Nikhil

bullish on the PM role quietly becoming the most important role in tech again when anyone can build, the person who decides WHAT to build becomes the bottleneck

Wonder who the wife will be 🐟👀

Scrolling is on the decline More charts: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

No winners from India!

Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Rebranding to 'forward deployed engineer' from 'consultant' one of the great all time recruiting whammies."

This is genuinely the worst economy to hate your job in.

No one has hurt the tiny car culture in India than this dude

AI-native software engineering teams operate very differently than traditional teams. The obvious difference is that AI-native teams use coding agents to build products much faster, but this leads to many other changes in how we operate. For example, some great engineers now play broader roles than just writing code. They are partly product managers, designers, sometimes marketers. Further, small teams who work in the same office, where they can communicate face-to-face, can move incredibly quickly. Because we can now build fast, a greater fraction of time must be spent deciding what to build. To deal with this project-management bottleneck, some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) ratios downward from, say, 8:1 to as low as 1:1. But we can do even better: If we have one PM who decides what to build and one engineer who builds it, the communication between them becomes a bottleneck. This is why the fastest-moving teams I see tend to have engineers who know how to do some product work (and, optionally, some PMs who know how to do some engineering work). When an engineer understands users and can make decisions on what to build and build it directly, they can execute incredibly quickly. I’ve seen engineers successfully expand their roles to including making product decisions, and PMs expand their roles to building software. The tech industry has more engineers than PMs, but both are promising paths. If you are an engineer, you’ll find it useful to learn some product management skills, and if you’re a PM, please learn to build! Looking beyond the product-management bottleneck, I also see bottlenecks in design, marketing, legal compliance, and much more. When we speed up coding 10x or 100x, everything else becomes slow in comparison. For example, some of my teams have built great features so quickly that the marketing organization was left scrambling to figure out how to communicate them to users — a marketing bottleneck. Or when a team can build software in a day that the legal department needs a week to review, that’s a legal compliance bottleneck. In this way, agentic coding isn’t just changing the workflow of software engineering, it’s also changing all the teams around it. When smaller, AI-enabled teams can get more done, generalists excel. Traditional companies need to pull together people from many specialties — engineering, product management, design, marketing, legal, etc. — to execute projects and create value. This has resulted in large teams of specialists who work together. But if a team of 2 persons is to get work done that require 5 different specialities, then some of those individuals must play roles outside a single speciality. In some small teams, individuals do have deep specializations. For example, one might be a great engineer and another a great PM. But they also understand the other key functions needed to move a project forward, and can jump into thinking through other kinds of problems as needed. Of course, proficiency with AI tools is a big help, since it helps us to think through problems that involve different roles. Even in a two-person team, to move fast, communication bottlenecks also must be minimized. This is why I value teams that work in the same location. Remote teams can perform well too, but the highest speed is achieved by having everyone in the room, able to communicate instantaneously to solve problems. This post focuses on AI-native teams with around 2-10 persons, but not everything can be done by a small team. I'll address the coordination of larger teams in the future. I realize these shifts to job roles are tough to navigate for many people. At the same time, I am encouraged that individuals and small teams who are willing to learn the relevant skills are now able to get far more done than was possible before. This is the golden age of learning and building! [Original text: deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issu… ]

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India’s Snabbit closes $56M round as investor interest in on-demand home services heats up techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/ind…

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Need to start doing this in Bangalore and Mumbai

One Indian founder who doesn’t get talked about enough

We are a whole generation with impeccable home decor and architecture taste but no fkn home to afford

🚨Mumbai dosa chain Benne in funding talks with Ranjan Pai's Claypond Capital, valued at Rs 350 crore The valuation reflects a relatively steep increase for a two-year-old cafe chain focused on dosa, idli, coffee and other South Indian offerings. It competes closely with The Rameshwaram Cafe, a prominent south Indian restaurant which is expanding to cities outside Bengaluru and Nikhil Kamath-backed Cafe Amudham, among others. Benne (which means butter in Kannada) was founded by Akhil Iyer and Shriya Narayan, a husband-wife duo with no prior experience in hospitality – while he's a film producer, she is a psychologist. The two, originally from Bengaluru, struggled to find an authentic Davangere-style benne dosa in Mumbai and decided to recreate it themselves. After several iterations, including some learnings directly from dosa makers in Bengaluru, they opened Benne in Bandra around mid-2024. What began two years ago as a modest, 12-seater nook tucked into a Bandra bylane has morphed into a full-blown urban phenomenon. Today, across three oulets in the city, the "Benne effect" is measured in two-hour wait times, a relentless carousel of viral reels on social media, and a front door that acts as a magnet for the city's A-list. Early momentum for the cafe was amplified by high-profile celebrity footfall. Visits from Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh in its initial days drew large crowds and heightened public curiosity around the brand. The buzz intensified when cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma were also spotted at the cafe, reinforcing its growing popularity. Within weeks of opening, Benne had built a cult following thanks to its reliance not on traditional marketing, but through storytelling and social media. With @Goenka_Tushar1 moneycontrol.com/news/business/…

Finally, Tesla too has learned that Indians aren't swayed by a great brand but want great VALUE. 3-row Tesla Model YL with captain seats, AWD and a 680km range is fantastically priced for what all it offers. autocarindia.com/car-news/tesla…

Social medias ranked by the IQ of their users 1. Reddit 2. Twitter 3. YouTube 4. Instagram 5. TikTok 6. Facebook 7. Reddit 8. LinkedIn

Employee got put on a TIP (Token Improvement Plan)