Adith Podhar 🇮🇳 | adith.eth

📢 Gemba Capital 2024 Year in Review 📢 - Our portfolio by numbers (since inception) - Investments in 2024 - Fund I Portfolio Highlights - Sectors to watch out for in 2025 link.medium.com/aSgAx9kamQb @GembaCapital @KaminiS3 @VipulRawalHere @AnupreetLamba @ThEbmr @GovindKL @ShashankRG23 #investing #yearinreview #VentureCapital #microvc #startups

The new Gemba Capital website is the most honest version of our story, who we are, how we think about backing founders at the earliest stages, and a look at the portfolio we're proud of. And if it resonates we'd love to hear from you.

𝗪𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘂𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 :) We've been heads-down building and backing founders, learning from them, and figuring out who we are as a fund. It felt like the right time to put that on paper.

People kept begging the MLA to clean their filthy area, but he kept throwing empty promises while the garbage rotted. So when patience ran out, the public gave him a reality check - they dumped the entire neighborhood’s trash right outside his house. Prime example: modern problems require modern solutions.

I'm amazed at his calmness, that car is worth more than $300k

My parents follow a standard procedure anytime they’re driving to unknown territory: -Dad drives -Mom pulls up directions on her phone -Mom calls out turns along the way This inevitably leads to constant, petty bickering throughout the ride. “You didn’t tell me where to turn!” “That’s because you’re driving too fast!” “I don’t know what 'right there' means! Tell me the name of the street!” “You keep talking and I can’t pay attention to the map!” And so on and so on. (And so on.) For years, they have done this while a large, Bluetooth-enabled, navigation-ready screen is positioned inches away, in their nice Lexus SUV, ready at any time to connect to a phone which would then conveniently display the route on screen. I once offered to set this up for them. They quickly hand-waved the idea and proceeded as usual. Married 40 years and still going strong. Marital foundations are built on bizarre customs that outsiders simply cannot understand. Never interrupt a bickering couple while they’re enacting one of the routines that holds it all together.

If you go to Jim Corbett national park, there are higher chances of spotting Jim Corbett than spotting tigers.

You have been SOLD everything...without u even realising it...sitar shows, indian sneaker brands, new cuisines, bad movies, sour doughs, organic cotton, autotune singers, overhyped concerts....the list goes on.

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era. Almost nobody understood what he said. Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.” Not tech startups. The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees. The businesses that actually run the physical economy. They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it. Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.” Software is dead. The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever. AI ends the contract. The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business. But customized by whom. The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is. Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?” That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves. Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer. Let them fight. Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero. Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built. It collects where the brain meets the business. Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic. Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy. Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates. Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue. That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born. You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system. The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in. 33 million companies are standing in the dark right now. Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.

This.

@VishalBhargava5 @TVMohandasPai It's illegal hawkers..there is encroachment on footpaths..u cannot even walk

@TVMohandasPai Andheri is a disaster. Completely rotten governance in that locality.

The tragedy of our cities. World class buildings, third class roads and footpaths in many areas. Private quality, public disaster driven by deep corruption! Was in Mumbai today at Andheri-totally shocked at bad roads,huge debris on road, slow work, poor quality of new concrete road, never ending works….

In venture, portfolio fragmentation is the price you pay for lack of fidelity. The future of venture is concentration.

@pbshgthm I experienced the same when I moved to BLR from Mumbai. But trust the city, it will take time, and you will start liking it for many other things.

2 months in Bangalore and I miss Mumbai. I miss the people. Every small interaction here feels like a negotiation. Auto drivers, packers, old tenants. Everyone’s trying to squeeze something out of you. In Mumbai a cab driver sees it’s hot and just turns on the AC. Here you have to ask for it like it’s a personal favour. That tells you everything.

So proud of @getplumhq and the entire team here. Congratulations @thesanerguy and @tanish2k Happy to get a ringside view since 2019 when @GembaCapital participated in the pre-seed round. Onwards and upwards !

One of the best reads today for me. I come from a traditional marwari biz family and have observed many people in our community. Top 2 reasons I could observe and attribute for the difference between average uncles and really successful uncles are: 1) Better and faster at mental math 2) Excellent memory and recall of people, past transactions and numbers It helps them make decisions faster. They become better negotiaters, with supporting logic and hence eventually better deal closers.

Recently my son asked me why he needs to do mental math when calculators exist. I told him if he doesn't, he will make irrational decisions throughout his life. Let me explain. Say you see two packs of snacks. A 500g pack for ₹100, and a 200g pack for ₹45. Which one should you buy? The math is not at all hard, but people who are scared of mental math will not do it. This is not such an important decision that you pull out a calculator for it. So you make the decision on vibes - say ₹100 "looks too high", or that the smaller pack costs "less than half of the biggest one" or some such. The problem isn't that you made a poor decision on snacks. It is that if you do this repeatedly, you train your mind to make decisions on vibes. Over time your reasoning muscle atrophies - so you start relying even more on vibes. Before you know it, you are taking even big decisions on vibes. Should I rent or buy a house? Let's decide based on "EMI affordability", not rental yield. Should I invest in this IPO? I have heard of the company's brand so I'm all in. It isn't only financial or quantitative decisions either - in my mind the math muscle and the logic muscle are closely correlated, so a decline in one certainly affects the other. Like the Arab who let the camel's nose inside the tent, fear of math is the first step towards thoughtlessness, and needs to be nipped in the bud. Intellectual laziness starts with snack prices.

@thetanmay BLR has the bars but Mumbai has the crowd and the vibes :)

Bangalore bar none has the most interesting restaurant and bar scene in India

Gear School road in Bellandur. Fully encroached by illegal hawkers , shops extending on the footpath and dark stores parking all their bikes on the foot path. It's not even walkable, by adults..forget children and senior citizens..pls take some immediate action. #GreaterBengaluruAuthority #Bengaluru #PedestrianSafety

Bengaluru south city corporation | Walking space reclaimed! 🚶‍♂️✨ A successful encroachment clearance drive was held in Vishwaspriya Layout, Begur today. Footpaths are back for pedestrians, making our streets safer for seniors and kids. 🧹🛡️ #GreaterBengaluruAuthority #Begur #Bengaluru #PedestrianSafety #VishwaspriyaLayout

Some teams don’t just ship features - they rethink experiences. @flicktv_in is one of them. By turning short-form viewing into something social and alive, they are proving that storytelling doesn’t have to be passive. We are glad to support a part of their journey💜

Lovable hit $200M ARR in <1 year with 100 employees. @ElenaVerna who heads growth there says 60-70% of traditional growth tactics don't work in AI. The new playbook: - Need to re-capture product-market fit every 3 months - Give away product for free a lot to capture word of mouth & virality (beats paid ads) - Build and ship in public leveraging founder + employee socials - "Minimum lovable product" not MVP (need to create product delight)

@blrcitytraffic this vehicle is parked opposite Prestige Jade Pavilion Bellandur everyday on the wrong side, converting a two lane road to one lane. Can you please look into it?