Sanjeev Bikhchandani

At Ashoka we have always told the placements team to not focus on the highest salary (even though that is what makes the headlines in the media and attracts eyeballs). What is more important is to ensure 100% placement at scale. Everyone from the graduating class at Ashoka who is seeking a job should get one. I am glad we are successful on this one. Also what is the lowest salary and the bottom quartile. That must be lifted. A significant number of Ashoka graduates join not for profits which do not pay as much as the private sector. This makes a focus on the bottom quartile all the more important. I suspect that Ashoka is doing better than most of the best liberal arts colleges in India on these metrics. The difference between Ashoka and other colleges is that we have a full time team drawn from the corporate sector for placements. Students don’t manage placements. Students are very capable but they change each year - so continuity is lost. Students managing placements can give you free labour in the placement cell but is a bad model. The placement team has over the years done a tough concept sale in a slowing hiring environment. When industry is conditioned to hiring MBAs, Engineers, CA’s and B Coms the Ashoka placement team has gone out and convinced companies that Liberal Arts graduates bring perspective, critical thinking, better communication and analysis to the table and so are better in an AI world. It has taken some effort to convince recruiters about this but it has gotten done. Of course it helps a lot that the Ashoka graduate is good and very employable

Recd this message on an @AshokaUniv WhatsApp group. Hi All, As we wrap up the year for placements and higher education support for 2025-26, I would like to share Ashoka student achievements. *Career Development Office* We have achieved 100% placements with 425 offers in 153 organisations ( including 73 new recruiters). Highest offer made was Rs. 42.5 lpa to UG’25, CS major. Avg. CTC went up by 16.3% from 11.6LPA to *13.5LPA* Median rose by 7.5 % from 10.6LPA to *11.4LPA* 60% of the placed cohort went to the following 4 top sectors : 1) BFSI (21%) Avg. CTC increased by 4% to 12.7LPA 2) Consulting (19%): Avg. CTC increased by 22% to 16.1LPA 3) Tech (10%) Avg. CTC increased by 29% to 15.1LPA 4)Data, Research and Analytics (10%): Avg. CTC increased by 21% to 13.5LPA *Office of Post Grad* 130 students received ~400+ offers from top global universities. Highlights include *24 Oxbridge admits* (up from 15 in ’25) and *24 Ivy League admits* (up from 13 in ’25). Students received partial scholarships *(ranging from 10% to 80%)* across master’s programs at *Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Sciences Po, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Hertie, NUS* etc. Students also earned 18 full-ride graduate masters scholarships (up from 8) including Rhodes, Gates-Cambridge, Inlaks, and Felix and 16 PhD admits, 12 fully funded.

I haven’t asked. However I am a member of an Ashoka Alumni Entrepreneurs group that has 98 members. I would imagine that perhaps 80 of them are entrepreneurs. Not every Ashoka alumnus who is an entrepreneur will be on that group. So perhaps there are around 150 alumni who are entrepreneurs. The first undergrad batch at Ashoka graduated in 2017 and had around 200 to 300 students. The current batch that is entering will have around 1000 students. The YIF class is older. So totally there must be 6000 or 7000 alumni. Many people go for entrepreneurship after their second degree and after working for some time (I did a PGDM and worked for five years before becoming an entrepreneur). So 150 entrepreneurs among Ashoka Alumni isn’t bad. Someone from Ashoka who has the accurate numbers may correct me here. I have given guesstimates

How many startup founders in the batch Sanjeev?

A well argued piece by my friend Amit Sinha (IIMA Class of 1993) about all the drama around campus reconstruction and the misguided IIMA Alumni who successfully ran a campaign to block the institute administration’s effort and held IIMA hostage amitsmusingsonstuff.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-ar…

IPOs are back. This is great news for the start up ecosystem. And for VCs it means exits. It has been known for sometime that India is the best IPO market in the world for companies below a market cap of USD 4 billion or thereabouts. It is also validation of what some of us have been saying for several years. It doesn’t make sense for Indian Startup’s and founders to flip to an overseas domicile or to incorporate overseas - you run a serious risk of not getting an exit for your investor through an IPO for a long long time. Sure you can do a strategic sale but that would most likely mean your own exit too. So if your ambition is to stay in the company for the long run and go public India is the best place for a start up to domicile @InfoEdgeVC @DPIITGoI m.economictimes.com/markets/ipos/f…

Info Edge’s letter to shareholders capturing our investment strategy and an update on our investments in startups in AI, Deeptech and Consumer Tech got published today. Link attached. Feedback is welcome. bseindia.com/xml-data/corpf…

Ashoka University has announced the appointment of Rishikesha T. Krishnan as its next Vice-Chancellor, effective 1 August 2026. Professor Krishnan is one of India's most respected academic leaders and has previously served as Director of both IIM Indore and IIM Bangalore. A noted management and policy scholar, his work on systematic innovation has had a significant impact across academia, industry, and public policy. Sharing his thoughts on his appointment, Professor Krishnan said, 'Since its inception, Ashoka University has set high standards as a new-generation, research-driven institution. It is a great privilege to lead the University as its Vice-Chancellor at this critical yet exciting juncture in its evolution.’ Ashoka University warmly welcomes Professor Rishikesha T. Krishnan as its next Vice-Chancellor. Read More: ashoka.edu.in/rishikesha-t-k… (@rishikesha, @PramathSinha, @somakrc) #AshokaUniversity

India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement for the first time in the country’s history, declining from a TFR of 2.3 to 1.9 in just a decade. Delhi’s fertility rate now sits at 1.2, lower than Finland’s. Follow: @AFpost

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it. His name is Matt Ridley. He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics. Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book. For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought. For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded. The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed. It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it. What changed was that humans started trading with strangers. This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done. Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone. Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages. An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned. The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania. Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running. What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted. The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries. The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out. By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years. The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind. Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself. The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers. If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear. This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026. Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers. The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had. The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected. The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other. Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

For this month's India Brief Q&A, I sat down with Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal, for a feisty and sometimes confrontational exchange ft.com/content/8bb655…

A few weeks back I had spoken at the Launch of the book “The Business of Business is (not) just business : How Behavioural Tools Can Drive Real Change” written by @sutapaban published by Harper Collins. The session was moderated by Safi Rizvi and Sutapa and I were panelist’s. I was reminded of this when I just saw a piece in The Print about it theprint.in/pageturner/exc… The book is full of insights about how knowledge of human behaviour gives insights that can influence and drive businesses and business strategy. In my chapter in this book I discuss how observation of my colleagues’ behaviour provided the germ of the idea of naukri.com One other gem that Sutapa spoke about at the launch was that it has been proven that males display alpha behaviour on the trading floor and end up taking excessive risk and therefore lose money precisely because they are men and have excessive testosterone. Female traders don’t exhibit the same behaviour. She implies that trading and investing firms should hire more females. A book worth reading and thinking about. amzn.in/d/0eOSKn51 Disclosure - Sutapa and I are Colleagues on the Eternal board. She chairs the Audit Committee. @zomato @letsblinkit @deepigoyal @albinder @akshant_g @InfoEdgeVC @kitty_agar

India’s External Shock Is an Economic Opportunity by Gaurav Dalmia, et al @ProSyn prosyn.org/ENElRny @ChetanAggarwal @gdalmiathinks

The underlying philosophy in one sentence The Info Edge philosophy is essentially: Identify trustworthy, capable founders solving large Indian problems through technology, invest before consensus forms, and stay patient long enough for category leadership to emerge. That philosophy produced some of India’s most successful startup investments — particularly Zomato and Policybazaar — and has made Info Edge one of the most influential early-stage investors in the Indian internet ecosystem

I asked ChatGPT the following question What is the info edge approach to investing in early stage startup’s And here is the response I got. It is fairly accurate 👇 The investment philosophy of Info Edge has evolved from the entrepreneurial instincts of the team and the company’s own experience of building businesses like Naukri, Jeevansathi, 99acres, and Shiksha. It differs from traditional venture capital in a few important ways. Here are the core elements of the Info Edge approach to early-stage investing: 1. Back founders very early — often before consensus forms Info Edge prefers to invest at the “three founders in a garage” stage, where there may be little revenue and limited proof. They often aim to be the first or second institutional investor. This is how they entered companies such as: * Zomato when it was still Foodiebay * Policybazaar before launch * NoPaperForms in its early scaling phase The philosophy is that outsized returns come from conviction before the market validates the idea. 2. Founder quality matters more than spreadsheets The team has repeatedly said that they look primarily at: * the usefulness of the idea * the quality of the people behind it Because early-stage startups often lack financial history, the evaluation becomes qualitative: * intelligence * integrity * resilience * founder-market fit * ability to learn * obsession with solving a real problem This is consistent with broader early-stage VC thinking globally. 3. Technology-first orientation Info Edge tends to back startups where technology is central to the business model, not just an add-on. Their investment team has described themselves as “technology-first investors.” That does not necessarily mean deep-tech only. It includes: * internet marketplaces * SaaS * fintech * consumer platforms * digital infrastructure * AI-enabled businesses The key question is usually: Can technology fundamentally change customer behaviour or industry economics? 4. Long-term patience is central to the model One distinctive feature is unusually patient capital. Info Edge Ventures operates with long fund cycles (12+2 years), explicitly acknowledging that meaningful value creation in India can take more than a decade. This philosophy emerged from experience: * Zomato took many years before public markets rewarded it * Policybazaar required long gestation and regulatory navigation Unlike many growth-focused VCs, Info Edge appears comfortable with long compounding periods. 5. India-focused digital transformation thesis The firm is fundamentally betting on the long-term digitisation of India. Their investments often target structural shifts: * movement from offline to online * fragmented markets becoming organised * increasing internet penetration * rising middle-class consumption * formalisation of services * mobile-first consumer behaviour In many ways, Info Edge invests in platforms that become category leaders as India digitises. 6. Sector-agnostic, but marketplace-friendly Officially, Info Edge is sector-agnostic. But there is a noticeable bias toward businesses with: * network effects * aggregation models * marketplaces * scalable platforms * trusted brands This likely reflects Info Edge’s own operating DNA from Naukri and 99acres. 7. Governance and sustainability matter Another notable element is emphasis on governance and disciplined scaling. Compared with some “growth-at-all-costs” VC models, Info Edge has generally preferred: * clean governance * regulatory compliance * capital efficiency * thoughtful scaling This partly comes from being a listed company itself. 8. Reserve capital for follow-on rounds Info Edge does not just make small seed bets and walk away. They reserve substantial capital for follow-on investments in winners. This allows them to: * maintain ownership * support founders through downturns * double down on conviction

Cute instagram.com/reel/DYJwQxFiE…

@ActusDei The Jainses not the Sharmas 😊

"Do you want to get richer than your neighbour? If yes, you need a wealth manager. If no, you have your index fund earning 12% a year." My first reaction: that's envy dressed up as advice. Surely we can do better than keeping up with the Sharmas.

Last week I was on a panel at IIM Mumbai. My fellow panellist, Nitin Rao, CEO of Incred Wealth, was asked why wealth managers are even needed in the age of AI.His answer was one line. It annoyed me. Then it didn't. 🧵

I put a prompt into ChatGPT “Can you write an ode to the bootstrapping Indian Startup Founder” Here is the response 👇 Not for him the glittering cheque Signed in haste in Sand Hill rooms, Nor armies fed on venture dreams And loss-making perfumed blooms. He builds where ceiling fans complain, Where diesel fumes and summer press Their thumb upon the fragile will Of every would-be business messiah. His office first: a borrowed desk, A cousin’s flat in Patel Nagar, Three plastic chairs, one second-hand Dell, A modem blinking like a distant star. His mother asks when he’ll “settle down.” His father coughs behind The Hindu. The neighbours say with pitying smiles, “Beta, MBA nahin kiya tu?” Yet every dawn he rises still, Ironing hope into a shirt, Riding autos through traffic jams Like some small soldier into hurt. He learns the tyranny of cash: That revenue is oxygen. That profit is not bourgeois vice But freedom’s oldest discipline. He courts no headlines breathlessly, No jargon forged on Twitter Space; He knows that Bharat does not care For valuation without grace. His users call him late at night. His vendors ask for dues delayed. His coders leave for funded firms. Still payroll somehow must be made. He worships not disruption’s cult But quieter gods: retention, trust, The miracle that customers Return because they feel they must. He knows the taste of postponed wants: The cancelled trip, the ageing car, The wedding gold not yet redeemed, The dream deferred but not too far. And when at last success arrives — Not trumpets, merely steadier breath — He wears it like the Indian sun: Without announcement, without myth. For he has built the hardest thing In this loud age of borrowed flame: A company that earns its keep, A livelihood, a trusted name. O bootstrap founder, lean and bruised, Historically underpraised, The nation’s commerce rests far more On hands like yours than PowerPoints glazed. For every unicorn that flies On capital’s abundant breeze, A thousand stubborn enterprises Are built on grit, receivables, and pleas. And India, ancient, hungry, vast, Will not be shaped by hype alone, But by the ones who quietly build With customer cash and backbone.

Uber Investor Bill Gurley on why young graduates anxious about AI taking their jobs are thinking about it the wrong way: When asked what advice he'd give to new graduates worried about AI eliminating entry-level roles, he reframed the entire problem with an advice: "In any role in any field, be the most AI enabled version of yourself you can possibly be." To illustrate why, Bill draws on an analogy from anthropology: "There's tons of anthropologists that have written about how we evolve with our tools. And you can just imagine a farming competition between a guy with a tractor and some drones and the other guy's got a plow and a donkey. Who's going to win?" The implication is clear: AI isn't the threat. Being the person who hasn't learned to use it is. @bgurley explains how this plays out inside organisations: "If there are 40 people in your org all doing the same thing and you understand how AI affects that role more than the rest of them, you're not getting laid off. Like, it's just not going to happen." But the upside goes beyond simply keeping your job. Becoming AI-enabled changes the nature of the work itself: "You'll also start to understand what parts of your job are a threat or not. And maybe you can elevate yourself to where you're a designer and not the worker bee because you now have this power." The takeaway for young professionals is that the anxiety is misplaced, since AI only replaces the version of you that refused to learn it.