Hyped to back @VedantGupte @iaryan_jain @SiddharthT61847 and @Trackkofficial building the investing app Gen Zs actually deserve.. in their seed round alongside @LightspeedIndia we’re just getting started fr

I put a prompt into ChatGPT “Can you write an ode to the bootstrapping Indian Startup Founder” Here is the response 👇 Not for him the glittering cheque Signed in haste in Sand Hill rooms, Nor armies fed on venture dreams And loss-making perfumed blooms. He builds where ceiling fans complain, Where diesel fumes and summer press Their thumb upon the fragile will Of every would-be business messiah. His office first: a borrowed desk, A cousin’s flat in Patel Nagar, Three plastic chairs, one second-hand Dell, A modem blinking like a distant star. His mother asks when he’ll “settle down.” His father coughs behind The Hindu. The neighbours say with pitying smiles, “Beta, MBA nahin kiya tu?” Yet every dawn he rises still, Ironing hope into a shirt, Riding autos through traffic jams Like some small soldier into hurt. He learns the tyranny of cash: That revenue is oxygen. That profit is not bourgeois vice But freedom’s oldest discipline. He courts no headlines breathlessly, No jargon forged on Twitter Space; He knows that Bharat does not care For valuation without grace. His users call him late at night. His vendors ask for dues delayed. His coders leave for funded firms. Still payroll somehow must be made. He worships not disruption’s cult But quieter gods: retention, trust, The miracle that customers Return because they feel they must. He knows the taste of postponed wants: The cancelled trip, the ageing car, The wedding gold not yet redeemed, The dream deferred but not too far. And when at last success arrives — Not trumpets, merely steadier breath — He wears it like the Indian sun: Without announcement, without myth. For he has built the hardest thing In this loud age of borrowed flame: A company that earns its keep, A livelihood, a trusted name. O bootstrap founder, lean and bruised, Historically underpraised, The nation’s commerce rests far more On hands like yours than PowerPoints glazed. For every unicorn that flies On capital’s abundant breeze, A thousand stubborn enterprises Are built on grit, receivables, and pleas. And India, ancient, hungry, vast, Will not be shaped by hype alone, But by the ones who quietly build With customer cash and backbone.

An investor risks money. An entrepreneur risks his or her life. An investor has a portfolio of investments. If a few succeed the investor succeeds. An entrepreneur has only one life. If the company goes down the entrepreneur goes down with it. The risk that an entrepreneur takes and the risk that an investor takes are asymmetric. Which is why we as investors have huge respect for founders instagram.com/reel/DXdzdaUil…

2025 - It’s all there. You just got to notice. We had started out building a Chesscom, but for math. But the more we spoke to our community, the more we realised… math is just an anchor. What people really wanted was to spend time doing something that wasn’t just scrolling reels, but something that felt worthwhile. Something productive, something that didn’t make them feel dumb. This is why they stuck. Keeping this in mind, we launched Cross-Math in January, our first puzzle format. Same playbook but around a puzzle, and the response was amazing. This continued over months, from bringing in puzzles to even bringing in a memory format…all at the request of our community. We may not be the best product people in the ecosystem, but we always ensured that we spoke to our community, and they guided how we build the platform. By March, Matiks wasn’t just a game, it was a platform where like-minded people connected, competed, and spent their time productively. Until then, LinkedIn was our only source of getting new users apart from PLG, and that’s when I started putting in some effort on Twt. While most companies lean on Perf Marketing to get their initial bunch of users, it was very clear to us that we had to crack PLG to build a billion-dollar, blitz scalable platform. Thanks to @katrishabh & @saver3011 , we were never pushed out of that mindset. They were okay with us staying at 500 users and experimenting more instead of chasing volume. April is when people truly started noticing me & Matiks on Twt. The more people tried it, the more people liked it. And they even started sharing their experiences with Matiks on their tl and our metrics started getting better. I also started doing a bunch of challenges like 1 day intern for 1 lakh rupees (which @keylimepie2000 won), running 1 Km for every 10 downloads (that couldn’t last very long :D). Shamelessly tagged Matiks anywhere and everywhere. Talked to people who tried Matiks. Put in 20 hrs workdays…not sustainable, but we couldn’t let the opportunity go. Increase your surface area of luck and something will hit you. I also did the follower count challenge, posted videos of me doing fast math. Many Twt folks engaged…many helped. It’s a long list and if you are reading this…you have to know I can’t thank you enough! And if I can ever help you back…I’d be real lucky to do so. May is when I thought, let’s get a few big names to try the platform and see if they would give us a shoutout. Day 1 - I asked @nikhilkamathcio to try Matiks…many people tagged him as well…but nothing happened. Day 2 - I asked @thetanmay to try Matiks…nothing happened for 12 hrs. I went to @kamath_sutra ’s place that night to have a beer and told him what’s been happening. We were at our 2nd beer when Tanmay replied! He tried it, he loved it, and he wanted to talk. The very next day, he gave us a shoutout and things changed. More people started noticing Matiks. Day 3 - I did nothing. I was overwhelmed with the response Tanmay’s story was giving us. Many people ask what’s the increase in DAU his mention got us, but it added value that was much more than just a spike in users. Day 4 - I asked @waitin4agi_ to try Matiks and he did! He replied as well and suddenly, I was talking to the man himself at 4 am, telling him about our plans. Sometimes things don’t happen for months, and suddenly, they happen in days. It may have looked like we were chasing clout and distribution, but we had spent 7 months trying to build the best product. The love and the response we received was a result of the same. May was when for the first time in 25 years, I spent my birthday away from my parents...this time with another family, built in Bangalore, Matiks. June and July were a haze. It was a shift from working like a bunch of hacker house kids to operating like a real company. July, we threw the Matiks party along with the @OfflynLife boys. August-September-October, we sat back and worked on making the product more appealing. We also started seeing traction from outside India, more people giving us shoutouts and this time not just on Twt, but on Instagram and Linkedin as well. People also started forming their own communities around Matiks. And not to forget, we raised a round with Tanglin Venture Partners & @InfoEdgeVC with some stellar angels. By November we had grown 50x from where we were at the start of the year, all organically, but we had one question - is this thing fun to watch as well? That is when @SushantTimmapur came up with the idea of Brumble and man, was that a success!!! Looking back at the year, I did gain more than 15kgs…but that’s not the focus rn. The thing is, we didn’t plan for any of this. A bunch of kids trying to have some fun is all we are. But things started falling in line…as soon as we noticed. Currently, we are at 100x of where we were at the beginning of January 2025 and we just got to ensure we repeat the same in 2026 :) And it can surely be done…if we just don’t stop…noticing.

One more thing. Our 10 minute delivery promise is enabled by the density of stores around your homes. It’s not enabled by asking delivery partners to drive fast. Delivery partners don’t even have a timer on their app to indicate what was the original time promised to the customer. After you place your order on Blinkit, it is picked and packed within 2.5 minutes. And then the rider drives an average of under 2kms in about 8 minutes. That's an average of 15kmph. I understand why everybody thinks why 10 minutes must be risking lives, because it is indeed hard to imagine the sheer complexity of the system design which enables quick deliveries. Also, if you've ever wanted to know why millions of Indians voluntarily take up platform work and sometimes even prefer it to regular jobs, JUST ASK any rider partner when you get your next food or grocery order. You will be humbled by how rational and honest they will be with you. Having said that, no system is perfect, and we are all for making it better than today. However, it is far from what it is being portrayed on social media by people who don't understand how our system works and why. If I were outside the system, I would also believe that gig workers are being exploited, but that's not true.

Facts below (1/5): In 2025, average earnings per hour (EPH), excluding tips, for a delivery partner on Zomato were ₹102. In 2024, this number was ₹92. That’s a ~10.9% year-on-year increase. Over a longer horizon also, EPH has shown steady growth. Most delivery partners work for a few hours and only a few days in a month. But if someone were to work for 10 hours/day, 26 days/month, this translates to ~₹26,500/month in gross earnings. After accounting for fuel and maintenance (~20%), the net earnings for the partner are ~₹21,000/month. Note: Earnings per hour are calculated on total hours logged in, including the time when the partner might be waiting to receive an order. Earnings per “busy hour” will be higher but that’s not the right metric to look at. On top of this - delivery partners earn 100% of tips given by customers. The average tip per hour in 2025 on Zomato was INR 2.6 and in 2024 was INR 2.4 per hour. Tips are transferred instantly, with zero deductions. We absorb the payment gateway processing cost ourselves. About 5% of the orders get tipped on Zomato; 2.5% on Blinkit.

Very well written @deepigoyal Every word is true. It beggars belief that a Champagne Socialist who married a film star and had a designer wedding in Udaipur and a first wedding anniversary in Maldives has the audacity to then shed crocodile tears around alleged exploitation of gig workers. Aam Aadmi my foot

Thanks for putting out these details in Public @deepigoyal I can testify to the fact that discussions on delivery partner welfare and fair compensation occupy a significant percentage of the time in Board meetings. The management and the board are bothered about these. Now the people who ran this campaign and unsuccessfully tried to organise a strike could have written or come over and asked for this information and got it and had a discussion. However they preferred to instead launch a campaign on social media - it suited them and their political agenda better

Last one on this topic, and I have been holding this in myself for a while. For centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt. The gig economy shattered that invisibility, at unprecedented scale. Suddenly, the poor aren't hidden away. They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000 biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general. This is the first time in history at this scale that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about the gig economy. We want these people to look our part, so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less. We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt. That ₹800 order might equal their entire day's earnings after fuel, bike rent, and app cuts. We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract. It's personal. Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That's why debates explode. It's not just policy. It's emotional reckoning. Some defend the system (“they choose it”), others demand change (“this isn't progress, its exploitation”). And here’s the uncomfortable twist: the unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ isn’t dignity. It is about returning to invisibility. Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income. And then what happens? The rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer, they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity isn’t even debated. The gig economy just exposed the reality of inequality to the people who previously had the luxury of not seeing it. The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door. Visibility is the price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better (which we keep doing continuously as delivery partners are our backbone), or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. The other simply helps the consuming class feel virtuous in the dark.

At Info Edge we bid farewell to Chintan today. A super person, a great friend, advisor, supporter, problem solver and well wisher. Very often my go to person for all things finance, accounts, legal, tax, deal structuring, governance and business in general. A great CFO and Board member, he served Info Edge with great distinction for twelve years, keeping us out of trouble and helping us avoid potholes. Wise people have said that the CFOs main job is to save the founders from themselves. Chintan certainly did that very well. This of course is over and above the hygiene job of ensuring true and fair accounting, the right controls and providing support where needed and being the brake where needed. It is said that a great leader is someone who makes themselves dispensable by growing other leaders. That Chintan did this very well was driven home to me the other day when our interim CFO Ambarish Raghuvanshi, who has been shadowing Chintan for the last three months came to me and said that he is very happy and confident about the people, processes, systems and controls Chintan has put in place and things will run smoothly without Ambarish breaking a sweat. Thanks most of all Chintan for upholding and defending the corporate governance standards at Info Edge from the day you joined right until today. We are all rooting for you in your next assignment at IAN. Ever onward and upwards. May the force be with you @InfoEdgeVC

We just raised $3.14M🥧 From solving brain teasers in classrooms to solving for scale, this one’s a big step towards making mind sports the coolest out there. Huge thanks to our investors for believing in the equation we’re building @InfoEdgeVC @UntitledVC @gauravmunjal @RomanSaini @anilgoteti @Tanuj_kh @AmanHasNoName_2 @yash_dandavate @Abhishek Patil(Growthx) Now let’s multiply the madness 🚀

Congratulations Bluestone for the listing today. And thank you for allowing ⁦@InfoEdgeVC⁩ to invest

Our first jury member for the Info Edge Ventures AI Hackathon - @sbikh! There's still time to be a part of it: submit your AI idea or solution by tomorrow to win: INR 1 Crore in Seed Funding Cash prizes galore Access to exclusive network Submit now: bit.ly/InfoEdgeVC_AIhack

Many congratulations to @ixigo & all Ixigems as Ixigo lists on the stock exchanges! This has been a journey filled with grit, resilience, and remarkable customer orientation. We are proud to be a part of another product led success story from India.

Very well done ixigo. Congratulations @alokebajpai thank you for allowing @InfoEdgeVC to invest

PB Fintech turns profitable in Q3 after reporting Rs 37 crore PAT. Well done Yashish and team. Great planning and execution moneycontrol.com/news/techno…

[Announcement] I am stoked to announce that Airblack has raised INR 33 crores led by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (@DellFdn), with participation from Elevation Capital (@ElevCap), Info Edge Ventures (@InfoEdgeVC), Blume Ventures Founders Fund (@BlumeVentures), and angels, to expand on our mission of taking outcome-led education to the 'next 100 million people'. In the last 3 years, Airblack has trained over 35,000 women to launch an independent livelihood in the Beauty sector, and our confidence in the opportunity-hungry people of India is as high as ever. For the right outcomes & and opportunities, the demand is unparalleled. We cannot wait to take Airblack's impact on hundreds of cities in India and introduce millions of people, especially women, to the dream of an independent livelihood. A big thanks to our existing supporters @KhandujaM, @vaasbhaskar, Kitty & @katrishabh, as well as new supporters Debo, Sanjay Modi, Avleen, @sajithpai, @harshilmathur, @shashank_kr (and others at @MarsShotVC), Vijay & Raji from NIIT Group, @Sairee, @drriteshmalik, @7rahulc, @manasjsaloi and @_mekin for vote of trust. Lastly, any new industry change requires extreme patience and resilience, and I am very privileged to work daily with the passionate team at @clubairblack - building this wouldn't have been so fun and fulfilling had it not been for this team.