Simran

if i can help someone see the signal in their chaos turn an idea into something real build something that actually matters or just believe they’re not too early, not too late that’s the kind of work i care about dm’s open if you’re building

@NBDwrites Ok

@simransurii don’t respond to that DM. I did not send it to you. It’s the same hacker who has hacked so many accounts. Please DELETE without pressing any link.

Shoonya isn’t silence. It’s what remains when the noise leaves. No hacks. No stimulation. Just you, sitting with everything you’ve been avoiding and somehow, finding peace in it. Been a while since I met myself like this.

Met @sama today. Move to sf, it will change your life!

@ashajadeja Looking forward to reading this!

Part of our work at Center for Environmental Education, Ahmedabad, India. The report should be on the website.

launching a $200M AI + Startup Fund. Backing founders building the next layer of intelligence across healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Looking for: – Series A AI companies – High-pedigree pre-seed/seed founders Warm intros > cold decks. simran@kanegi.in

Highlight of day 1 in Bombay! Lovely people ❤️

Some days you’re closing deals, hiring fast, everything feels aligned. Some days you’re questioning everything the product, the timing, yourself. Both are normal. Building something real isn’t linear. It’s cycles. Energy, doubt, clarity, chaos all part of the same graph. The mistake isn’t having low days. The mistake is thinking they mean you’re off track. You’re not. You’re just in the part of the journey no one posts about.

“In a world of noise, confusion, and conflict, it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline, and peace. Not the peace of withdrawal, but the peace of those who live in love.” — Thomas Merton

it takes one email to change your life

Founders who raise on Zoom alone don't raise. When I was raising my first fund I lived in San Diego. I flew to Dubai. Switzerland. Israel. New York. Then moved to Dubai for a month. Not because I wanted to. Because you cannot raise money on Zoom calls alone. The founders I meet who can't raise have one thing in common. They're pitching from their bedroom. Sending decks. Booking Zoom calls. Following up on emails. And wondering why nobody writes the check. Investors back people before they back products. And they decide if they back you in the first 10 minutes of being in the same room. Not on a 30 minute video call where you're a face on a screen. The founders closing rounds in 2026 are on planes. They're at @consensus2026. @EthCC. @ParisBlockWeek. @token2049. They're having dinner with the right people. They're doing the uncomfortable thing most founders won't do. Get out of your house!!!

Water is one of the biggest mafia industries on the planet. Old-school. Boring. Traditional. And that’s exactly why it throws crazy margins. 😎 We’re turning black water into clean water at 70% lower cost in a $300B+ market. Deck ready. Investors, who’s in? 💰

I’m hosting dinner parties again. 8-10 people, twice per month in San Francisco. If you are a founder, and especially if you are NOT a founder, and you would like to come for an evening of good food and conversation, send me a DM First dinner is March 27

India is building 3 futures at once: Silicon Valley AI spiritual depth and wedding budgets that could fund startups

AI is going to drain a lot of moats.

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon. My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction. I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January. The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000. In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh. I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently." I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits. The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo. The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production. I do not have enough senior engineers. I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds. We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do. I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve." The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised. I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired. Some of them are the same people. I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things. The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production. I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction. The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet. I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone. The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured. My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run. The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it. But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

Spent yesterday at @iitbombay in a masterclass by Prof. Peter from @WashU in St. Louis. One idea stayed with me: The institutions that survive disruption are not the ones with the best content they’re the ones that redesign the system around the content. That’s how @washingtonpost and @nytimes reinvented themselves. Feels very relevant for what’s happening in education and AI right now.

I have realised..I have no prime I will evolve until I die.

Rescheduled an important call for an investor meeting. 15 minutes before the call: “Not our thesis.” This could have been communicated days earlier. Founders move entire schedules around these meetings. The startup ecosystem talks a lot about backing founders and supporting women founders. Start with something simpler: Respect people’s time.

@defi_dua This is so kind!! Also very proud!

First action post exit: wiring my first two angel checks to founders I’ve long admired. Giving back to and being a part of the ecosystem that pushed a kid from Ludhiana this far. SF is truly magical.