Saurabh Lahoti

#PalkiSharmaShow: Is This AI’s Biggest Challenge Yet? @palkisu tells you.

🇮🇳 India lifted 496 million people out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, according to the World Bank’s October 2026 Poverty and Equity Brief. • Extreme poverty (people living on less than $3 a day) fell from 27.1% to 2.6% • People living below $4.20 a day fell from 57.7% to 16.1% • India added 134 million jobs between 2017 and 2023

Rough week for software. 81% of names down. ServiceNow off 34%. Multiple compression happens much more swiftly & brutally than multiple expansion.

This video deserves to go viral.

JUST IN: Elon Musk unveils the Tesla Roadster by launching it off a ramp before the car flipped in midair and safely landed on the ground. The car is a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX. One of the most insane things I've ever seen.

The smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US for the simple reason that the economic incentives are far far better. Perplexity ($20B), Skild ($14B+), Baseten ($13B), Together ($8B), Glean ($8B), Modal ($5B), Rubrik ($25B), Harness ($5B), Blacksmith, Parallel, Greptile, CodeRabbit, Composio, Distyl ($2B), Resolve, Luma, Cartesia, Wispr, dMatrix, Arize and many more - all started by at least one Indian-born founder. The US is a far easier to raise capital in with far less dilution. Most Indian companies are switching where they're domiciled to get access to the US capital markets. Every single Indian venture firm is trying very hard to invest in the US or risk not participating in the AI race (ironically, the management fees of venture firms are so high in India relatively that this is the one group that net of carry actually has incentive to be in India because they take home well north of a living wage whether or not funds perform do) While Zomato ($35B now, $8B at IPO) might be the biggest outcome in Indian venture, Cursor ($60B), Reflection (potentially $20B+), World Labs ($8B), OpenRouter ($8B), HuggingFace ($12B) and of course the $1T+ big labs quickly make those outcomes seem small and happen on a much smaller time scale, with much higher IRR. Engineers at these startups regularly get paid $1M/yr, and make $10M+ on exit. Even in BigTech, it is trivial to pull up levels fyi and see that if you're L6/L7+ with ~10 years of experience, you're making $1M/yr there too. And of course, we all know the slew of Indian CEOs of companies here, not to mention a huge bench of lesser known executives across the board in public and private companies. I say all this because every time there is a slight immigration hiccup in the US, I hear the online pleas to "build in India", I struggle to understand why most engineers, academics or founders would do that net of desire to be close to family, failure to obtain visa and devout patriotism. This is not a superiority thing or a US v India thing. The economic incentives at least for technologists to being in the US outweigh India by at least an order of magnitude.

Was super-cool to attend @BessemerVP's "Make in India" meetup at Redwood City last week. Some interesting insights from the freewheeling convos👇🏽

At my startup, @usefyi we have pivoted from a document search tool for everyone to a security product used by IT people. We've also changed our name to Nira (@niradotcom). The pivot got kick-started when someone used our product in an unexpected way. Here's the story…

The VC process is just so berserk, it's just crazy. Startups with a great team, live product and great metrics often struggle through months of calls to raise even $2M while a new Co started 2 weeks back with just a story that is currently "hot", will raise $5M in 5 days.