reflects better surveillance, not necessarily a worse disease burden. Kerala's life expectancy (~75–77 years) is the highest in India, approaching that of developed nations. Cancer is fundamentally an age-related disease - the longer people live, the more time cells have to accumulate mutations. States where people die younger from infections, maternal mortality, or malnutrition never "survive long enough" to develop cancer. Kerala has largely conquered the infectious disease burden that dominates mortality elsewhere in India. When you eliminate deaths from diarrhea, tuberculosis, and neonatal causes, the proportion of cancer in the disease landscape naturally rises. This is actually a marker of development, not failure. Kerala has near-universal literacy (~96%), especially female literacy, which strongly correlates with health-seeking behavior. People present to hospitals earlier, get screened, and receive formal diagnoses. In states with poor access, cancers go undiagnosed, patients die at home labeled as "fever" or "abdominal illness," and never enter any registry. What is Simpson's Paradox? This is similar to the observation that hospitals with better ICUs report higher death rates - not because they kill patients, but because they receive sicker patients and actually count deaths properly. Kerala "looks bad" partly because it has the institutional capacity to look honestly. This is a classic lesson in epidemiology: incidence is a function of both disease occurrence AND detection capacity. You must always account for the denominator and the measurement system before drawing causal conclusions. Also, there is ZERO evidence to equate unprocessed red meat to cancer causation. Please dont send me useless data from WHO and other crap sources - none of them show causation of unprocessed red meat use and cancer. The associated RISK (again there is no causation proven) is from processed/ultraprocessed meats. The most common reason for increased cancer is tobacco, alcohol, obesity. So use your account to help people in controlling these well known risks, instead of trying to play "food jihad" ok? Let people from different States and Cultures enjoy their culinary delights. You can mind your own business. So next time you visit Kerala with your friend Dr. Rajeev, enjoy some beef and porotta. Serving good food to hosts has always been our happiness mantra.

I know it’s 12:20. But please take your time and listen to this Vincent Kompany statement about the racism incident around Vini Jr. against Benfica. Succinct, differentiated and absolutely on point. Brilliant words.

The Prime Minister does not do press conferences, runs away from the Parliament, and suppresses dissenting voices... but protest inko polite aur seamless chahiye.

Never supported Anna Hazare IAC (20 marks) Never voted for BJP (20) Never heard Mann Ki Baat (15) Never watched BJP propaganda movie (15) Never abused RaGa (10) Never joined WhatsApp University (10) Never trusted Godi media (10) Tell your score out of 100 🔥

Respect to Greg Chappell for initiating the now famous letter addressed to the Government of Pakistan appealing for Imran Khan to be treated with dignity. This is a greater act than any he performed on the field. And he performed many.

Thread

Only cause they got out of India

Here are more details on the Singapore mosquito paper. The key result: Releasing bacteria-infected mosquitoes over large swaths of Singapore, twice weekly, led to a huge drop in dengue cases after 3 months. The bacteria, called Wolbachia, naturally infect insects like bees and beetles. They do NOT naturally infect Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. A Wolbachia bacterium was found in a house mosquito (Culex pipiens) in 1924, though, and by the 1970s researchers figured out that these bacteria interfere with mosquito reproduction. Wolbachia were deliberately introduced into Aedes aegypti in 2006, with the first field releases of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes happening in Australia in 2011. This Singapore paper isn’t a new idea. Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes become infertile because the microbes enter cell nuclei and use proteins, called CifA and CifB, to mess with histones during sperm development. The sperm never develop properly so, when these infected males later mate, the female lays eggs that never hatch. (Importantly, females only mate once, and it is also only females that bite humans. This is why the study releases MALE mosquitoes; so people don't complain about the government airdropping biting mosquitoes over their houses.) For this paper, researchers divided Singapore into 15 clusters totaling ~724,000 people. Eight of those clusters had twice-weekly releases of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes, and the other seven had no releases. They then tracked dengue infections. After 6 months of releases, only 354 of 5,722 Dengue tests (6%) came back as positive in clusters with releases, compared to 1,519 of 7,080 tests coming back positive (21%) in the control clusters. You could just irradiate males and release them (without the Wolbachia), and the U.S. government already does this to fight against screwworm invasions in Central America. X-rays alone are sufficient to make males sterile, but X-rays also damage somatic cells, meaning you have a higher likelihood that irradiated males will not “compete” as effectively for females. Wolbachia is better because it leaves fitness alone and targets sperm more directly. It's also really expensive to make Wolbachia mosquitoes; about $5 per person for an urban study like this. This is because you not only need to separate mosquitoes by sex, but then you need to infect them with Wolbachia AND irradiate them, using x-rays, to make sure you sterilize any females that accidentally pass through the filter. Still, this is cost-effective at reducing disease transmission. Another option is to release mosquitoes carrying gene drives. But that seems socially unpopular, and it’s tricky to guarantee the gene drive will never leak into the wild. So for now, Wolbachia seems like our best option, even though they need to be released constantly to keep mosquito populations low. This paper is a very important, large-scale demonstration of bioengineering at scale!