Vikalp | विकल्प

So, I've been making playlists for few years now. Thought of sharing it. Here we go! 🎶 1. Desi happy trip, ~2hr: Best for a road trip or chilling in your balcony with some upbeat desi music (added new music for those who've been listening to it) open.spotify.com/playlist/6A4AS…

I don’t feel Figma is at fault. A good manager would have pushed back. It’s easy to blame tools but its really the leadership and the org culture that’s the problem here 🚩

@Kenneth I read both. All points to shareholder value.

@vikxlp productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-layoffs-l…

Layoffs tell you a lot about the leaders of an org. So I would ask you to read this completely. You will see a lot more of these, but rarely will you see any with this level of humanity

New day, new design tool on.design/claim?ref=vika…

@sanketpath @sahilk Soon Netflix, Youtube & Instagram will put Claude Code in their competition list with sleep

@sahilk The new Slack. Always online.

🥲🥲🥲

Why doom scroll when you can ...

@ponnappa Design has to be part of the culture and mindset. Especially in B2B, design takes a backseat. Distribution and financials push the sales. Design is seen as a cost not a value. On the other hand we have Stripe, Linear & Vercel.

microsoft under nadella is a whole new beast from the microsoft i grew up with - but one thing hasn't changed - the core products still have a shitty user experience. using teams for the first time and boy i thought slack was a turd but teams, oh boy.

be kikkoman start a soy sauce company in the year 1600 make soy sauce for 420 years keep making soy sauce for another 420 years in outer space people still want soy sauce

Indian liberals. Full show here: linktr.ee/vgrover

When privilege pretends to be economics: Why Deepinder Goyal gets it royally wrong On January 1, Deepinder Goyal decided to welcome 2026 by going all guns blazing on X. Over 4.5 lakh delivery partners, he said, delivered more than 75 lakh orders on December 31 – unaffected by strike calls. Proof, according to him, that the gig economy is working just fine. And if you think otherwise, well, you've probably been misled by "vested interests". If I were writing this as a glowing investor note or a LinkedIn post, about India's unstoppable startup story, I could have stopped right there. Maybe added a chart or two. Maybe thrown in the word 'disruption' somewhere. And then moved on. But alas, that's not how realty works. Because once you slow down and actually read what Goyal is saying, a very different picture emerges – one where desperation is dressed up as choice, a very high attrition rate is sold as flexibility, and structural problems are reframed as moral guilt felt by the consumers. In my analysis, I do something very unfashionable: I take Goyal at his word – and then deconstruct it, point by point. Why "people keep showing up, so the system must be fair" is a deeply flawed argument. How high attrition is being repackaged as evidence that gig work is a matter of choice – proof that it is merely a “gig” and not meant to be anyone’s long-term job – rather than being acknowledged for what it really is: economically unsustainable. Why blaming "society" for traffic violations conveniently lets platforms off the hook. How averages on earnings hide the real costs riders bear – EMIs, depreciation of vehicles and smartphones, risk. Why comparing delivery partners to IT freshers is a false equivalence. From Industrial England to American cotton to the Silicon Valley to Gurugram, markets rarely correct power imbalances on their own. They need scrutiny, regulation, and pressure from outside. India’s gig economy undoubtedly delivers speed and convenience. What is also delivers – quietly, efficiently – is insecurity. Safety risks. Capital costs borne by workers. And a language carefully designed to make all of this sound normal. The real question is not whether the gig economy creates work, but whether it creates work that is economically viable once risk, costs, and churn, are honestly accounted for. My column @newslaundry newslaundry.com/2026/01/03/whe… If you plan to abuse, please try keeping it civil 🤣

Long post: I'm in the thick of multiple (sometimes heated) discussions on Whatsapp groups about Zomato & gig economy workers, and I'm fed up of repeating points, so I'll put all my arguments here. And maybe burn a few bridges in the process... 1. Disclosure: I am an Eternal and Info Edge shareholder, and have been for a few years. It has been a good bet for me, and the things I'm saying are despite having a vested interest in the success of these companies. 2. Why are they speaking up now? It's rare to see Deepinder and Sanjeev Bikhchandani speak with such passion about this issue, despite the fact that the issues that Raghav Chadha is raising are NOT new. We've heard them over the years from other politicians, and from multiple gig economy associations (esp Telangana). Issues are not new, strikes are not new. What is new here is the impact on the stock price that the strike has had, and the political support that the strike has received from Raghav Chadha. The fear that this might blow up into something bigger from a regulatory standpoint is real, and that will have a tangible impact on the bottomline. Eternal/Zomato has already lost a significant amount of market value (12.89% in 3 months, 5.47% in a month) and is at a crazy PE of 1400+, which means that if investors get scared, it can plummet. The stock price is fragile. At that scale, Info Edge's 12.38% stake in Zomato is impacted and can be impacted by this. Bring in regulation and it there's a clear business impact because Zomato operates on fine margins, and tightly controls gig worker and restaurant payouts. Can the BJP say it won't support gig economy workers? Politically, it's a no win situation for Zomato and Info Edge, and they're on their own. And it's their money at stake. Update: it was point out to me, and I agree... correlation is not causation. 3. How much do they pay gig economy workers? Only Eternal can give clear data, but it is true that it's a fine margin. Eternal has granular control over its contribution margins, and exercises multiple levers (increasing average order value, increasing restaurant revenue, reducing delivery payouts) to achieve profitability and increase profits. It's an incredibly well run business. A chart they published in 2024 which explained how they control margins made me choose to invest in them. Two things: 3a. For every anecdote about a delivery worker struggling, Eternal can you tell you stories of success. They probably will. 3b. Averages do not do justice here, neither does the median situation. I'll explain this later. 4. Gig economy workers have very little negotiating power: It's a buyers market. I've said this many times before: Platforms and aggregators are in the business of increasing fragmentation and monetizing aggregation, such that no single player has sufficient individual negotiating power. Delivery workers have no choice but to unionise and strike, and then it's a game of blink (for the lack of a better word). 5. Our country's burgeoning employment problem (and poorly run education system) is at fault here: we're producing poorly skilled and educated masses, and not enough employment opportunities, so people have little choice. Social upliftment is difficult. We're seeing a rise in personal debt used for consumption, not assets. Last year, FMCG company struggled with rural sales, and I'm not sure how much of their sales this year has been front-loaded and how much is demand driven. Income inequality is increasing rapidly. We're largely mirroring South Korea's experience with debt ridden chaebols, and a largely successful startup ecosystem to attract investment in the country, so no one will mess with this (unless you're running gambling and calling it gaming). But I digress...No one is going to escape poverty (not destitution but poverty) by becoming a gig economy worker. But do they have choice? There's enough supply and demand is controlled by a handful of large "employers" in Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto, Uber, Ola, Rapido and the ecommerce aggregators that also do deliveries. 6. Is this employment: Of course, this is not employment. All labour platforms learned this from Uber: delivery workers are not employees. There's no minimum wage, there's no guaranteed social security, there's very little accountability of the type that labour laws provide for. It is labour arbitrage by creating a construct where delivery workers are not employees, they're not "entrepreneurs". It's a halfway house. 7. There's also massive externalisation of cost: vehicles, fuel, safety. Add those costs to the P&L of these companies and they probably won't survive. They know this. Government has actually failed by allowing the halfway house of employment-entrepreneurship as a construct. But government has failed to provide adequate education and employment too, so they can't kill this. Not easy for them either. 8. But we don't want unions: They're not employees so can they even unionise? I don't think so. They have unions and associations, but to be honest, I don't want communism and unionism. I'm a capitalist, but when there's market failure, regulation needs to step in for capitalism to succeed sustainably. At least that's how I see "rational self interest" in objectivism. But I digress again: there appears to be market failure on the supply side, and it is given power imbalance, the complete control that platforms have, and the risk of exploitation (I've published recordings of Uber and Ola drivers a decade ago complaining to the co that because they reduced commissions, they're unable to pay loans and will commit suicide), there needs to be regulation to address this power imbalance in the industry itself. Zomato can give you data on how the average delivery worker fares, or even the median. However, the role of regulation here to ensure that there's a minimum threshold of income such that there isn't exploitation. The real question is: will the platforms be able to survive that, given that, at best, their profitability is on precarious ground? 9. Shouldn't competition solve for this? It should but network effects are already at play, with limited platforms. There is demand side capture with limited players, and with each platform looking to reduce costs, move to profitability, with Zepto looking to list, Swiggy having recently listed, this is now going to be more about maximising wealth for founders and investors. While there isn't cartelisation, and there is competition between them, I'm not sure if there is competition on the supply side. No one is trying to pull delivery workers from the other, is there? Not everyone can pull off a Rapido, and ONDC isn't really working out, is it? 10. Lastly, I usually avoid commenting on people, but something triggered me here: I see Deepinder's tweet about how the delivery business has exposed us to poverty in our cities as deflection, and frankly it reads like AI slop. It just feels artificial. We see poverty every day in our cities, on our roads, and many people employ those who who live in slums, bastis and cramped colonies with illegal construction and poor sanitation. It's not that we haven't used the Delhi metro or local trains in Mumbai. Deepinder isn't even acknowledging the problem that is being raised. It reads like deflection. Sanjeev's comment on Raghav, talking about where he got married and who he got married to is despicable trash talk, and unbecoming of someone like Sanjeev. He's better than that. It's lazy ad-hominem and he's smarter than that. You don't need to be poor to have sympathy for the poor, or try to help them. There needs to be some semblance of humility here, especially when you have so much power. Sure, Raghav is a politician, but politicians have a great sense of what can be a compelling issue for them to raise, but the fact that a politician is raising it shouldn't deflect us from the problem at hand. It's also true that the AAP government was in power in Delhi for 12 years and they didn't do anything substantive for gig economy workers in Delhi. What have they done in Punjab? In one group someone has asked whether there is another business behind getting this issue raised, as in is anyone targeting Zomato... again, that doesn't change the fact that the issue is real, and has been real or raised for over a decade, and there is governance failure, and market failure on the supply side. This needs to be solved, and deflecting is going to just kick the ball down the road. But then I guess that's what will happen here again.

Such succinct lines summarising bad leaders & leadership. So true! karbonbased.io/posts/2026/01/…

These 3 kids are imitating The Bee Gees. It actually gets better and better the longer you watch it.

I'm looking forward to playing with the Cursor visual editor, but I think design tools often whiff on understanding where the actual labor lies in product design. It's only partially the surface.

In the early 1980s, the watchmakers of Switzerland faced an existential problem: a new technology that produced watches cheaper, more accurate, and functionally superior in every way to anything they made at the time. I wrote something for @worksinprogmag about the fightback - and what it says about human craftsmanship in a world that sometimes feels it might no longer need it. worksinprogress.co/issue/watch-me…

If I have any local followers in Cochin/Kochi who might be up for a cold drink on this hot Kerala afternoon, please let me know. No promises, but I will DM you if I can get free! Eager to better understand this city from a local’s perspective.

@Kenneth very few can unite the team and design community in such a way. First condition, your work has to affect enough.

When was the last time someone saw this kind of buzz around design leadership changing?

@sleepyhead148 WTF man! Why can't we have decent non-action flicks in theaters.

So Wake Up Dead Man isn't getting an India release. Speaks volumes about the kinda movies that we get.

@sahilk @sanketpath +1 Where: Still Coffee, Indira Nagar

@sanketpath @vikxlp when

.@terminus is such a well designed app. It’s so cool that I can spin up ideas, fix existing bugs, or just plan something new using Claude Code on my Raspberry Pi at home, while I’m out waiting in an hour long queue!