Aspiring Polymath, Good Fight Instigator, Humane Capitalist, Dad Joke Connoisseur; Cofounder JioSaavn; Partner 212MEDIA
NYC|MTV|BOM|DEL|BLR and Zoom
Joined March 2007
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Vinodh Bhat retweeted
Lonely and Right
Keynes said picking stocks is like a newspaper beauty contest: you don't win by picking the prettiest face, you win by picking the face everyone else picks.
Ninety years on, that's still the most honest description of my job which is sad because I think I know beauty.
Now the tortoise and the hare. Everyone tells it as "slow and steady wins." That's not the story. The story is that for 90% of the race the tortoise is losing. Badly. In public. The hare is at the cocktail party. The hare's LPs are thrilled. The hare is on the list. Then the tortoise wins at the end, and we tell it to children, and we leave out that the tortoise spent the whole race feeling like a fool.
So be honest. Would you rather win 90% of the race and lose at the end, or lose 90% of the race and win? Counted in years of your one life, the hare has the better deal. That is venture capital right now. The young partner in a venture firm would rather be the hare and jump to the next firm than be lonely as the tortoise.
The consensus deal is the hare. Expensive, crowded, fun. Everyone at dinner knows the company. The marks go up, the capital piles in, and for years you feel like you're winning, right up to the moment the music stops, which is the only moment that counts. The contrarian deal is the tortoise. It pays only if you're contrarian and right, and you find out which at the end. Until then you're on no list, nobody at dinner has heard of your company, and you look slow. Early and wrong feel identical from the inside. That's the whole difficulty.
So the real trade was never consensus versus contrarian. It's finding the thing that's contrarian today and consensus in eighteen months.
Buy the tortoise, then watch it grow legs. Cheap entry, then the multiple expands when the crowd arrives, and then you're back at the cocktail party being congratulated on your foresight by the same people who thought you were lonely.
Lonely and right, then crowded and rich.
That's the business. Finding the ugly duckling that's going to become a swan - that's where the alpha is.
What's contrarian now that I think flips? Held loosely:
1. Outcomes, not tokens. Everyone is selling the enterprise intelligence by the pound. The enterprise doesn't want intelligence. It wants the claim processed, the invoice reconciled, the ticket closed. One in five companies has AI in production; one in fourteen has rebuilt the factory. Whoever sells the other thirteen a finished outcome, priced like a result and not like a utility bill, wins the decade. It looks like a services business on the way in. So did Amazon.
2. Security that gets paid for the breach that didn't happen. The attackers have agents now, so every company on earth is about to be robbed at machine speed, and the defender's product is still a dashboard. The bet is the company that stops selling the dashboard and starts selling the result: we handle it, we're on the hook. Security and insurance were always the same business. Someone is about to notice.
3. The specialist labs. Not the frontier, which is consensus at a trillion, but the labs that do one thing for one industry at a hundredth the price.
4. The boring half of the physical world. Robotics is loud. Inspection, maintenance and warehouses are quiet, and the revenue lives in the quiet part.
I may be wrong about all four. That's rather the point. If I were sure, so would everyone, and then it wouldn't be a trade. It'd be a cocktail party.
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
Elon Musk unveils new Tesla Roadster by launching it off a ramp flipping the car mid-air and safely landing.
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
Cavemen Issues Dire Warning That The Wheel Is Going To Eliminate Countless Jobs
youtu.be/hYTIs1epD0A?is=X547…
Laughed out loud several times during @nbcsnl after a very long time! Weekend update was next level.
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
I think @evanspiegel is actually making sick progress on SPECS and Snap is going to crush it when these get to < $400
SPECS bring useful digital experiences into the world around you while keeping you present in the moment. From work and navigation to entertainment, creativity, and connection.
SPECS.com
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
Great video by Andrew Schulz (via IG) on what it means to be a New Yorker and what it meant when the Knicks won. Certainly resonates with me. How we feeling?
One thing that continues to stand out about Snap: @evanspiegel seems genuinely obsessed with building a great product experience for users, not just optimizing near-term financials.
Yes, 12 years investing in Specs is objectively a long time. But the world may finally be catching up to the vision:
a) the enabling technologies especially generative AI + hardware miniaturization are finally arriving
b) vertical integration gives Snap unusually tight control over the end-user experience
c) integrated hardware/software platforms are dramatically harder to copy than standalone app features (many of which competitors cloned from Snap over the years!)
The market also may be underestimating the strategic value of 25MM+ paying subscribers across Snap+ and related offerings. That’s not just “subscription revenue”... it’s proof a meaningful segment of users is willing to directly pay for a unique product experience. And frankly, for competitive reasons, I wouldn’t disclose churn rates either.
Financially, the 1K layoffs should materially reduce stock-based compensation pressure. Hopefully compensation increasingly shifts toward cash-based incentives tied to durable operating performance and free cash flow generation.
And for financial analysts modeling the business: try adding back the quarterly Specs R&D spend to better understand the underlying economics of Snap’s core platform today. Specs are not ordinary operating expenses. They are a long-duration strategic investment that could create entirely new revenue streams and margin pools in the future, while strengthening a moat.
One final thought for activists: if you engage with management, try to add value. Great founder-led companies are often built through long-duration conviction that looks irrational before it looks obvious. Being constructively challenging is useful. Being a pain in the ass usually isn’t.
$SNAP
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
WELCOME TO THE AI BOWL
And if you've seen this movie before, you already know how it ends.
Tonight, while 130 million Americans watch the Seahawks and Patriots, they'll also witness something that should make every serious investor deeply uncomfortable:
The single largest concentration of AI advertising in television history.
16 tech companies bought Super Bowl ads this year.
OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, Genspark, Base44, Rippling, Ramp - and more.
Tech ad spending is DOUBLE what it was during the 2022 "Crypto Bowl," the last time NBC broadcast the game.
At $8-10 million per 30 second spot, plus production costs pushing all-in budgets north of $20 million per ad, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent tonight by companies trying to convince you their AI product will change your life.
I've been in markets for 45 years.
When an entire sector floods the most expensive advertising real estate on the planet, it's not a signal to buy. It's a signal to think VERY carefully about what comes next.
My friend @DougKass has been beating this drum for years with his "Stock Market Super Bowl Indicator".
The more intensely a single sector dominates Super Bowl advertising, the more likely those stocks underperform in the year ahead.
Doug's been right far more often than he's been wrong on this one.
Because we've seen this exact playbook twice before...
2000: The Dot-Com Bowl. 14 internet startups bought Super Bowl ads at $2.2M per spot. Pets .com spent $1.2M on its famous sock puppet commercial.
Within 10 months it was dead - stock went from $11 to zero.
8 of 11 startups that advertised were bankrupt or sold in fire sales within a year.
2022: The Crypto Bowl. FTX, Coinbase, Crypto .com, and eToro collectively spent $54 million on Super Bowl ads.
Larry David told 100M viewers "Don't miss out on crypto."
9 months later, FTX was bankrupt.
Bankman-Fried is now in prison.
Coinbase shares fell 70% within a year.
By the next Super Bowl, crypto had "zero representation."
Now 2026: The AI Bowl.
And the parallels are impossible to ignore.
The Duke CFO Survey tells us the vast majority of CFOs report "no change" in productivity, decision-making, or customer satisfaction from AI investments over the past 12 months.
US tech giants spent $380 BILLION on AI infrastructure in 2025. Goldman Sachs says measurable GDP impact doesn't start until 2027.
The companies SELLING AI tools are getting rich. The companies BUYING them can't measure the returns.
And tonight, the sellers are spending record sums to convince even more buyers to pile in.
The data on Super Bowl advertisers as investments is damning.
Bridgewise found that after 6 months, companies running Super Bowl ads trailed the S&P 500 by an average of 9.2%.
Only 25% outperformed the index at 6 months.
Now look at who's advertising tonight:
OpenAI and Anthropic are pre-IPO companies burning billions in cash, racing to prove they can monetize before capital markets demand accountability.
Genspark and Base44 are startups most Americans have never heard of, spending $8-10M per spot to introduce themselves.
The real rivalry tonight isn't Seattle vs. New England.
It's Anthropic vs. OpenAI, fighting for "mindshare and legitimacy as both prepare for massive IPOs."
That's a NARRATIVE CAMPAIGN to justify valuations before public markets scrutinize the books.
Every bubble has a moment where the hype sector dominates the Super Bowl.
Dot-coms in 2000. Crypto in 2022. AI in 2026.
Peak advertising spend correlates with peak euphoria, not peak fundamentals.
Dot-com companies told you to click.
Crypto companies told you not to miss out.
AI companies are telling you the future is here.
The future may well arrive. But the stocks are priced like it already delivered and exceeded expectations.
It hasn't.
Enjoy the game tonight.
But the best contrarian indicator in markets isn't some fancy algorithm.
It's a $10 million Super Bowl ad.
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
— Maya Angelou
via the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter (tim.blog/fbf) from @tferriss
I played a lot of tennis in September, and one match in particular taught me a lesson I didn’t expect.
That day, I played terribly. Not because my opponent overpowered me, but because of something embarrassingly small: my cotton t-shirt. It was drenched, clinging, heavy. Every point I felt its drag—a tug here, a sticky patch there. I wasn’t playing tennis, I was managing discomfort.
The next week, I made one tiny change: I wore a @Nike Dri-Fit shirt. That’s it. No new racket. No new strategy. Just a better shirt.
Suddenly, I wasn’t distracted. I wasn’t fussing with fabric or weighed down by sweat. I could just play. The game felt lighter, freer, more fun. I played some of my best tennis.
The lesson wasn’t really about clothing—it was about friction. One subtle distraction was enough to limit my performance. Removing that distraction unlocked focus, flow, and joy.
This is exactly how improvement in business works. We often assume progress requires a massive leap: a bold new strategy, a complete overhaul, a “10x” innovation. But sometimes, the breakthrough is far smaller. It’s about noticing the friction we’ve grown accustomed to—the meeting that always runs too long, the tool that constantly crashes, the process everyone secretly hates. Each one is a sweaty cotton t-shirt.
The problem is, we adapt. We normalize the drag. We compensate for it day after day, thinking that’s just the cost of doing business. Until one day, we make the smallest of changes—a new tool, a clearer process, a faster decision—and suddenly realize how much lighter everything feels.
Focus is an underrated competitive advantage. When your mind is free to lock fully onto the work itself—not the distractions, not the annoyances—the quality of your output transforms. It feels less like grinding effort, more like flow.
So now I'm going to ask myself regularly: what’s my cotton t-shirt right now? What small, fixable friction is weighing me down? And what’s my Dri-Fit—my simple switch that could remove the drag and unlock better performance?
On the court, it made tennis more enjoyable and let me play to my potential. In business, it can mean the difference between constant firefighting and sustained excellence.
Sometimes peak performance doesn’t come from massive breakthroughs. Sometimes it just comes from 'swapping the shirt'.
Vinodh Bhat retweeted
"I only use the Brave browser and Brave Search for this reason. I don't want my search history saved somewhere. F--k that." - Jason Calacanis on the latest episode of @theallinpod
Thanks for the shoutout, @jason! Proud to be your choice for private browsing and search!🫡
How many GPUs could be bought in the coming years? Well, how many networked neurons are in the human brain? Answer: 86 billion. There are 5 major frontier models - OpenAI/ChatGPT, Amazon/Anthropic, Google/Gemini, Meta/Llama, xAI/Grok - all racing to build super intelligence. The outcome is the ultimate human that has PhD level understanding of 10,000+ subjects that nearly everyone will have access to. Let's just say 5 of these companies have the cash flow to keep buying networked neurons. 86 billion x 5 = 430 billion. Nvidia sold 3.8MM Grace Hopper integrated data center GPUs in 2023, and data center revenue was up 217% 2024. Blackwell has been very well received in 2025. #LongWayToGo $NVDA
Last week, we witnessed something extraordinary: The Picture of Dorian Gray @DorianGrayPlay on Broadway. Sarah Snook didn’t just perform—she transformed. For two straight hours, she became every character on stage. A full-body, full-heart performance that somehow felt effortless and impossible all at once. One person carrying that much story, emotion, and intensity with zero breaks? Unreal.
Dozens of voices, postures, and personalities, all pouring out of one person with unbelievable precision. Hilarious one moment, gut-wrenching the next. She shape shifted into every character on stage—switching voices, expressions, and energy like it was magic, all brought to life with her voice, body and soul. The show wasn’t just a performance..it was a masterclass in stamina, storytelling, preparation and total command of the room.
While there wasn’t a big set or flashy tricks, the show’s use of technology and screens will set a new standard in live performances and storytelling. We walked in expecting a play and left feeling in awe, like we witnessed something extremely rare.
Sarah Snook is in a league of her own and a generational talent.
Words to live by, from Pope Francis: “Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself and flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves. Living for others is a rule of nature. We are all born to help each other. No matter how difficult it is…life is good when you are happy; but much better when others are happy because of you.”
Congrats @sriramk! Excited for the sustainable productivity your work will unleash.
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