Siddharth Shrivas

India has a huge problem. Our e-commerce Industry is littered with white-labled products being sold at ridiculously high prices. This means you save less money, and can buy fewer products. To fix this, I created actuallyfair.in It is a consumer to manufacturer platform with a selection of premium products of the same quality as brands, but at 1/10th of the price. Check it out :)

You need to be honest and kind. You can either be right or be right and effective. If you want to be effective, you need to layer honesty with kindness.

No one likes being sold to. Humans are hard wired to avoid being sold to. The best way to do sales is to tell the truth. Most people will see right through your sales tactics. What matters is credibility. People will buy from you if they trust you. People will trust you if you are authentic and tell the truth even if it isn’t ideal for you. If your pitch doesn’t resonate with someone, move on. Keep your offer as close as it can be to the version you believe in the most and is the most honest - and sell that.

Sam Walton made himself accessible to any associate in the company. Anyone could fly down to bentonville and meet the CEO of the then $50 billion company and voice their concerns/opinions. If Sam felt that they were right, he would side with them over their managers. He thought that if he called his associates partners, they should have the right to meet him for 15mins if they are upset.

The more of your profits you share with your associates, the more larger your profits grow in total size. In case of Walmart as a company, the single most important interaction was between the store associates and customers. The happier management kept the associates, the better their interactions were with the customers and the more the customers bought / stayed loyal. You don’t want pissed off associates and customers who only walk into your store once.

What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.

You raise your seed round.....now what? The first thing you do when $1-2M hits the bank account is open the app, look at the number, take the screenshot, smile, send it to your family group chat to make your dickhead brother jealous....then close it. You just got 18-24 months if you're disciplined, 8-10 if you're stupid. Firstly, Don't change your fucking life. Pay yourself enough to not stress about rent. $80-120k depending on city, even lower if you can stomach it. If you pay yourself $350k after a $2M raise.....chances are, you will not last. You're not running a company just yet.....it's an experiment...one that will end quickly if you prioritize short term gains > long term greatness. Same with office. You don't need one. The "we need a real space for the culture" is bullshit. Work from home. Your only job for the first 6 months is to talk to users and ship quickly. If you raised $2M and you're not doing (minimum) 5 customer calls a week as a founder........your priorities are messed up. You need to understand as quickly as possible if the people who use your product, come back without you begging them to do so! Almost everything else is a vanity exercise. Series A timeline in 2026 is 600+ days from seed. Less than 15% of seed-funded startups ever raise an A. So track burn weekly. Know your runway to the day. Every dollar should ship product or facilitates customer feedback . If a tool, hire, or expense doesn't do that, stop it. Conference tickets? No. PR firm? Absolutely fucking not. "Brand consultant" don't be stupid. Logo redesign? GTFOH. 72% of seed stage burn is "people". 74% of startup failures involve premature scaling. You raise, you feel pressure to "build the team," you hire 4 people in 90 days, burn goes from $40k/mo to $180k/mo, the new hires don't have product to work on because there isn't one yet, you spend your time managing them instead of talking to users, runway evaporates, you're back fundraising at month 9 with worse metrics than when you started. Stay 2-3 founders + AI for as long as humanly possible. The teams crushing right now have 4 people doing what 15 used to do just 24 months ago. When/If you do hire.......focus on builders, forget managers. Focus on operators, not "credentials". If you're not using AI for code (Cursor, Claude Code), customer support, sales prospecting, content, ops, brand, recruitment vetting......your competition is winning. Tech is commodity now. GTM and data are the moats. Use AI to compress everything that isn't either of those things. Try to avoid giving advisors equity. An "advisor" (who you mistakenly thought would enhance "credibility optics") who takes 1%, for doing absolutely nothing, is the same prick that costs you seven figures in a future round. Model dilution before signing every SAFE. Don't talk to VCs for 6 months. (forget the "always raising" mindset for now) Keep relationships warm with periodic updates but take the foot of the gas slightly. I know. I'm a VC saying this. But I mean it. The gravitational, distractional pull of the next round, will fuck up your focus harder than anything else. Send your existing investors a 5 line monthly email. Don't go to investor dinners. Don't "build relationships for the A." If you're talking to VCs more than building, again, your priorities are misjudged and it will show up against your development goals. The money will fuck with your head. People will ultimately treat you differently. Nobody really prepares you for that. You'll get DMs from people you haven't talked to since school. You'll feel the urge to announce, to LinkedIn post, to look like a "real founder." You'll also be lonelier than ever. You raised, your "friends" think you've made it, you can't tell them you're scared shitless and don't know if it'll work. I would recommend finding 1-2 founders.....who are 6 months ahead of you, and text them weekly. That's effective therapy (at least from my personal experience). Last thing. The party ended when the money hit. Now you have a shot and a clock.....the only thing that matters is whether you ship something people genuinely want before that timer runs out. Most people who give you advice in the next 6 months are probably going to try selling you something. Filter everything ruthlessly. Trust your user feedback and trust the burn rate. Now go build and say "no"...... consistently. Godspeed.

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." — Andy Grove Adam Foroughi, founder of Applovin, wakes up paranoid everyday: “I feel like most successful people are paranoid. I wake up at the exact same time every day. I do the same exact morning routine every day. I check the same stats. It just gets me going.

Current AI custom prompt: You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can. Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument — restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.

Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want coaches to analyse every single play of theirs so that they can be perfect.

Michael Jordan doubted his abilities as a basketball player initially. He didn’t think he could compete with people at the pro level after high school. Only after he started playing with the, he realised that he had skills his competitors didn’t and said to himself “Maybe I can play with these guys.”

X auto paid for my tick for another year. Guess I have no choice but to go viral on this platform now 🫡

@harnidhish Nicee 🫡

MY BOOK IS ON BLINKIT!!!! Get your copy (on an insane discount, I might add!) IT’S BOOK LAUNCH DAY!!!!!!!!!!!

The most important piece of advice I’ve ever heard for anyone trying to achieve something difficult in life : “I was learning more and more about the mind and the immense power it has over the body. (My competitors) weren’t mentally prepared for intense championship training. I knew the secret. Concentrate while you are training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind. When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I knew if I was concerned about bills or girls, I would only make marginal progress. I understood the important of a positive attitude and having your mind tuned in. I began looking at the difference between me and other body builders. The biggest difference was that most body builders did not think “I’m going to be a winner.” They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining. Most people I observed couldn’t make astonishing advances because they didn’t have faith in themselves. They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realise it. That destroyed them. It has always been my belief that if you’re training for nothing, you’re wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn’t put in the kind of effort I did, because they never thought they could make it. Starting with that premise, they didn’t. It is in the mind. You talk yourself into it, you tell yourself you’re going to be the best.” - Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold painted his office room with dozens of positive affirmations. He was literally brainwashing himself into not giving up and working hard. He wrote “Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.” “A man of passion rides a mad horse.” The mind is a powerful place and what you feed it affects you in a powerful way. Arnold ended up winning Mr. Universe in 1967.

How bad do you want it? Arnold Schwarzenegger studied his monthly photographs with a magnifying glass. He measured his muscles daily and noted every eight, and half inch growths. He paid attention to every aspect of his life and fine tuned it in a way that helped his ultimate goal. He learned from Reggie Park, his mentor but famously said “There is no formula that you just do such and such to get a certain result. You need to find out what works best for you.”

where to hire the best filmmakers in mumbai? looking for a full time in-house content head with TASTE + skill.

The biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders is AI. But the most underpriced opportunity is probably non-AI ideas. So if you have a good non-AI idea, go for it, because everyone else is going to overlook it.

Apollo 10 to 11 took about two months Artemis 2 to 3 will take one to two years Back then the tech was primitive and the risk was real but they moved fast because the space race vs. the soviets was pushing them Today we have far better systems, more safety and more resources and yet everything moves slower At some point you realise speed is not about capability it is about urgency When there is real competition people compress time When there is none even the best teams stretch it

@Suchetkm @TheWTFund @nikhilkamathcio All the best Suchet!

After 2+ years, I am moving on from @TheWTFund & NKSquared The last 2 years have been a real education on how startups & venture capital work Thank you to @nikhilkamathcio, Naman Lahoti and the rest of the team for creating a high velocity, high impact environment I got to work closely with one of my idols, and also got to work with exceptional, high potential founders, many of whom we backed through WTFund, who are already making their mark. Working with these founders, all of them roughly my age, has sharpened my own sense of direction A shoutout to @mal_arshia, @Vivek__kamath & @harnidhish for making the work worth showing up for As for next steps, I will be beginning my next chapter as an operator. More on that soon!