Vivek Ramachandran

@hindookissinger Surely the Zoroastrian kings are an acceptable exception

@protosphinx I wouldn’t be dismissive. Applovin is probably the most important company in digital direct response advertising of the last decade.

AppLovin’s market cap is bigger in dollars than its daily web traffic. With Bangladesh as its #2 traffic source. Totally legit

The dollar is losing reserve currency status. It’s down to 42% of global reserves, and gold is rapidly rising.

One of the finest humans I’ve had the honour of knowing. And the best gaming brain in India. Our loss of @vivekr94 as a colleague << Value created for India gaming. Vivek and @sashank_v are building something special at GameRamp. And hiring across roles in BLR.

We are thrilled to announce our investment into GameRamp GameRamp has raised a $5.4M Pre-Seed round led by BitKraft Ventures with participation from Mixi, Southpark Commons India, us (DeVC) & select Angel investors Our former colleague Vivek R left Z47 last year to partner with

💰New: GameRamp, which helps games & consumer apps rapidly scale up, has raised $5.4M pre-seed funding round. The round was led by @BITKRAFTVC with participation from Mixi, @southpkcommons, & @DeVC_Global Story - moneycontrol.com/news/business/… @vivekr94 @sashank_v @Anuj_Tandon

@hindookissinger I’ve followed the data of geographical transition of this talent across Maths and Physics. You wouldn’t like the answer.

So apparently China has several top models now. I can understand India’s manufacturing challenges. I can understand the infra gaps. What I can’t understand is how Indian IT giants sitting on billions have made no real AI progress while their core business is under direct threat. And they continue to peddle nonsensical visas and what not. That business is over! And no I’m not talking about cash starved startups. No. This isn’t even about India. It just makes business sense to own SOTA models if you’re an IT leader with 100k+ employees. AI will eat your own business alive in ten years. It’s just common sense! You have the cash. It’s sitting on your balance sheet. Use it. There’s absolutely no cope except that you’re intellectually lazy and nobody is calling this out This is a historic L. Monumental mistake. One for the history books. Big big blackpill lads I can’t lie.

The lack of short selling in Indian markets is causing potential market distortions. Unless we make shorting of stocks easy in the Indian markets, price discovery will be impaired. India has been a structurally long-only market with almost no shorting activity, because borrowing stock to short is really hard and is an offline process. Because of this long-only bias, there's probably very little short-selling talent as well, even if large funds want to start shorting. The only real way to short stocks until now was to use futures, maybe options. But there are only 224 F&O stocks, which means you can't short the vast majority of the problematic stocks. Also, these contracts expire every month, and the cost of rolling over these contracts is significant (only the 1st month contract is liquid). Unless this changes, there will always be weird distortions in the prices of Indian markets. Short sellers, although they have a bad reputation, are massively underrated. Think of them as janitors; they clean up all the garbage in the markets and make them more efficient. Securities lending and borrowing (SLB) is still an offline process, and most brokers don't offer an online option. Like everyone, we at @zerodha offer it, but you'll have to call us to borrow or lend, and there's a process, which means it'll never scale. Hopefully, we will have an online platform by the end of the year, and stock lending and borrowing will become much simpler.

First-mover advantage is a myth

The more I see sport, and the more I see life, I am increasingly convinced that reputations and egos come in the way of creating great teams.

Air superiority doesn't imply, or guarantee a loss loss rate of friendly aircraft. Even 'obsolete' air defense systems can deal damage to a superior air/naval fleet. This has happened in Iran, Kosovo, Afghanistan and in countless WWII battles.

If you're frustrated at work, consider joining a smaller company

Acceleration.

BTW tariff is from the Arabic تعريف.

@kmr_dilip 1) higher liquidity in secondary markets will help 2) said liquidity will open up post a level of capital traction which might not be correlated to ‘doing well’

The biggest flaw in startups is making early employees wait for an IPO to get paid while the founders and VCs cash out in secondary rounds. The people who took the deepest risks- the early employees are left holding paper wealth. The system isn’t broken, but it is imbalanced. If secondaries were normalized for employees, the best talent wouldn’t be forced into golden handcuffs. They’d be free to bet on new ideas, creating more startups and more wealth. It’s unfair that Investors and founders can de-risk along the way, while early employees are told to ‘think long-term’ without the same options. Hey founders, listen- when your company starts to do well, look at the people who made that possible. Wealth isn’t created by trapping talent, it’s created by freeing it. There are 1.5 million direct jobs generated by startups in India today. When people know their upside is real, they don’t just work harder, they build better.

@nikitabier Open source

Between advising 60 companies over the last year, I have identified 6 methods to bypass Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (IDFA) in totally compliant and longterm defensible ways. If I turned them into a SaaS product, it would increase the efficiency of global ad spend by $100 billion annually. But then I would have to be a SaaS founder—and I don’t think I could handle my spouse having an affair.

This is why ChatGPT and nvidia is valuable, while the underlying LLMs are a commodity.

Brawl Stars is one of the best live ops/ discipline/ turnaround stories in games. This is why big PE firms are deploying big dollars into studios w/live products although I'm not sure they've all employed the right teams/structures to fully take advantage of the opp so far