Mayank Shrivastava

Agree that passion is overrated. But the great thing about passion is that it can be reignited or found again. But don't let your passions die. The death of passion is the birth of regret.

@midopido21 Best left back by a distance

3 throw-ins taken by Nuno Mendes yesterday.. x.com/Ahmed158241/st…

Identifying Moats in Applied Agentic AI - iterations, memory, and long term planning open.substack.com/pub/mayankbutw…?

@AjaxFik that era is not coming back - we should get over it, specially if setpiece FC is in the title race. We can only hope for hooliganism, violence and talks of staying humble if they are title contenders

bro title races used to be box office. now the league leaders are relying on own goals & set pieces 🕊️

@rom1trs arcads

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@Nithin0dha This is arguably the largest financial engineering scheme in modern markets. The current playbook is built for private investors (VCs and early backers) to extract the maximum wealth during the exit cycle—be it through inflated, unprofitable growth or capital gains tax arbitrage

If you take money out of a business as dividends, the effective tax rate is 52% (25% corporate tax + 35.5% on personal income). Through capital gains, it's just 14.95% (with cess). Why does this matter? Here’s what you should know if you invest in IPOs. If you're an investor (especially a VC), the math is simple: reduce corporate tax by showing minimal profits or losses. Spend (Burn) on acquiring users, build a growth narrative, and then sell shares at a higher valuation while paying much lower tax. This spending also makes it harder for competitors to survive. To be clear, we're not discussing R&D spending here, which, incidentally, is very low in India (0.7% of GDP). What's often overlooked is that VCs are essentially playing a tax arbitrage game. Look at most VC-backed businesses listed in the last few years, the reason they show little or no profit is partly due to this. Once you run a business this way, it's extremely difficult to switch. Every startup that's 7-8 years old from the time of raising the first round faces constant pressure from VCs for an exit. With almost no M&A opportunities in India, IPO is often the only way out. The government probably designed this tax arbitrage to incentivize companies to spend money and not just accumulate and distribute. But I'm unsure if the balance is correct. I think it's also creating businesses that aren't very resilient. One prolonged market downturn, and many of these unprofitable companies would struggle to survive. Two things that make this more interesting: Unprofitable growth gets valued at much higher multiples than steady profits. A company doing ₹100 cr revenue with 100% growth might get 10-15x, while a profitable one with 20% growth gets 3-5x. So VCs aren't just saving on tax; they're in essence creating a 3x higher exit valuation. If you're competing against someone burning cash, you almost have to match it to defend market share, even if you don't want to, because of the quirks I mentioned above.

@henrythe9ths @sfchronicle The dot com crash was also a correction in the long scheme of things

The @sfchronicle just quoted my hot take on the AI bubble. Turns out my wildest prediction was spot-on (down to the exact number). I told them how I meet first-time founders (non researchers) with no revenue, no product, no team, and no deck and yet they are easily raising $5M+ on $25M+ caps for oversubscribed initial rounds. This was impossible 5 years ago. Back then, only proven founders with exits could raise large seed rounds. But now, engineers leaving OpenAI or hot AI startups get $100M+ for their first startup with zero proof of concept. I’ll be the first to claim: “Yes, it's a bubble”, but it may NOT matter because VCs are okay with having 1000 failures if one of them becomes a trillion-dollar company. A decade ago, one 10x exit could justify 10 failures. Then came the decacorns. One could justify 100 failures. Now, in the trillion-dollar era, one winner can justify 1000 failures. And, this is happening in real time. OpenAI is now preparing for an IPO targeting a $1 trillion valuation. They are doing $10B in annualized revenue but lost $12B just last quarter. This proves my point about why investors keep believing despite the exorbitant losses or sky–high valuations. In fact, Sam Altman himself warned that someone would lose a phenomenal amount of money. And the Bank of England and the IMF both warned recently of a market correction. So yes, it’s a bubble. But in the mean, we’re all living in it and benefiting from the trillion-dollar potential of AI companies and the thousands of overpriced startups that it can support. And my trillion-dollar analogy is playing out right now with OpenAI's IPO plans. What do you think? Will OpenAI be that one massive winner that justifies the 1000 failures, or will this end like the dot-com crash?

@LFC_Sam__ Way to build a following

🚨🚨No Liverpool fan should have less than 2000 followers, Reply under this tweet and follow everyone who likes your tweet ❤️❤️

@CounterPressers Agree with the first point, but not the second one

@henrythe9ths FUNDRAISE

I got rejected by 144 investors before raising $150M for my $200M+ rev/year startup. After 144 rejections, I started questioning our approach. Were we solving the right problem? What were we doing wrong? Why weren’t investors seeing what we were seeing? Were we the right team to build this? We tried everything: different pitch angles, new deck structures, and reframing the problem. Then came the 145th meeting, where we closed our first growth round. That yes made everything worth it. But getting there took years of mistakes and hard work. We went through a lot of trial and error just to figure out what resonates with investors. We tried dozens of approaches to figure out what made investors engage. Some landed, most didn't. But each iteration taught us something about what builds conviction versus what just sounds good on paper. And once we cracked that code, our Series C closed faster than expected. And today, I see so many founders in the exact same position I was in 10 years ago: grinding through rejections, questioning everything, and trying to figure out what works. So today I want to give you the resource I wish I had back then: Something that shows you exactly how to structure these conversations and navigate the entire process (because the fundraising cycle can be a big distraction and take a toll on you as a founder). So I've partnered with Notion's Startups Team to create the essential fundraising resource that helps you avoid the mistakes that cost me years. Here's what you are getting: • The actual decks I used to raise $150M for Super[.]com (Series B, C) • 50 real examples from funded startups like Eleven Labs and Artisan AI • A searchable database of 10,000+ investors - angels, VCs, and accelerators you can reach out to immediately (this alone would take months to build manually) • An AI-powered fundraising agent built into Notion with step-by-step prompts (no separate ChatGPT needed) Want access? • Like and share this post • Comment "FUNDRAISE" • Follow me so I can DM you the link I'll send it over ASAP. P.S.: If you are serious about fundraising (now or in the future), you should grab it right away.

Windows blue screen of death happening in these countries right now

1/30 Our "Protein Project" report is here What is it? Unique public-health project funded by @paraschopra to analyze common/well-known protein supplements sold in India Who did it? Me & team at The Liver Institute with world class, independent food/drugs testing Neogen Labs.

A beautiful elephant family sleeps blissfully somwhere in deep jungles of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu. Observe how the baby elephant is given Z class security by the family. Also how the young elephant is checking the presence of other family members for reassurance. So similar to our own families isn't it Video @dhanu_paran for @tnforestdept #elephants #TNForest

Imagine being a founder in the 80s and 90s with no VC money!!

@rgandhi90 @getmycouch Hope all is well with the chair delivery. Happy to hear any feedback at mayank@getmycouch.com

@mayank330 @getmycouch Thank you so much. Highly appreciate your prompt response. All the best for your new store openings!

.@mayank330 looking for your intervention on two pre-paid orders placed in Feb at @getmycouch #17429 sofa delivered, cushions pending since Feb #17450 teak wood chair pending. No response from your staff, constant follow up, no reply to mail, msgs, calls. #escalate

@rchowdhri None. Good judgment and the ability to stay out of operations, back the founder are true investor qualities. Nice, knowledgeable are good qualities for the LPs and the fund

you are looking to raise money, and you were to rate an investor on a 2by2 - jerk vs nice and knowledgeable vs ignorant. If you can only optimise for one dimension, which axis will you optimise for?

Surely the only toll that doesn’t accept FASTag had to be in Faridabad

@AnupamMittal Are you also suggesting that india should create its own phones and operating systems, and then play stores?

Many startups pay anywhere between 20-50% as Google Tax to get distribution & protect their own brand from bidders. It’s the Digital East India Company 😥

The best part was his elevator pitch “Sirjee, just increase your valuation. It’s easier to run a startup in India than a real business. You will only pay gst and income tax in a real business. When will you pay yourself” This is byjus’ level stuff!!!

Today, I received a call from a guy who was selling me “GMV services”. So, I got curious to understand this term. Basically, he would deposit money into our account and we would pay him consulting services in another account. This would increase our GMV and valuation