sahil
474 posts
@_sahildhull
AI wearable | a16z sr005 | iitk
Slight rant - Indian VCs are so weird, delusional and over-confident. A partner from a well-known firm (Red-Orange Logo) recently told me: "Arey yaar, ye Chinese log hi sab kuch lead kar rahe hain models mein." Translation - "The Chinese are leading everything in the model space." Funny thing? Same firm passed on investing in multiple research labs. Honestly, it's not even surprising anymore - it's just the pattern. Indian VCs, by and large, don't want to fund the process of building something. They want to fund the proof that it already worked. No appetite for the messy, uncertain, pre-traction phase where the actual hard stuff happens - the research, the architecture decisions, the "we don't know if this will work yet" phase. They also have the balls to say - "You are doing too many things" That's where companies like DeepSeek got built. That's where labs get built. That's where moats get built. But sure, easier to wait until someone else has de-risked the entire thing, then show up with a term sheet and opinions about geopolitics. The frustrating part isn't even the pass - passes are fine, not every fund has the mandate or the conviction for deep tech. The frustrating part is the confidence. The certainty with which people who opted out of the game will tell you who's winning it. India has the talent. India has the compute access. India has founders who are genuinely trying to build frontier things - not just wrap GPT and call it an AI startup. What it doesn't have enough of is early believers. People willing to back the research before it has a leaderboard score. People willing to be wrong with you before you're right. Until that changes, we'll keep having the same conversation. VCs lamenting that the Chinese are ahead, while quietly having passed on every opportunity to change that. --- I am gonna change it personally, if that's what it takes.
