This is a transcript of an AMA I did on 7 May ‘25, for the SeedToScale team (part of Accel India, runs seedtoscale.com). It was themed around unpacking the Indus Valley Report 2025 but it did go beyond the same. I have edited it mildly to make it more readable. If you see SPW, remember it stands for Sajith Pai’s Words. I have used SPW wherever I have added …
Venture Capital / Startups
The best VCs are long, preloaded, context windows for their founders
I thought the following passage from Victor Lazarte, Benchmark’s newest partner (on the Venture Unlocked podcast) was fascinating.
…“So you’re not going to come in and like, just have this crazy insight. So the way we add value is, like, every week you’re doing, frankly, like, part of it is this boring work that other people could do. Like you’re closing candidates, having conversations with this candidate, explaining to
Interleavings: Notes & thoughts on recent reads, 25 May ’25
What I read and found interesting of late. The title ‘Interleavings’ comes from publishing. Interleaved books are those sold with blank pages inserted between printed pages so as to facilitate note-taking. This was a common practice in the 16th and 17th century, but has disappeared now. Thus my term ‘Interleavings’ for my notes and thoughts on the digital texts I enjoyed reading. Here are my interleavings from the recent past.…
The Four Routes to Starting Up
In my role as an early stage VC, I often get asked by aspiring founders for my reactions to, and feedback on, their startup ideas. This article is borne out of the learnings from those interactions, and is written to be helpful to any aspiring founder, who is figuring out their startup idea.
For founders who are in the process of honing in on their startup idea, it is worth …
Interleavings: Notes and thoughts on recent reads, 27 April ’25
In publishing, interleaved books are those sold with blank pages inserted between printed pages so as to facilitate note-taking. This was a common practice in the 16th and 17th century, but has disappeared now. Thus my term ‘Interleavings’ for my notes and thoughts on the digital texts I enjoyed reading.
Here are my interleavings from the recent past.
Interleavings: Notes & thoughts on recent reads, 13 April ’25
In publishing, interleaved books are those sold with blank pages inserted between printed pages so as to facilitate note-taking. They were a common practice in the 16th and 17th century. Here is how an interleaved book with notes by the reader (source) looked like –
Thus my term ‘Interleavings’ for my notes and thoughts on the digital texts I enjoyed reading.
Here are my interleavings from the recent …
Reflections on completing 10 years in Delhi
I recently completed 10 years in Delhi, India’s capital city. Well, strictly speaking, I have lived the last decade in Noida, a satellite city of Delhi, part of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), and tightly integrated with Delhi, and so this will do. Neither me, nor my wife, have roots or relations in Delhi or the wider region. So what am I doing here in Delhi?
Well, we moved …
Venture as temporal arbitrage, and the rise of marketmaking in venture.
This is a brief review of the essay Making Markets in Time by Abhraham Thomas.
I first heard of Abraham Thomas, from my then IIMA junior Sudhir Sitapati. This was just before Malhar ’97, the Xavier’s college fest. I was in the IIMA team for the Malhar quiz, and Sudhir told me that AT (as Abraham Thomas was called) was a formidable quizzer representing IITB. For some reason Sudhir, …
My fave podcast episodes of 2024
Podcasts are having their moment today, given the outsized role they had in the US 2024 Presidential election. It is impressive how some of the larger ones, such as the Joe Rogan Experience, have emerged as counterweights to mainstream media. While podcasts have hit the cultural zeitgeist and have broken into the mainstream, they …
The Busy Founder’s Guide to PMF
TL;DR: PMF or Product-Market Fit is not a singular fit, but in fact two sequential fits. First, you need to achieve Product to Problem Fit or PPF (where you validate that your solution is able to address problems for a set of customers), and then you need to achieve (Go-to-Market) Motion to Market Fit, or MMF (where you can reliably, affordably, acquire lookalikes of the above customers to build a …