Sharad

as more ai-driven companies attempt to vertically integrate software and hardware, eng teams need better ways to build and optimize the software part of the equation. been cool to watch Revel develop this space from the start. congrats @scottgmorton and @Revel_Software team 💥

+1

@CRED_club Been a regular CRED Store user, but return experience is pathetic. Wrong size, contacted support within return window. Ticket closed repeatedly, fake pickup attempts (no one showed up). Now refusing return. Not about cost, support quality has detriorated @CRED_support

microdose the midas touch. reply with an emoji. one reply, picked at random, wins a gold coin.

@puneetiitm Congratulations ✨

Starting the year with a new chapter. Excited to share that I’ve joined as CEO of Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India) to lead the investment team and help scale the business. Grateful to Steadview for an incredible journey and the opportunity to grow alongside exceptional founders and colleagues. Looking forward to doubling down on India’s growth ecosystem and partnering with high-growth companies. We’re also scaling the team—reach out if you know great talent. entrackr.com/news/former-st…

Nothing against Curly Tales (Kamiya Jani) but the Government (I&B and Tourism Ministry) is literally Paying 6,00,00,000 (6 Crores) to Kamiya Jani (Curly Tales) for eating in Vande Bharat and Having Chaat at Ghats in Varanasi and that too gets Aired on Doordarshan a Channel that no one Watches. On the other hand Government’s MoD’s ADA (Aeronautical Development Agency) is hiring Professionals for 5th Generation AMCA (Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft) and 4.5 gen +Tejas Mk2 and the Maximum package offered to the Appointment of Project Admin Officer (PAO) 5 Vacancies with 10 Years of Experience is 59,276 per month that makes 3,55,656 Per Year.

@MohapatraHemant @LightspeedIndia 🚀🚀

Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :) Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look. We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more. We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more. Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:

@ganeshsonawane 🔥🔥

when i first tried these smooth cooling high density pillows in china, i fell in love instantly. got the sample, negotiated the price, asked the manufacturer to make a sample batch and told my team back home that we had found something truly unique. they loved the samples too, but our r&d soon came back with a counter proposal that we should make the cushion here. give us 3 weeks and we will match the density and feel. we could import the fabric because no one in india had anything like it. but then bis regulations hit. even fabric imports were almost banned. now it has restarted but with massive tariffs. the team was ready with the cushion made in maharashtra but we had no fabric cover that could deliver the delight the cuddle pillow was supposed to have. our r&d stepped up again and developed this fabric in india but the cost shot up so much that at one point, and maybe even today, the covers of the cuddle pillow cost more than the cushion inside. but here we are. fun fact, when i visited the delhi mattress expo a few months back, at least a dozen vendors had frido copies and a few of them were selling a very poor cuddle pillow replica with neither the cushion nor the fabric anywhere close to ours. so copying and improving a product also needs a lot of know how. these are made in India 🇮🇳 and we clearly declare the country of origin of products by law, you can check on our website, we do import some products for saving capex and we do 5x more manufacturing and employ 100s of people directly and 1000s indirectly and will continue to do both. btw the chinese version in the picture is smaller than the frido cuddle pillow.

@juliet_turner6 Congratulations ✨

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

@sathaxe ❤️

how it started (2012) how it’s going (2025)

@isabelunraveled Congratulations ✨

this is probably a good time to tell you all some news! 💍❤️

My latest for @latimes: I travelled to southern India to document the rise of the AI "arm farms" — where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. latimes.com/business/story…

@LifeOfShandi 🙌

tldr; your boi is on is his first abroad trip(TO SFFFFF) im at the dubai airport. i open my laptop while waiting for the boarding to start. i have some time. i think about how far we have come. how easy and difficult it has been. how privileged i’ve become. become? didn’t i have these privileges all the time? well i’d say no. here is my story. hi, i’m harsh. i come from a middle class family(not victoria beckham’s type) and as a kid, i didn’t even dream about going abroad ever. i was a pretty smart kid who used to love playing sports. i was always motivated by parents to work harder, do better. they taught me that nothing in life comes easy(well, except hardships). i remember being in class 12th and deciding not to go to my high school farewell because spending 5k on a couple of hours didn’t make sense to me and it felt unfair that my parents worked so hard to earn it and it would just be gone in a couple of hours. my parents tried to convinced me to go but i had already made up my mind. i remember thinking to myself that day: what if 5k wasn’t that big a deal someday? what if life wasn’t just about money. how would my life look like then? i’m not gonna sit here on my economy seat in emirates and tell you, nah i have all the money in the world now but we are doing okay smol harsh and yeah 5k isn’t that big a deal now. i got into bits goa after my 12th which is like um what’s the school people in us go to if they don’t get into ivy league schools. yeah that one. it was my first time living alone, a lot of freedom and loneliness. i even decided to leave the college in the middle of the first sem and go back home and join a uni back there. glad to say, we didn’t go through with that decision. made a lot of mistakes. made some homies. made memories for lifetime. on a sidenote, if you can afford it, just go to college man. i see all these high school dropout kids building companies which is insane, i love that for you. but is that all there is to life? whatcha gonna do with all that money if you are 50 and not content with what you ended up sacrificing for the mills in the bank? what if you have all the money in the world but nobody to spend it with? i’d say you are smarter than that. back in 2nd year of college, me and my homie we used to grind data structures and algorithms together. i changed my phone but i wish i could show you the screenshots(pls help @saaarrth ) and show you how desperate and helpless it felt not getting shortlisted by all of those big shot companies. you start blaming stuff. you start blaming people. you start blaming everyone and everything because it feels so unfair. shocker. i know. idk who put this idea in everyone’s head that life is fair. it isn’t. you are born with a certain level of IQ, EQ, privilege, looks and all of that changes how the world perceives you. but just so you know the most good looking guy who models for idk what’s the equivalent of victoria’s secret for men(nike lol) but yeah whoever that guy is and makes a shit ton of money, i’m sure he is as miserable and as happy as you are in your life. nobody has it all. you don’t want to swap lives w anyone. because if you were willing to swap your life in entirety(sacrifices, problems, regrets, pain) with anyone else in this world genuinely then you would have become a closer version of that person already and wouldn’t feel the need to swap anyway. so yeah i finally got an internship in a company that rhymes w pisco. but i had already learnt the hustle. the art of working hard and reaching out. i wanted more(never enough by andrew wilkinson btw banger book). and so i used to do these random internships: marketing(1k rupees a month), content writing(250 per article), sales( 5k per month) and a bunch of other fullstack internships. i don’t think any of those internships have been in vain and will ever do. if nothing, it has instilled in me the belief that i can do anything and everything just by spending some time in it. with super smart models, that belief is a superpower. nothing you put your heart and mind to ever goes in vain btw. it always comes back. always. 100% 3rd year ended. our summer internship started. i was in a big firm(a company which has a video platform and rhymes with pisco) and honestly, didn’t learn anything at all there for the 2 months. just got paid a lot for a 20 year old and came back to college. by then we had BCG coming over to our college for the first time for consulting roles. i wanted to try it out. i spent days(genuinely days) polishing and making my resume better, getting reviewed by everyone and anyone. i remember the day my resume got shortlisted for interviews. we were walking in the lanes of our hostel. i was so excited. i didn’t know what’s gonna come or what’s gonna happen but i knew that it would be fun and fun it was. i spent the next 25 days reaching out to all the bitsians in the world who are working in bcg trying to setup mock interviews, working my ass off in case studies, the early mornings, the late nights and man was that a wonderful experience. there was this one guy, Sameer. He was working in BCG london back then as a project lead iirc and he used to spend 3 hours with a random 20 year old teaching him everything there is about consulting and not just one day, it was like 10 days. he didn’t get anything out of it. he just did it to help a younger bitsian out. i love that so much. that is exactly why i am always happy(more than happy tbh) if someone asks for help from me. damn if i could change someone’s life for the good, that would be insane. thank you Sameer, you did change my life for good. on the interview day of BCG, i had my first round and it was a quick 15 min round as the guy taking it was travelling and i got rejected. just 15 mins and you are done. no second chances. all the early morning 6 am preparations, all the sticking to late night schedule and then getting up early regardless for the 3 hour calls, everything that i did for the past 25 days gone down the drain, right? honestly 3rd year harsh would have thought so but not 4th year harsh. i was pretty bummed for sure but we had all of these big shot companies coming in 3-4 days for coding roles and i had coded my ass off before bcg and summer internships preparation so i went back to it. i still believed in myself. you wouldn’t believe me but i think the reason i got offers from amazon and capital one(i gave 2 interviews, cleared them both) was because i had prepared for BCG. i could feel my answers were so much more structured now. i used to think clearly. frame my answers better. so yeah, your boi ended up with 2 offers in the end of day 1. i chose capital one since it was starting out as a company in india and i thought it would be like a startup(which was partly true and partly false) and my homie from college also got in. we started living together, working together, kinda spending a lot of time together which two toxic ambitious males shouldn’t tbh. that was the first time i started making enough money that i didn’t have to worry about my basic needs or wants anymore. i could finally spend on my parents, my friends, my brother without feeling oh but what will happen. that feeling is good. to anyone who says, money can’t buy happiness. you are both right and wrong. for people who haven’t seen a lot of money in life, they should play the money game for a bit. its worth it. you will learn a lot about yourself. you will earn money. you will love spending it on your fam and friends. that’s a 11/10 experience. i wish everyone gets to experience that someday(i think you will anon, keep going) towards the end of the first year of working as a corporate slave, two of our college seniors got into YC and were building voice ai agents for HVAC companies(h/t to broccoli.com, abhishek, aditya and somil) and that was the first time me and my friend kinda got to know about the world in SF we started looking more into it. damn. i remember the first time i read about yc and funding and starting companies. i didn’t know that kinda ambition was possible before then. i got to feel first hand how far ahead the technology is in silicon valley when compared to the rest of the world. i wanted more. i left my corporate MNC job and joined a smaller startup (~30-50 people) as a data scientist. i learnt a lot. we had amazing founders and an even better team(shoutout to everyone at Sundial), made a few close friends there. post that stint, i wanted to work in a yc company. not any yc company, the one which just started. the one where things would break everyday. the one where you are the marketing, product, frotnend, backend, customer support and so i started cold emailing founders who had just raised money in yc. 50 emails. no replies. 100 emails, 1 reply. 200 emails, 4 replies. 300 emails, 10 replies. got interviewed for one of them and joined @alexcodes ai with the most cracked(genuinely) coder i have had the pleasure of working with. good thing was, he was also my founder. we were building the cursor for xcode. we were competing directly with cursor and windsurf for market space and goddamn what a feeling that was. every customer felt a huge win. every churn felt like a loss. i used to reach out to people who cancelled their subscription just to kinda know why they thought it wasn’t worth it. i still sremember the busy days, the ones where we pushed a new version and it had bugs and we would spend hours solving bugs, talking to everyone on discord but by the end of it all it was worth it. i had gotten my chance to work with an amazing founder in a company i loved building a product that was changing lives. i remember some tweets where people would say “can’t imagine coding ios apps ever again without alex” and honestly, those were the highlights of my days. now i work as a founding engineer at Lumari. we help supply chain companies build agents on top of their existing ERPs and workflows and it has been super fun so far. oh also, Alexcodes got acquired by OpenAI and my goat Daniel has joined Codex. i am on a flight to SF. this is my first time going out of my country. a younger version of me couldn’t even dream of going out of country. just somewhere out of city would have been enough for him. my life has been as easy and as difficult as yours and like everyone else’s. while so much more is to be done, i’m happy and grateful to god for a lot of things i have been lucky to achieve in life. to anyone who is struggling rn to make sense of their life, who is struggling to make ends meet, who is struggling to get a job, i can’t say anything that would make it easier for you. i’ll just tell you that its possible. i’ve done it and so can you. just persevere a little bit longer. just work a bit harder. keep going. i love this quote from someone, “till death all defeat is psychological” you didn’t crack an interview? big whoop you were fired from a company? big whoop you got dumped? big whoop yeah. big whoop(thanks ted lasso) you can and will come back from everything in your life even if everything seems to be going wrong right now. that’s not a nice place to be but there is a way out. there is always a way out. you can do it anon. i believe in you. grateful and excited for everything that’s yet to come :) signing off, the boy who took his first flight at 22.

It is so sad to read @AkshayaS90's father's posts on Linkedin. Imagine losing your only child and then paying bribe for her death certificate. Stuff like this makes you lose faith in humanity.

This is the Ejipura flyover in Bengaluru, under construction since 2017, still incomplete after 8 years. For perspective, the UAE built the Burj Khalifa in 5 years. The US reconstructed the World Trade Center in 7 years. China turned Shenzhen from a fishing village into an industrial city in 7 years. And here we are, unable to finish even a flyover in nearly a decade. The irony is that after all that delay, whatever finally gets built barely lasts a few years.

Today is Chhatth Pooja Celebrated mostly in the gangetic belt Let me explain why Chhath Pooja is a big deal. And why it is my favourite festival. Here is why 👇 1. Chhath is a festival of faith unlike any other. There are no stringent rules. There is no mahurat. There is no pandit ji. You don't have to go to a temple. No specific mantras or pooja or havan. This is a festival of individual faith. A prayer that brings together the softest of things - the heart of a mother.. with the mightiest of elements - the Sun.. There is no conduit - no Panditji, no specific place of worship, no chanting of hard-to-know mantras, no stringent rules and process gatekept by anyone Women (my dadi, my mom, my aunts) stand in any water body, in the cold, before the sun rises, praying to the sun. They murmur silent prayers for everyone's well being. There is no loud music or lud chants Just a woman with irrational faith and a soft prayer for their kids and families and community. 2. You can do chhath even if you have nothing to offer to the deity (Sun). There is no defined offering, no sweets, dry fruits, no dakshina to offer to panditiji. You just offer water to the sun if you have nothing else. In hindi we call it ' Suraj ko argh dena' If you have the means you offer whatever fruits are locally available. There is scant difference in how the richest perform this festival, versus the poorest. It is truly, a festival for EVERYONE The only thing you need is faith and good vibes 3. Chhath is unique in that it celebrates and worships both the rising sun and the setting sun. The same prayers are offered to both The whole world pays homage to the rising sun- symbolic of the powerful, mighty, on their way up. Chhath reminds us to value the setting sun too ❤️ Paying homage who came before us, and past their prime, and whose shoulders we stand. It is also a symbolic gesture to remind us of impermanence. What rises up, sets down and rises again. And both who are rising and setting deserve our homage and prayers and kindness 4. It is truly a community festival. Many people you see in this photo are not family, but from the local community. For 4 days people flock to the homes where chhath Pooja happens. People come to help. Pooja is hard on the ones doing it ~ 4 days of fasting, last 2 days fasting without water. If someone is not able to fast and pray, they try to participate by association. By helping, and by doing the pooja -via the ones who are fasting and praying My house in Ranchi is buzzing with people for 4 days - with folks from the community, friends-from near and far. People come to seek blessings from the ones praying, to help, chit-chat and most importantly, to get prasaad The faith is strong :) I wish I had more time to dig deeper. Maybe next year. But I hope this helps you understand why 'Chhath' is a big deal for some of us. And kyun, "Diwali pe chutti mile na mile, chhatth pe milni chahiye" is a legit request for some. Because there is an unsaid rule in our part of the world - " You can be a moron, good-for-nothing son all year But if you come home for chhath, and help decorate the ghaat (water body) and do the service and participate in the faith, all is forgotten and forgiven. And you qualify for the best blessings from the kindest warmest, hearts brimming with faith.. like only a mom's heart can be ❤️❤️" Jai Chhathi Maiyya Happy Chhath pooja to all 🙏🙏🙏

I was high on India’s growth story. But not anymore. For years, I thought we were on the right path, it’s only that we’re a poor country (thanks to colonisation) but as our income grows everything will change. And that’s going to happen soon. We’ll have great infrastructure, cleaner roads, efficient systems and whatnot. But lately I’ve been feeling it’s just a story being fed to us, the change isn’t actually coming. The slow growth that we see, that’s not going to change anytime soon- in fact, it might get worse. Simply because corruption is too ingrained in the system and scarcity mindset supersedes our desire to do better for each other. Every single time. It’s not our fault. Good behaviour starts at the top. When our politicians and their rallies leave roads dirty, I can’t expect an average Indian to take the ‘Clean India Mission’ seriously. It pinches me when I pay tax because I know it’s not just being used to build better infrastructure, it’s going to someone’s pocket too. I would love to pay more tax, but all I ask for is more transparency into where it’s being used. Every time I interact with a govt institution, I am left in awe of how inefficient and opaque the processes are. It’s a nightmare to get things done if you have good ethics. ‘Additional fee’ is almost always expected to move anything. And there's unnecessary focus on language that also sometimes dictates how you're treated. Just recently, my neighbour lost their only son (22 yrs old) to a pothole accident, within 6 hours that particular pothole was covered, while all others around it weren’t. And within weeks, that one pothole is also back to the same condition. Imagine how they must feel. We talk about taking care of our citizens- it’s almost a JOKE. My friends keep telling me govt is focussing on bigger problems right now, but I have never really understood what those are. If you know the answer- please educate me. With AI and humanoids taking over in the next decade or so, we’re pretty much doomed. We will end up with millions of jobless Indians and I don’t expect the govt to do anything about it. Maybe they’ll prevent humanoids from becoming a reality in India the same way they don’t want self-driving cars. The only way I see us doing better is if entrepreneurs take charge of building better systems, funding research, improving healthcare and driving more innovation against all odds. All around me, young ambitious Indians are driving real change, and I am so freakin proud of our entrepreneurs. We need to celebrate them more for trying, for failing. For privileged Indians like me, we live in a bubble of our mostly privatised world and that’s nice because 80% of our time is spent at home/office. So I am not complaining about my life, this is not a rant. I truly want my country to do better, and I don’t see it happening rn. I'd love to know where I'm wrong. Until then, I hope India is thriving in some other universe, because I really believe she can.

😂😂

🤦‍♂️ indeed

The five schemes combined cost more than Rs 95,450 cr cumulatively through August 2025 To fund this, the state increased borrowing to Rs 63,377 cr with CAG specifically identifying ₹63,000 crore borrowed to fund guarantees 20% of revenue receipts now locked into welfare 15/21

Ouch