Vijay Rayapati

Atoms. atoms.co/vision

We are a small team, Claude code usage took over from Cursor at @atomicworkhq . This is Jan'25 data. It was probably opposite, just 60 to 90 days ago. It's crazy how much Claude Code gained both mindshare and $ share.

This morning @wangandrewd requested that his Cursor seat be removed since he's so deep into Claude Code and it kicked off an internal cascade of requests within Valon 😬

In the last week of January, Shailendra Singh (right), head of the $9 billion Indian venture firm Peak XV Partners, sat down for dinner with a younger partner, Ashish Agrawal, one of the firm’s top-performing investors. Agrawal wanted to apologize. “Sorry it is happening this way, sorry I have to do this,” Agrawal said. He was apologizing for quitting the firm so abruptly, and at such a sensitive moment. Peak, which until it was spun out in 2023 was the Indian unit of Sequoia Capital, was trying to close on more than $1 billion in its first fundraise as an independent firm, and Agrawal’s departure threatened to delay the deal, or worse. Peak’s two other senior partners, GV Ravishankar and Mohit Bhatnagar, had also met Agrawal over dinner, asking him to reconsider his decision. For Singh, though, Agrawal had a lot more to apologize for than the timing. Their break was precipitated by what Singh considered an outrageous demand from Agrawal: a profit share of as much as $200 million on the breakout success of fintech company Groww (similar to Robinhood), which netted the firm and its limited partners $2 billion. Agrawal had led the Groww deal, one of the firm’s biggest-ever wins. @followthemani @NewcomerMedia newcomer.co/p/sequoias-for…

.@ResslAI deploys AI employees at field ops businesses to automate their office work - responding to leads, booking jobs, sending estimates, etc. Their agents sit on existing software and increase operating margins. Congrats on the launch, @arushi_ressl and @AbhishekEswaran! ycombinator.com/launches/PXv-r…

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

Three New Funds for Exceptional Founders in India, APAC and beyond 🚀 We are pleased to announce the closing of $1.3 billion in new capital commitments across our India Seed, India Venture, and APAC funds. Along with significant uninvested capital in our existing Growth fund, we are excited about our ability to back outlier founders building category defining companies, across multiple stages, as we have done for two decades. We are immensely grateful for the steadfast commitment from our Limited Partners (LPs) for our inaugural Peak XV funds. Many of our LPs are leading non-profit endowments and foundations, and serving them adds a special meaning to our work. We understand every fundraise is a responsibility to the founder ecosystem and to our LPs, and we are relentlessly committed to serving them. This is the most exciting time we have witnessed in our lifetimes. AI is transforming the world at an unprecedented pace, and while the initial breakthroughs were concentrated in Silicon Valley, AI opportunities are now abundant in India and APAC. The size, scale and sophistication of technology startups is deeply inspiring across both India and APAC. India’s FinTech ecosystem is already one of the most advanced in the world and the Consumer opportunity has decades of compounding ahead. The combination of technical innovation, deepening markets, quality of talent and increasing global ambition makes this an amazing time to be investing in the region. For those special founders who have a vision to change how something works and who combine ambition with execution, hustle with resilience and who wish to serve the world ahead of themselves, we are here to partner with you. 🙌 @sjs_day1 @mobhat @gvravishankar @RajanAnandan @i_sakshichopra @rohitagar_wal @abhishek_mohan