Poulami Bhowmick

Things that don’t make any sense: Coffee, matcha and movie prices are the same in New York and Mumbai. How can a market with 3x less disposable income/propensity be priced the same?

I wrote a $10M check after a 15-minute meeting with @lqiao @FireworksAI_HQ. It is one of the easiest investment decisions I have made in a 10-year investing career. 1. Team: The founding team is the best in the world and have worked together for years. 2. Market: They are in an insanely large and fast-growing market. 3. Traction: I get in trouble for saying triple, triple, double, double is dead and it is. I can invest in Fireworks which has scaled to $1BN in ARR in 4 years. Enough said. 4. Hiring Ability: The single best founders are able to hire talent that you did not think was possible to acquire. George Hu is one of the legendary operators of the last decade, former President of Salesforce. His joining shows the scale of ambition and quality of the team. 5. Upside: Do you believe AI will be transformative to the way we live and work? Do you believe we will live in a world of many models, both horizontal and specialised? If so, Fireworks has the chance to be a $500BN company. This check literally would not have happened without @MattEvantic. I owe you one amigo!

i usually support france but rooting for spain today bc england can beat spain but i dont think england can beat france

Looking at France lose to Spain and realizing how powerful Cabo Verde was

Weird trend these days. People are romanticizing village life - green fields, fresh air, and all that...Some are even deciding to move there. Honestly, they literally have no idea what village life is actually like. Always thought how unaware and innocent these people are. Let me walk you through the reality of village life. Indian villages still have the strongest caste discrimination, gender inequality, religious divisions, character assassination, family politics, generations-old feuds, land disputes, and social hierarchies that decide how people treat you. That’s where people have been fighting over the same piece of land for 30 years. Families don’t talk to each other for generations. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody judges everybody. Everybody has an opinion about how you should live your life. And the craziest part - The same people romanticizing village life have probably spent two days there on a vacation. They saw green fields, fresh air, a pond, made a few Instagram reels, came back, and now they’re telling everyone - This is real life 🤦‍♂️ No. That’s the picnic version of village life. Real village life starts after the camera is turned off. If you actually move there, you’ll regret that decision in less than a few months. The village is where centuries of social conditioning are still the most visible. Cities are far from perfect- But cities at least give people a chance to reinvent themselves. To build an identity beyond the family they were born into. Come out of this imaginary paradise that doesn’t exist. Indian villages are not like Switzerland villages.

Founders: Calendar invite naming sets expectations: ❌ 'Demo of [Your Product]' ❌ '[Your Company] Presentation' ✅ '[Their Co] <> [Your Co] - Discovery' ✅ '[Their Co] / [Your Co] - Initial Conversation' Signal: This is mutual evaluation, not a pitch.

@viraj_sheth It has boomed but some places should have more beaches and more trees. Don't want concrete there

genuinely very surprised that despite being 1 hour away by ferry and on the other side of south bombay, alibaug doesn’t already have top notch infra and an incredibly booming real estate market.

Berthe Morisot (1881-1895) "Girl in a boat with geese", c.1889

We can pontificate on #Twisha's death, but we all know  the one brutal truth that killed her : the obsessive premium we attach to a male child. The lifelong social privilege of a “son” creates collateral damage for every woman alive in India . This desire cuts across class, caste, and religion alike. Twisha is dead. But her story survives in the collective, generational silence of women who endured but survived. women who, in some form, exist in each of our homes.

Today my mother said something to me that felt like it travelled across generations of women. After hearing about the Twisha Sharma case, she became very quiet on the phone. Then she said softly: “You know… my mother once told me the same thing.” And I stopped speaking. She told me that when she was younger, my nani had once said to her: “I would rather have my daughter back in her childhood room than hear people whispering over her dead body.” My mother said she never forgot that sentence. And today, decades later, she found herself saying the same thing to me. Perhaps this is how women pass down love. Not in jewellery. Not in recipes. Not in wedding saris. But in emergency exits. In teaching daughters that home should always remain a place they can return to without shame. My mother said something else today that broke my heart a little. She said: “Aakanksha, you married very late as per Indian Standards. Do you know why I never pressured you?” And honestly? I did know. But I wanted to hear her say it. She said: “Because I was always okay even if you never married.” Not because she did not want happiness for me. But because she never believed marriage was the sole proof of a woman’s successful life. She watched me build companies. Survive grief. Move countries. Sit beside hospital beds. Feed strangers during COVID. Break ceilings nobody in our family had even imagined touching. To her, I was already whole. Marriage was never a rescue mission. And perhaps that is why when I finally did marry, I married from a place of peace and not panic. Not because society’s timer was ringing loudly in my ears. Not because relatives were becoming restless. Not because I thought being single made me incomplete. But because love arrived gently. And because my mother never raised me to believe I had to tolerate fear in exchange for companionship. Today she kept saying: “If you are ever unhappy, come home.” No drama. No conditions. No “what will people say.” No “adjust beta.” No “this happens in marriage.” Just: “Come home.” And there is something profoundly healing about knowing the women before you fought quietly so that you could inherit not just strength… …but permission. Permission to leave. Permission to survive. Permission to choose life over appearances. I think that may be one of the purest forms of motherhood there is.

100 years old and still the coolest person alive. Happy birthday, Sir David!

Here's what worries us most about the election results, particularly in #WestBengal - every political party will now adopt BJP's template and it's a race to the bottom. If #BJP is criticised for bulldozing Bills in #Parliament, it gives examples of when #Congress did it. When people lament loss of freedoms under BJP, it points to the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. The bottomline is this - once bad precedents are set, given a chance, every party would exploit it. Every party claims to be a defender of democracy when in Opposition, BJP also did. Now BJP has set a template for gaming elections - gerrymandering in Assam, SIR in Bengal, polarisation everywhere, breaking up parties, unleashing govt agencies against opponents, compromised institutions. Given the opportunity, how can any party resist the temptation of following the same playbook to grab and consolidate power? Elections may never be free and fair now. #RIPDemocracy This is why it's important not to celebrate such bad precedents as 'masterstroke' and 'chanakyaneeti'. Support for any political party shouldn't blind us to the fact that systems once corrupted are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make whole again! In the long run, everyone suffers.

My autistic cousin tried wine for the first time and said it had notes of rust, wood chips, and asbestos. He says he will not be trying it again 😂😂😂 Please guess what wine he had.

Prannoy Roy time and again coming out on the top no matter the channel he is engaged with is testament to the fact that class is forever, everything else just noise

Day 2 of helping this girl get a job. Turns out "open to anything globally" is a very bad strategy. Growth/strategy/partnerships. Something real. #Europe #London #France Link: linkedin.com/posts/poulami-…

Help this girl get a job. No really. 60 days of posting about this starts now! linkedin.com/posts/poulami-… #europe #london #hiring #WorkMode #job

Introducing Lovable for more general tasks. Lovable has always been for building apps. Today it also becomes your data scientist, your business analyst, your deck builder, and your marketing assistant. This is a big step toward what Lovable is becoming: a general-purpose co-founder that can do anything. See examples below.

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

No debt Ideal weight 8 hours of sleep Mental health on track Right nutrition Zero Alcohol This was my peak I was 8

European diplomats when war breaks out outside of standard 9-5 working hours: