Sandeep Paruchuri

Really enjoyed chatting with @alicenewtonrex recently about one of the most exciting product journeys of my career!

@pitdesi Threw some tokens at it: chatgpt.com/s/t_69b1f4b8c4… tldr we would need more demand to fully close the gap, but it would be a lot narrower if we were closer to the per trip cost of comparable systems eg WMATA

@pitdesi Has anyone worked up what BART’s gap would look like if you used the operating cost metrics of a top 10 US public transit agency? Would be an interesting exercise on whether it’s a revenue or cost problem

I love BART But it's crazy how poorly it has been run! Pre-pandemic, the farebox covered ~70% of your ride, the rest was subsidized by the taxpayers, which is pretty good! Now only about 20% of the revenue comes from the farebox, the rest is borne by taxpayers. NOT GOOD! BART ridership is less than half its pre-pandemic levels. Some of that is due to remote work, but a lot of that is self-inflicted... people just don't want to ride BART as much anymore. They let fare evasion slide (as policy!) for years. Aside from the lost revenue, fare enforcement is a signal. When you stop enforcing fares, people who cause trouble show up, and you see stuff happening on BART that you DO NOT want to see. The people who just want a safe ride to work stop showing up because they have had enough... and then you get a death spiral: fewer paying riders, worse experience, fewer riders. They finally added new fare gates ~6 mos ago, which has helped tremendously, but it was a little late! Farebox revenue has been dwindling, so BART wants SF residents to approve an additional 1% sales tax on top of what is already one of the highest sales tax rates in the country. But they seemingly haven't done much to control costs! We've got >200 BART employees making more than $250K a year. They have a PR team (why?) while the system bleeds riders. They have the strongest public transit union in the country that is unwilling to rightsize the staff for a ridership that is far below what it was. I think they did some permanent damage to the system over the past few years. A lot of offices used to consider BART access as a must-have but now they don't, because people felt unsafe coming in, so companies moved further from BART stops. People will ultimtely come back when they feel safe. And... there's a huge untapped asset: real estate. BART sits on valuable land across the Bay Area. In cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, transit agencies lease station-adjacent real estate for retail, restaurants, and housing. It's a massive revenue stream, and many train lines around the world are profitable due to the real estate... capture some value of the land you increase by getting passengers there! I once tried to get BART to lease out access to their real estate (they have relatively large stations that could serve retail!), but they seemed to have little interest in it. They'd rather ask taxpayers for more money than unlock value they're already sitting on. The pain here is largely self-imposed. I absolutely love BART but don't think we should pay for their ineptitude! nytimes.com/2026/03/10/us/…

@chiefofstuffs Imagine the GDP unlock

@sp990 fixing the sf costco food court line is my roman empire

My new product execution interview question should be “how would you optimize the Costco food court line?”

Taking a Teams call and a Meets back to back in browser is eye opening. Really wonder how Microsoft leadership would explain the experience gap to customers or even their own bosses after all this time

Turns out people like ChatGPT and mocking the sycophantic voice was confusing and a backfire. SF twitter bubble in shambles

Classic example of what dumping free subscriptions into edu and via developing market partnerships like Jio can do for your talking points to Wall St

My kingdom for an AI that can fill out and sync all my mandatory trackers at work

FIFA Peace Prize winner really showing us why he deserved it

@BenSlivka Can't tell if that increases or decreases overall risk 🙃

@sp990 xAI and the rest of the LLMs are decades away from AGI.

wasn't this _literally_ how skynet was framed?

@typesfast @parkerconrad They missed the opportunity to add some purple background to it

Rippling finally got their logo on the ugliest building in the city. Good job ⁦@parkerconrad⁩

San Francisco: it's daylight savings time and sunset is 5pm Also San Francisco: how about a little heat wave?

@conor_ai @meh_agarwal Rosewood Happy Hour.

@meh_agarwal 💀💀 what’s the age filter set to tho 👀👀 might need to look into some TAM expansion opportunities

Finding PMF as a single man in SF is super hard

Typical San Francisco. In 2019 the proposal was 575 units with a 50% affordability goal. It would have created 288 affordable units. "No market-rate housing on public land" ideologues pushed for "100% affordable" and now we’re down to just 100 units. Utter stupidity.

The true sign you've slowed down on travel is realizing all the new release in flight movies are actually new to you

It begins realtor.com/news/celebrity…

I can't wait to see what Lucy Guo does with full liquidity

July 3 literally anywhere else: extra ice, please July 3 in the bay area: turning on your heat

The Pacers deserved better than that Game 7.