Podcasts
1/ Chris Pedregal, founder + CEO at Granola on the Colossus’ Invest Like The Best podcast w Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts i found interesting.
Some of you may recall that Chris wrote a terrific piece a few months back on how founders should think about building AI products. This podcast is in much the same vein though I found it somewhat less useful than his article. What stood out
– Granola users take v different notes (more like states of mind / people-observations) than old-school note takers who cover facts / data from the convo
– how native AI users provide context (far more) than normie users. Interestingly, in his article he had written about how features enhancing context window and being able to provide AI with more info results in better AI-generated output and user satisfaction.
– why AI wrapper / app creators should focus on high frequency use cases where output quality matters – those are safe from cannibalisation by LLMs
– how critical the decision to make Granola a mac app that listened to via the device (as opposed to a bot that joined the call) was, and how that has made the biggest difference
– we are still at the clunky ui stage for AI apps. In the early days of cars, a stick was used for moving the vehicle which was not as easily controllable as a steering wheel. It was also less safe. AI’s steering wheel era is yet to emerge, he says.
2/ Sean Ellis, Growth Consultant, on the Lenny Podcast
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts i found interesting.
Sean Ellis is a marketer turned growth head who now consults (also wrote a book called ‘Hacking Growth’) companies on their growth challenges. He devised the now termed ‘Sean Ellis test’ for figuring out if you have product market fit, though in my view it is best used to determine if you have product to problem fit (the first phase of product market fit). This is a good conversation covering a bunch of topics including how to use the Sean Ellis Test, how to iterate on the score (improve time to value, make sure you are targeting the right customers etc), the importance of activation / onboarding etc. There is lots of good stuff here, especially if you are an early stage founder.
3/ Alok Goyal and Ritesh Banglani of Stellaris Venture Partners on the Neon Podcast
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts I found interesting.
Stellaris is an early stage venture firm in India, and they just raised their third fund of $300m. They spoke to Siddharth Ahluwalia on the Neon podcast about how the firm operates including their focus on ensuring 90% coverage of investments done in the market, why it is important to avoid or minimise adverse selection in venture, their decision-making process (i liked the concept of a ‘no-objection no’ as opposed to a firm ‘no’), as well as their process around proactive portfolio construction etc. Good podcast for venture nerds.
4/ Zal Billimoria, Refactor, on Venture Unlocked
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts i found interesting.
Zal is the first Parsi I have encountered in VC but he is in the U.S.! (Parents moved to US midwest fm India). Zal is a solo VC (no team!) who raises a $50m fund every 3 yrs investing in deeptech. Fun episode for venture nerds who like to mull over portfolio construction math in their free time.
What stood out was how A16Z, Zal’s previous employer, incentivised better behaviour to founders via fines for coming later to founder meetings, as well as tracked founder NPS for individual partners, how Zal manages a one-person firm, how he thinks about portfolio construction etc.
This one point by Zal stood out to me as a significant one – “feel free to take as many pitches, even if they’re not in your categories of interest. If you’re just getting started and you’re building out your network, you’re building your reputation, you’re building your reps with founders. There’s nothing better than you having more cycles with founders so that you can actually base your gut instinct for when you actually find those special people. Take those pitch meetings extremely seriously. Be prepared, but understand that obviously 98% of them are probably not going to be fits, but you are building your own worldview as to what types of founders you want to work with. Because if you’re only meeting one or two new companies a week, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you’re not building your own kind of mental capacity for what’s possible and when that special founder comes around.”
5/ Ravi Gupta, Sequoia (prev Instacart, KKR) on the Colossus’ Invest Like The Best podcast w Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts i found interesting.
Podcast episode spurred by ‘AI or Die’, an article which Ravi wrote that went viral. Interesting podcast that captures how a tier1 Silicon Valley investor thinks about AI, and gives glimpses into the prevalent zeitgeist.
2 quotes from the podcast, shared by Ravi that stood out
Matt Cohler, Benchmark: “Our job is not to see the future, it’s to see the present very clearly.”
Coach K, Duke: “I am not a world-class predictor, but I am a world-class reactor.” And he was referring to it as when college basketball changed from people that stay for four years to people that play for one and then go to the NBA. He was “I couldn’t have predicted that that’s the way the rules would go. I didn’t know. But you know what? Once that was the game on the field, I played it extremely well.”
Ravi: “…the Collisons, I don’t remember who said this, but they said they listen with predatory curiosity”. Predatory curiosity is an amazing phrase. Extreme active listening:)
Interesting point from Ravi – a startup can today build distribution (with an AI product) much much faster than before, and it seems faster than an incumbent can innovate. It is the widest that gap has ever been.
Ravi:“ If something’s an AI-first product, you probably shouldn’t care that much about the margins of it because it’s going to get so much cheaper to deliver that. Whereas if something’s not an AI-first product, you care a lot about the margins because that is the durable future.”
6/ Tomasz Tunguz, Theory Ventures, on Venture Unlocked
Link to podcast. Link to podcast excerpts i found interesting.
Some interesting quotes from the podcast
– “We are looking for applications of AI in two categories. The first is AI does work that a human cannot do. primarily because of scale. The other category we’re looking for AI is where there are shortages in the labor market. You have three things, toil, really unappealing work, nobody wants to do it.”
– “Q: What in your mind makes a company truly defensible in the world of creating an AI app?
A: I think it’s workflows. It’s not the technology. And this parallels to the previous wave of SaaS. There’s nothing technically different from Salesforce and an upstart CRM. There’s not. They’re all just databases with web pages on top. And within the world of AI, I think there’s an opportunity to reinvent those workflows because now all of a sudden the work has changed, right? A salesperson can manage many more leads. A marketing person can produce much more content. A lawyer can review many more contracts. And so the workflows themselves have changed. So the defensibility comes from identifying which of those workflows have changed and building the software. “
– “…there’s about one and a half trillion dollars worth of software and infrastructure spend today. And if you think about how much a company spends on software, it’s about 5% of revenues on average. AI offers an opportunity to go after labor spend in a pretty meaningful way. And labor spend might be 30 to 40% or more of this company. So if you can grab, I mean, you think about this, the market’s at least eight times as large going with AI.”
Articles
1/ Making Markets in Time by Abraham Thomas
Link to article. Link to article excerpts I found interesting, as well as my review of the article.
Good read, especially to understand what is behind the rise of ginormous venture funds, or venture banks as they are called such as General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Sequoia, A16Z etc., and what drives their actions.
2/ Letter to a Young Investor #2: A Consumer Investing Masterclass, by Kirsten Green, Mario Gabriele
Link to article (paywalled). Link to article excerpts I found interesting.
Particularly useful reading if you are a consumertech / consumer brands investor given Kirsten is one of the foremost consumer investors out there (Dollar Shave Club, Faire, Oura etc).
– Kirsten: “There are three frameworks I return to in order to pressure test this: The first is The Consumer Experience <> Business Model Test: does the business model itself enhance the product experience, or is it just financial engineering? A great example is Spotify – its subscription model isn’t just about creating revenue predictability; it fundamentally improves the experience by removing ads and enabling offline listening. Compare that to many other subscription-based consumer companies, where the model is in place primarily to benefit the company, not the customer. Similarly, virality is only a durable advantage when it meaningfully strengthens the product. Venmo’s viral loop strengthened its product experience – the more friends that joined, the more useful it became – while some fintechs relied on acquisition incentives that didn’t actually make their product better. If the business model doesn’t make the experience better for the consumer, it’s a red flag.”
– “You asked if I strive to “live in the future.” I wouldn’t say that – I focus on understanding the present so clearly that the future becomes inevitable. The most significant changes don’t appear out of nowhere; they build on signals here today. I engage with what’s emerging in a way that’s deliberate rather than reactionary. I’m not constantly testing every new product, but I do immerse myself in new ideas that challenge assumptions or reveal something about where behavior is headed. It’s less about chasing novelty and more about seeing the throughlines that indicate lasting change” It is worth noting how similar this quote is to Matt Cohler’s quote (in Ravi Gupta’s podcast above)
3/ Venture Capital’s Space for Sheep by Trae Stephens
Link to article.
“The average investor does not spend all day simply searching for the best new company; they spend all day searching for the best new company in socially approved technology “space.” Twenty years ago, that space was e-commerce, the “dot.com”-ing of brick-and-mortar stores. Fifteen years ago, “social-mobile-local.” Ten years ago, the “sharing economy.” Three years ago, gaming and crypto. Now, it’s artificial intelligence.”
How true. We see this with Quick Commerce right now in India too. The speed with which follow ons happened in Zepto a few months back and Slikk of late (multiple rounds in two months when nothing has fundamentally changed in the business), it is clear that QCom is now the place for ‘socially acceptable’ deployment of capital (a la AI in the west), solving a real (first-world) problem of capital deployment for certain growth investors.
4/ The Rise and Fall of the Hanseatic League by Agree Ahmed
Link to article.
This is such a well-researched portrait of a fascinating entity, the Hanseatic League, when merchants and citystates across the Baltic sea coast and Northern Europe came together for trade, and formed a coalition, to protect and advance its interests. It even acted like how a state acts, such as waging war to protect its interests, even though it was not one. The article is also a great minihistory of Northern Europe in the first half of the last millennium. Interestingly this was written by a founder (of Flowglad, a YC co). I wonder how he found the time!
5/ Innovation, sea snails, and the blind professor by Alex Telford
Link to article.
A good review of a very interesting book (Nature: An Economic History by Geerat Vermeij, who is a blind scientist) on seeing parallels between evolution and economics / innovation.
6/ Bollywood’s Fantasy of Control Is Failing Everyone by Takshi Mehta
Link to article.
Good wrap of how high ticket prices and hence reduced visits to theatres, for Hindi films, along with the high prices paid for movies by streaming sites in the COVID / postCOVID era has led to an industry where stars demand absurd prices, but movies struggle to recover their budgets.
7/ Meet the Man Who Can’t Stop Founding Budget Airlines by Roshan Fernandez
Link to article.
In Neeleman’s view, competing head-to-head with the industry giants is a losing game. Speaking at a Breeze flight-attendant training session in mid-February, Neeleman wrote two numbers on a whiteboard: 90% and 86%.
The first figure reflected the percentage of routes where Spirit overlaps with other airlines. “They are in bankruptcy,” he said. (Spirit exited chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month).
The second was the percentage of nonstop routes where Breeze has no competition—a figure that has now ticked up to 87%. “You aren’t just doing what everybody else is doing,” he said in an interview.
The airline reported its first full quarter of operating profit at the end of 2024 and has been growing steadily, now serving 70 cities with more than 280 routes.
8/ Tyler Cowen, The Man Who Wants to Know Everything by John Phipps
Link to article.
“Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.”