J. Vikram Bakshi

May the fourth be with you

A wise lady once said, 'I never trust anyone who doesn't walk with a limp.' The limp shows we are real and honest. Don't hide your scars. They are your proof of life.

Bravo! Electric buses are 56% of city buses in Europe 🇪🇺 - up from 12% in six years! City buses in Europe go electric at high speed. In my home country, Norway, we are close to 100%. But please look at the map - the trend is across the continent! It will be supercharged by the war in the Gulf. Every nation wishes to be energy independent. And why cling to fossils when electric buses are cheaper to run, more high tech and easy to charge in bus depots? It’s important to note that the electric turn is not just in Europe. China of course is leading on everything electric. Ethiopia has prohibited fossil cars. 80% of new cars in Nepal are electric, 40% in Vietnam and 50% in Singapore. Santiago de Chile and Delhi host the highest number of electric buses outside China - more than any European city. The trend is global! The tipping point is behind us. The green shift is much faster than we often think!

2,100 - 2,200-year-old mermaid/ Matsyakanya plaque from Chandraketugarh, West Bengal, dating to the Shunga period (c. 187-75 BCE). This is among the earliest depictions of mermaids in history.

Potholes are lifesavers… Also why I enjoy print newspapers.

I voted yes on a $100 billion investment. It took forty minutes. Seventeen of those minutes were lunch. I did not read the memo. The memo was 94 pages. Page 1 said "Artificial General Intelligence." Page 94 said "$830 billion valuation." Everything in between was a graph going up and to the right. The graphs measured "Total Addressable Intelligence." That is not a real metric. But it had a three-letter abbreviation. TAI. Three-letter abbreviations are how you know something is serious. The revenue was $5 billion. The loss was $14 billion. That's $2.80 lost for every dollar earned. I called it "investment-phase economics." The other partners liked that phrase. One of them wrote it down. One of them underlined it twice. Someone showed the path to profitability. A line starting at $5 billion and ending at $280 billion. By 2030. That's a 56x increase in four years. The line was very steep. Steep is good in a pitch deck. Steep means ambition. Flat means you have a business. Nobody wants a business at this valuation. Thirty-seven investors signed on. None of them asked how $5 billion becomes $280 billion. You don't ask that at $830 billion. You nod. I nodded. The company used to be a nonprofit. Its founding mission was "ensuring AI benefits all of humanity." We converted it to for-profit. I asked what happened to all of humanity. Someone said they were "grandfathered in as stakeholders." I asked what that meant. He said "it means they're in the deck." Slide 11. Small font. The infrastructure plan calls for $600 billion in data centers. I asked where $600 billion would come from. Someone said "future rounds." I asked what would fund the future rounds. Someone said "the infrastructure." I did not ask a third question. The third question is where the math breaks. You never ask the third question. The CEO told Congress that AI safety requires responsible governance and significant investment. He told investors that AI dominance requires speed and significant investment. Same week. Same billions. Different adjective. Congress got "responsible." Investors got "dominant." Both rooms nodded. Nodding is the primary output of an AI investment meeting. We are very good at it. A junior analyst at my fund ran the numbers independently. She calculated that at the current loss rate, we'd need to raise $200 billion more before reaching profitability. She put this in a memo titled "Structural Concerns." I promoted her to Head of Strategic Foresight. She forecasts now. She doesn't calculate. There's a difference. Calculating uses numbers that exist. Forecasting uses numbers that should exist. We prefer the second kind. I tried the product once. ChatGPT. I asked it to summarize the investment memo I had not read. It got three of the numbers wrong. One of them was the valuation. The valuation it hallucinated was lower than the real one. The real one was less believable. I voted yes anyway. A reporter asked me if an $830 billion valuation for a company losing $14 billion a year made sense. I said "we're not investing in a company, we're investing in a paradigm." She asked what that meant. I said "exactly." She printed it. It sounded profound in the article. It wasn't. But at this valuation, everything sounds profound. The LPs in my fund asked about the OpenAI position. I showed them a chart titled "AI Market Penetration: 2026-2035." I generated the chart with ChatGPT. It hallucinated two of the data points. I left them in. They improved the trajectory. The LPs nodded. Nobody checked the data points. Nobody checks the data points. The data points are not the point. The point is the trajectory. The trajectory is the story. The story is the raise. And the raise is $100 billion. Microsoft invested $13 billion before us. They integrated the product into everything. Adoption is early. "Early" and "low" mean the same thing. But "early" sounds intentional. I'm told it will accelerate. Acceleration is always in the next quarter. The next quarter is always soon. Soon is not a timeline. It's a feeling. Feelings close rounds. We are now in the largest private funding round in the history of technology. For a company that loses $2.80 on every dollar it makes. With a plan to grow revenue 56x in four years. While spending $600 billion on infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. After converting from a nonprofit whose mission was to benefit all of humanity. The metrics are extraordinary. None of them are financial. All of them are directional. Directional means they point in a direction. The direction is up and to the right. Up and to the right is all you need. I'll make Managing Partner this year. My thesis was simple: "AI is inevitable." Inevitable means you can't be wrong. If the company succeeds, I saw it coming. If it fails, the market wasn't ready. Either way, I saw it coming. That's the beauty of inevitability. It's the only investment thesis that can't be disproven. I still don't know what a token is. But I know what the round raised. And I know what the next round will raise. The second number is always larger. That's the only math that matters.