Z47

5/5 His closing line, after Avnish asks what he'd tell founders still deciding: "Don't overthink, start. Most decisions are reversible. Few are one way." The 5/85 split he ran on his team is in here too. So is the ESOP wall. Watch the new Unstarted episode here: youtu.be/8o24ugxlt14 @VikramV23 | @avnish_bajaj | Anish Pail

4/5 Then Exponential's cheque came in. He paid off the debt. Found his way back to the discipline he started with. His brand framework now: "A brand is the expectation a customer has from you." Not ads. Not awareness. Not Amitabh Bachchan dancing on TV.

3/5 Years later, with $10 million in the bank, Vedang Patel made every mistake the ZIRP era invited founders to make. "In two years, I made all the mistakes I had to make. Money is such a luxury to make mistakes." The mistakes were expensive. 15-20 CR in personal-guarantee debt was expensive!

2/5 The pivot wasn't a brilliant idea. It was a question he asked himself, sitting in his cubicle: "I looked at the guy in my office who had an MBA. And I thought - is that what I want to do? There was a resounding no, from all sections of my brain." He calls it the Sunday-Monday test now

1/5 A 23-year-old finance analyst with IIM seats turned it down to start a t-shirt company with ₹1.75 lakh. His mom cried for days. "What is wrong with my seemingly intelligent son?" That son built @thesouledstore . A company that is ₹1000 crore in revenue today.

Read the full news here: z47.com/news/z47-backe…

From a single co-branded card to a dual-network Visa-RuPay platform serving 17,500+ pincodes, we're proud to back @anilgoteti and the team at @getscapia through their $63M Series C and beyond. We're linking the full story in comments.

2/2 The India AI Edge Website: z47.com/how-india-uses… Link to report: ai-edge.z47.com/The-India-AI-R…

1/2 We've spent 6 months developing a report on how India uses AI along with @OpenAI and @Zinnov Here's a snippet of everything we found and if you want to get a report, here's the link.

The report that will give you the latest perspective and change your perspective on AI! Launching 13th May. @Ashwinkannan @VikramV23

5/5 His closing advice: "If you have not taken a contrarian decision, you are never going to have that abnormal return. Find that one insight that is different. That you know in your heart, most people don't know. That's your ticket." 🎧13 years. One insight. A unicorn nobody expected. Full episode out on YouTube → youtu.be/F_NAA5-T-Ys

4/5 The hardest years weren't the early ones. They were the ones where everyone else caught up on paper. "Some people who started after us, their billion dollar companies. And here the parents are your investors. Investors are like, we should have put money into that company."

1/5 "A Bengali entrepreneur is like an oxymoron. My parents were teachers. There was no concept of profit at home." Jaydeep Barman built a unicorn - @RebelFoods1 . It took him 13 years. Here's what nobody tells you about that kind of timeline.

Mistake 4: Knowing you're on the wrong track and choosing comfort anyway Last January. He was in San Francisco with his co-founder, Both knew the strategy had run out and they both chose momentum. "We had spoken that there's a high chance we'll regret this. Let's keep the momentum. That decision was singularly the only decision that impacted mostly the entire year."

The AI conversation often starts with models. But the real opportunity lies in everything around them. From infrastructure and developers to vertical applications across healthcare, commerce, and financial services the surface area for building is expanding rapidly. What’s interesting is not just where AI is today, but where value will compound over time. Because large outcomes won’t come from using AI. They’ll come from building on top of it. Somewhere in this map are the foundations of the next set of enduring companies.

5/5 3 questions. 3 frameworks. Not from an MBA - from 15 years of building, reading, and applying the right idea at the right moment. The full conversation is on Unstarted. Worth it if any of these questions are live for you right now. 🎧Full episode link: youtu.be/vI-xC8-htpY

4/5 Q: How do I build with AI without being replaced by ChatGPT tomorrow? A: Don't start with the technology. Start with the user problem. Carl Benz invented the car, butFord understood people wanted to move faster. Nobody remembers Benz. If your AI product is just an efficiency gain, you haven't found the real problem yet.

1/5 Every founder gets stuck on the same questions: When do I start. How do I know it's working. What do I do with the fear once I've got something to lose. @youkaey has a framework for each one. None of them from an MBA. Here's the full stack