You don't get to call yourself a founder just because you started building something. That's the biggest lie in startups. We’ve glorified the act of starting to the point where it obscures the only thing that matters: whether anyone wants what you're making. Founders confuse activity with purpose. They fall in love with building. They get addicted to progress that only exists inside their walls. Lines of code. User flows. Team rituals. Pitch decks. It's all insulation. A startup doesn’t exist to be built. It exists to manufacture demand. The only reason to write a line of code is to unlock a reason for someone to pay attention. And yet, most early founders don’t actually talk to customers. They talk about talking to customers. They hide behind metrics. They obsess over conversion rates before they’ve earned any attention. They A/B test the shade of a CTA button instead of figuring out what problem someone would crawl across glass to solve. They ship, but they don't listen. They launch, but they don’t learn. Here's the hard truth: you can raise money, hire a team, get press, hit a milestone, and still not be doing the actual job. If you're not creating customers, you're not running a company. You're roleplaying one. You’re not a founder until you’ve created something people want so badly that they ask you for it. That’s it. That’s the bar. It's not about innovation. It's not about vision. It’s about demand. Raw, unprompted, unpaid demand. Something so painful or exciting or magnetic that people would feel the absence of it if you disappeared. And this is why most founders quietly burn out. Not from lack of effort, but from building for too long without making contact with reality. It’s easy to believe you’re on a journey when you’ve never been forced to face the market. But the market doesn't care how hard you worked. It only cares whether you solved something it gives a shit about. So start there. If you can't make one person care, you're not ready to make ten. And if you can't make ten care, what are you doing asking a team to build for a hundred? The job is to create a customer. Every other job flows from that. Until then, you're just practicing.

Many startups being built right now aren't going to need much more than a seed round in the entirety of their journey. Makes it even more critical to pick the right investor partner at seed.

8️⃣8️⃣8️⃣ Presenting, #TheGreatUnlock: My thoughts on how 8 reforms across tech, capital, entrepreneurship and population-scale formalisation can help India grow at 8% and become an $8T economy by 2035! youtube.com/watch?v=mHE3zaaV… @arkam_vc @bsrinivasa

Private equity is coming for the accounting industry. They’re rolling up practices, cutting costs, raising prices, and doing what PE does best. There’s just one problem: It’s not going to work. They’re lighting capital on fire, and they don’t even realize it. Let’s dig in!👇🧵

maybe a topic for @Noahpinion to opine on!

Vibe coding is literally the future

Conceptually, it helps to segregate your investment and trading accounts. In your investment account, one should not even think about whether a stock is 52 week high, 52 week low, above this moving average or below, what momentum shows or not. Technical analysis is a total distraction in your investment account; in fact, can be actively harmful. The only thing that should matter is whether this company - the actual business - can plausibly compound earnings on a diluted basis by a high enough number, over say the next five years, and whether one is getting the same at a reasonable valuation with limited downside. For that one will have to understand the enterprise in depth but also the sector, country and beyond. With primary research, not just secondary research. While past is not prologue, there are ~85 listed businesses in India today, for example, which have had EPS compounding over the last 5 years (so from pre-Covid) north of 25% CAGR, market cap north of 2500 cr, and dividend yield north of 0.5%. Not that these are cutoffs which are hard and fast - not at all - but just to get a sense. Such an approach - what we call PIPE investing, or public investing albeit private equity style - cuts out a lot of the BS. As Buffett said, if you are comfortable owning a part of a business that you cannot sell for five years, then that is a good approach to investing. [This humorous pic shows it well. Follow the Owner, not the Dog..]

The people who start the wars don’t fight them, the people who spend the taxes don’t pay them, and the people who forgive the criminals don’t live next to them. Of course we’re going to have too many wars, too much spending, and too much crime.

How Hayek’s Wisdom Can Help You Beat the Competition 1/18 Small biz owners—want to outsmart giants like Zepto & Blinkit? Let’s tap into wisdom from Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” It’s not my invention—it’s timeless. Your weapon? Local know-how. Let’s dive in. #HayekWisdom #SmallBiz

1/7 Hey 👋 At T2win, we help small biz owners like you track data, grow your business, and unlock affordable credit. Credit’s tough in 2025, but something big could change that: the Finternet. Let’s dive in! 🚀 #SmallBiz #Fintech #CreditAccess

But till when? In about years time, most of the SaaS can be built. However, layering human service and charging customers for outcome is what makes any SaaS looks great even today. Some call such layering as Outcome as a Service. @vaibhavbetter