Anand C
13.4K posts
@anandc
Managing Partner, @CelestaCapital and Founder of @CrescendoCX & HiOctave AI || Formerly GC, 90+ seed checks || Product @ Meta/Airtel/Five9.
Meet Rajeev Motwani (Every time you Google something, a boy from Jammu made that possible) > An Indian computer scientist born in Jammu, 1962 > Grew up in a military family that moved city to city, never settled anywhere > As a child he wanted to become a mathematician > His parents pushed him towards computers instead > Best decision they ever made > B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur, 1983 > PhD from UC Berkeley under Richard Karp, a Turing Award winner > Joined Stanford as a professor straight after > Founded MIDAS, one of the most influential research groups in Silicon Valley history > In 1998 two PhD students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin walked into his office > He saw potential in their idea when nobody else did > Co-authored the original PageRank paper with them > Helped them build what became Google > Also mentored the early team at PayPal > Won the Gödel Prize in 2001, the highest honour in theoretical computer science > Passed away on June 5, 2009 at just 47 years old IIT Kanpur named an entire building after him Sergey Brin said "Whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it." A boy who just wanted to study mathematics ended up building the foundation Google stands on. He never chased credit. He just kept opening doors for other people And the whole world walked through them without ever knowing his name
Inside the VC Roll-up Craze That Has Taken Silicon Valley by Storm newcomer.co/p/inside-the-v…
Gotta hand it to the Somalis in Minnesota. They executed the HBS grad playbook of rolling up mom & pop daycares and managed to operate at ~99% EBITDA margins that they largely passed through as special dividends to themselves
“𝙄’𝙫𝙚 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙝𝙖𝙙 𝙖 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝘼𝙄 𝙞𝙣 𝙘𝙪𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙪𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩.” That’s how a @Rachioco customer described their experience on Reddit. 🙌 Fast resolution. No transfers. No repeating the issue. That’s AI-native CX in action. 🚀
Smart AI Leadership Summit by Smart Venture Media is back. 3 summits in 365 days. This one's the best yet. The room on April 2: C-suite & VPs from @Meta , @Microsoft , @nebiusai , @Box, @togethercompute , @LangChain , @databricks , @lyft , @MongoDB , @SnorkelAI Execs from @AnthropicAI & @ElevenLabs Founders of billion-dollar companies: @CrusoeAI , @higgsfield , @getserval , @dexterity , Inc. Partners from @a16z , @IVP , @NEA, @BessemerVP , @Gradientvc, @M12vc Not a massive conference. Not a private dinner. Something in between — and harder to get into than both. Every seat earned. We cover the billion-dollar questions: How do you build distribution for your AI startup? How do you raise? How do you make money? April 2. @SiliconVlyBank experience center, SF. 8:30AM to after party. Code GraceGongCEO = 50% off. (We vet. Even paid tickets.) Lock in 👇 Link in first comment. #SmartAISummit #SmartAILeadershipSummit #VentureCapital #SmartAILeadershipSummit2026 #AI @
OpenAI is in advanced discussions to form a joint venture with private equity firms that would focus on bolstering adoption of its AI software across their portfolio companies bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Iconic quote from Peter Thiel on Vertical Integration, Elon, SpaceX, & Tesla. YC 2014. (Lecture introduced by Sam Altman) “In my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history, the last 250 years, where people have actually come up with new things & made money doing so. One is these sort of vertically integrated, complex monopolies, which people did build in the second industrial revolution at the end of the 19th & start of the 20th century. And so this was like Ford. It was the vertically integrated oil companies, like Standard Oil. And what these vertically integrated monopolies typically required was this a very complex coordination. You've got a lot of pieces to fit together in just the right way. When you assembled it, you had a tremendous advantage. This is actually done surprisingly little today. So I think this is a business form that when people can pull it off is very valuable. It's typically fairly capital intensive. We live in a culture where it's very hard to get people to buy into anything that's super complicated and takes very long to build. When I sort of think about my colleague Elon Musk from PayPal, success with Tesla and SpaceX, I think the key to these companies was the complex, vertically integrated monopoly structure they had. So if you sort of look at Tesla or SpaceX, you know, was there sort of a single breakthrough? I mean, they certainly innovated on a lot of dimensions. I don't think it was a single 10x breakthrough & battery storage or, you know, maybe working on some things, on rocketry, but it hadn't. Was no sort of single, massive breakthrough. But what was really impressive was integrating all these pieces together & and doing it in a way that was more vertically integrated than most of their competitors.”
Swarna Jayanti Park, Rohini, is ablaze with Kusum- hundreds of them bursting with red that feels alive, the sunlight turning the park into a riot of copper-red. You haven’t truly seen red until you’ve seen in them, where every step feels like stepping into a living painting.
Apple buying PA Semi for $278m in 2008 to start in-house custom chips a GOAT tech m&a deal. I wrote more on Apple M&A strategy and other notable deals here: readtrung.com/p/apples-m-and…
A Stanford professor analyzed 1,000's of angel investments to find out who's had the MOST unicorns. The results are fascinating. - David Morin tops the list with 23 unicorns - Peter Thiel and Lee Linden follow with 21 each - David Sacks at 20 - Marc Benioff at 19 A few things that stand out: 1) Almost every top angel was a founder or exec at a large tech company first. The clear signal here - they were mostly operators who earned their access. 2) Many co-invested together repeatedly. Thiel, Sacks, and Levchin all overlapped at PayPal and went on to back the same unicorns (Facebook, Airbnb, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX). 3) No women appear in the top 50. Sad. 4) The entry threshold to make this list is 9 unicorns (nuts!). The average unicorns across the top 50 is 13 (more nuts!). I share this for folks to have inspiration to angel invest themselves! There has NEVER been a better time - we are at a major tech inflection point. If you're thinking about angel investing and forming angel syndicates, you should check out Verivend. Automated capital calls, one-click funding for co-investors, real-time visibility into who's in. Seamless software with a great team to hold your hand through it. Try it yourself: lnkd.in/grrJxqxq Full credit to Ilya Strebulaev and his team at the Stanford for this research.
Sooner or later, everyone has to decide whether to give up lazy weekends, disposable income, and overall peace of mind to have a baby instead. For many of those on the fence, one anxiety looms large: What if I make the wrong choice? Parent regret is more common than you might think — the r/regretfulparents sub-Reddit alone gets around 70,000 weekly visitors who anonymously commiserate — though stigma makes it hard to admit in real life. Writer Bindu Bansinath speaks with three moms of young children about why they wish they could go back to their old lives: nymag.visitlink.me/Sv0c_9
