Arjun Malhotra

Investing in companies that don't make money @GoodCapitalVC

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

If you need an investor that can put on their big boy pants and lead your round, call me.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

I think long-form is the future for reasons that run deep beyond just a product decision -

1/ @mosseri shares that paying creators for performance has been ROI-negative. The funds were a fixed pool split by views, and as the creator base grew the same pot got spread thinner each quarter, so payouts kept falling even for the same work. I think long form could thus give IG a format where the ad load could finally cover the payout.

2/ YouTube just reached 15.8% of all US TV watch time, more than double Netflix, with connected TV at 44% of its US viewing. The living room is where the next decade of video ads gets sold and IG has almost no footing there. The 90 min horizontal format is what gets it onto the TV at all.

I can see why that’s tempting even if the odds aren’t clear.

[Colin and Samir ✌🏼✌🏾 @ColinandSamir]

Instagram launches long-form video called "Features"

Creators can link up to 8 clips that show up in the feed and drive to the full video per @mosseri

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

what's the best solution to give openclaws the ability to make phone calls in India?

finding that latency via twilio for india calls is too high.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

Every attempt to fix Indian manufacturing starts with the same instinct: consolidate the small players into something big. That playbook keeps failing, and it fails on the economics of the base itself.

India's manufacturing strength lives in thousands of clusters, with most units employing < 10 people. Each shop is specialised & retools fast because it is small, hence the firm size IS a feature.

When you roll those units into one large plant to chase scale, you kill the flexibility + specialisation that made them competitive in the first place. You end up trading away your actual structural advantage to play a scale game that China has won.

I think coordinating these small players works better than consolidating them for India. Zetwerk built its business on this premise. It orchestrates multiple small units across renewables, capital goods, aerospace & electronics - all while staying asset-light.

Building that layer however is expensive. Zetwerk does roughly ₹16k cr in revenue against a ₹1.6k cr loss. Those losses represent the upfront cost of wiring the network together. In this model, you have to fund the orchestration years ahead of the margin.

All that said, I'm still bullish on the model. Zetwerk may or may not be the one that cracks it but the coordination approach is worth backing regardless of who gets there.

[Zetwerk @zetwerk]

Zetwerk is now listed on the NSE and BSE.

To everyone who helped build Zetwerk, thank you. We hope you feel proud today.

To our new shareholders, welcome. We have a lot more to build.

Here’s to building an enduring manufacturing company from India, for India and the world.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

I now have a Granola agent that sits in on my WhatsApp calls.

I no longer have need for any material attachments.

I am untethered

I am free

[Shreyans Salecha @shreyansalecha]

friends, we have a new website - https://t.co/Ta77ULUULq - pls report any bugs/breakages &amp; would love to hear feedback - what's good, bad &amp; what can be improved!

[Amani @Amani_Chowdhry]

fruits of our labour, aka the new good cap website, is now live :) https://t.co/lEtbH7OgeQ

if you come across any bugs/have any feedback - pls let us know!

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

Yes, SMBs haven't adopted AI at any real scale, but an interesting distinction here is that this is not a capability issue so much as a coordination one. Every new city, site or lab adds its own layer of scheduling, supervision, quality control and planning. As the physical footprint grows, management overhead balloons and margins erode under the weight of it.

While AI can make these ops-heavy businesses easier to scale from the inside, it's natural for the adoption curve to be slower (and slower in India) where many firms haven't embedded software to begin with

[Ryan Hoover @rrhoover]

SMBs are so far from adopting AI.

I thought the explosion of consumer agent calls and texts would pull SMBs into adoption over the next few years. But many don't even have basic online booking.

(I'm attempting to pay someone to train our dog)

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

Agents became capable faster than they became trustworthy. They can already book flights, buy things, file paperwork and write code, and the tasks we hand them keep getting bigger.

But before an agent’s actions can be trusted, agentic AI companies need to solve for these things:

1/ Identity: There is no clean way to distinguish an agent’s action from a human’s. Even on your own system, without proper logging, you can’t say with certainty what you did and what the agent did on your behalf. You can’t assign responsibility for an action, or decide whether to allow it, until you know who took it.

2/ Accountability: When an agent acts on your behalf and gets something wrong, it’s unclear who answers for it. It could be you, the company that built the agent, or the company behind the model. Our laws were written for people and for passive tools, and an agent doesn’t fit cleanly into either.

3/ Permission: Even when you’ve authorised an agent, the platform it’s acting on has to allow it too. Most businesses haven’t decided whether they want that. A large part of Amazon’s business is built on people browsing its site, through sponsored listings, reccos and upsells. An agent that goes straight to the purchase skips all of that, which is why Amazon has actively blocked them.

Models will keep improving, but agents will only scale once this plumbing is solved.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

2026 has been an wild year for tech - even though i’ve felt this way every year for the last 3. the relentless pace of it all is insanely inspiring

[Tesla @Tesla]

Real life, baby

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

💯
As soon as we sense ai-speak, we're tuned out.

[Sunil Dhaliwal @dhaliwas]

I've sent a version of this to 10+ founders this month alone. Just because you can use AI, doesn't always mean you should

"Allow me to give some unsolicited advice: Investors are drowning in AI-generated cold emails and pitch decks. It is almost an automatic "delete-without-response" for me. It doesn't convey craft, or care in what you are building and comes across as low effort. I'd humbly suggest making your materials manually to ensure they best communicate your ideas in your voice. Others might disagree, so take this as a data point."

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

You can read the top 1% here as the prosumer market. For a consumer, an AI tool is a purchase, weighed against everything else they buy.

For a prosumer, it’s an input cost, weighed against an invoice/an hourly rate. So they'd always penetrate consumer-grade products first.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

@vikcr1703 💯

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

India's GDP per capita is around ~$2,800 today. That's usually the band where consumption starts to compound across countries like China, South Korea, Brazil, and I think it's a big part of why D2C brands have exploded here over the last 5+ years.

One category I'm v bullish on is appliances. The consumer durables market is on track for about $35 bn by 2030, with appliance growth stepping up from roughly 7% a year to 11%. This is also a "first-purchase market," not a replacement one - ie households are turning nuclear and buying a lot in the category for the first time, like air purifiers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers etc.

That hands the advantage to whoever can reach + finance a household new to the category and design specifically for a first-time owner rather than an upgrader.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

@LakshOnline that's so interesting!

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

In the last couple of months, AI agents have gone from enterprise vocabulary to a mainstream consumer product, with several million people installing one for themselves.

As the matrix below shows, I think the west rules the "autonomous generalist" category, where the use cases are broad and the software executes the task. This is because western agents assume an application or a browser on the other side.

India is approaching the same category differently, because a great deal of Indian commercial and institutional activity doesn't present one. It runs through telephone calls, messaging threads and counter staff, in several languages.

So Indian agentic startups have arrived at a combination: a person is still deployed at the end of every task, but the AI around them does the coordination, holding the case history, drafting each escalation, tracking what is still outstanding.

I believe the left side of the chart is where India has massive scale to unlock.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

every agent today is built for the buyer - to choose, compare, place the order. wondering if we start seeing seller-side agent optimisation soon

if an agent is doing the action, someone has to make their product legible to the agent, which probably runs on a different set of discovery signals than the ones we've been optimising for

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

https://t.co/aZSDY9j5VI

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

the case against vertical AI startups is usually that the TAM is small (especially in india) because people look at what that specific industry spends on software. by that math, every vertical will look tiny.

the number to anchor on should instead be: how much is the market spending on the people doing the tasks, the agencies picking up overflow, the contractors and outsourced teams filling the gaps?

what does the industry actually pay across the workflow to get the work done? that could be a much better judgement of the market.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

@radhika_agar you caused a real stir for @radika_agarwal

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

every app has their own agent right now and there's no way it's going to last. it's super annoying.

Just make a way for my agent to talk to your app or you're going to get disintermediated once someone aggregates your supply.