Arpit Gosain

[India FinTech Forum @India_Fintech]

🎉 Congratulations @hellorealx for being a finalist in the Fintech Startup of the Year category at IFTA 2025!

Join us to celebrate the brightest minds in fintech.
📅 10 Dec 2025 | 📍 Aurika, Mumbai

@GosainArpit @senzibl @neera_inamdar01

#IFTA2025 #Fintech #Innovation

[Neil Borate @ActusDei]

A quick video summary on the P2P lending industry crisis and why they may have to stop withdrawals

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

@protosphinx Build something people want

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

If you want to build something that is highly innovative, could you still outsource your tech?
Very recently we were able to build a strong tech team. The speed and power that has given us is something else.
Things that took 2-3 months earlier, we were able to do that in 4 days.

[Michael McGuiness @mikemcg0]

Q: What is data debt and how do you avoid it?

As Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman explains in the clip below:

“There are a lot of corners you can cut when creating your MVP… But data debt can haunt you because you can’t make up missing data and eventually your intuition will fail you.”

Reddit didn’t know their traffic for years and did product development by intuition for a very long time. The company ended up working out, but it was a huge pain for them and Steve regrets it.

Twitch founder Emmett Shear echoes the importance of event tracking:

“You will thank yourself later for having historical baselines for important user actions. Every time I’ve wondered how many people are using a feature and we don’t know, it was awful. You can’t make a decision for another three months as you build that baseline.”

He shares the advice Suhail Doshi, the cofounder of Mixpanel, gave him:

“Pick your top 5-7 most important user actions and just log those. You really don’t need to log everything. Most of the things you can do with your product aren’t important. There are maybe five things people can do that are important, and you can kind of just ignore everything else.”

For Twitch, Emmett and team tracked the following events: (1) watched a minute of video, (2) sent a chat message, (3) followed a stream, and (4) bought a subscription.

“Those four actions gave us a huge amount of insight into what was going on with our customers.”

Just to emphasize how important event tracking is, Steve concludes the discussion with:

“This is one of those areas where if I could just go back and give myself advice for thirty minutes and it would dramatically impact the trajectory of the company, it would be around this topic. If I was in your shoes, I would take half a day and read best practices for collecting events and storing them.”

Lastly, as Emmett emphasizes here: don’t try to build this tooling yourself. Just use Mixpanel or Amplitude. They’re more than enough for what you need right now.

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

What is the most important factor for the success of a startup, money or ability to survive with least amount of capital?
Each of these would have significant impact on the nature of solutions the team would come up with.

[Daniel Mahncke @MnkeDaniel]

Nick Sleep is one of the most successful Investors of the last two decades.

He crushed the market with an annualized return of 20.8% over his Funds' lifetime.

Here are 8 Investing Rules he used to achieve that record:

1. Stop Collecting, Start Thinking

“We think far less than we think we think.”

There’s so much information that we are busy collecting.

Instead, take more time thinking about information.

We can’t come up with different conclusions by only collecting.

2. Scaling Laws

Scaling Laws turn the size of a company into an asset instead of a burden.

The two important tenets:

1. The ability to self-fund growth
2. Increasing Barriers of Entry with increasing size

Such businesses support growth with little re-engineering necessary.

3. Micro vs. Macro

Macroeconomics acts as a call to action.

There's always some "significant" event, and you feel the urge to act on that news.

Reacting to these news is killing your long-term success.

Investment success mostly stems from inaction.

4. Destination

Where will the company be when it exits the growth phase?

You want to know:

- The markets it operates in
- The size of those markets
- Its position in those markets

Of course, you can’t know specific numbers.
Being vaguely right is better than precisely wrong.

5. Thesis

In hindsight, it’s easy to assess what information mattered and what didn’t.

In the moment, it’s not.

The biggest mistakes are made selling a great investment because of short-term noise.

Only act on information that directly influences your investment thesis.

6. Lollapalooza Advantages

Lollapalooza Moats consist of many small competitive advantages.

Those add up and create a strong and well-diversified competitive advantage.

Due to their diversification, these are the most durable moats and found at any great compounder.

7. Spawner

Spawners have one big and profitable business, which is responsible for generating cash flows.

Simultaneously, it invests in many small, low-cost ventures with huge potential.

Most of them will fail. But the ones who succeed become huge and profitable new businesses.

8. Scale Economics Shared

A win-win value proposition between companies and customers.

As the firm grows in size, scale savings are given back to customers through lower prices.

Those prices attract new customers who, in turn, increase scale economics even more.

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

This is so well explained 🙌

[Invest In Assets 📈 @InvestInAssets]

Peter Lynch once said:

«Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets.»

Here is a simple breakdown of how to analyze a balance sheet:

[MJ.algo 🇺🇸 @AlgoFamily]

I love opening up @x to see @Algorand trending! $algo

[Daniel Mahncke @MnkeDaniel]

According to Charlie Munger, every investor should use a checklist system.

It's the best way to structure your investment process.

I use 6 Checklists for the entire Investment Process.

Here's what they are and why I use them:

1. The Investment Philosophy Checklist:

The first checklist is a general reminder of my investment philosophy and serves as an anchor.

It's my starting and end point.

When I start to research a new company, I'll first glance at my investment philosophy checklist and answer the questions that I can already answer.

Example:
- Am I interested in this company?
- Am I starting this analysis from a neutral standpoint?
- Is this company in my circle of competence?

After finishing my research, I'll return to this list and answer the remaining questions.

Among them are questions about my thesis, my plan for handling drawdowns, etc.

2. The Stock Selection Checklist

Before you can analyze a company, you need to find it.

I use a Stock Selection Checklist for that. I don't include numbers in this checklist, like >20% ROIC or something like that.

I do that when I research a particular type of company, for example, long-term compounders or value plays.

But, in my general Stock Selection Checklist, I focus on the qualitative side of what I want to see.

For example:
- Recurring Revenues
- A Healthy Balance Sheet
- High Margins (in absolute terms and relative to competition)
- ...

I split the checklist into two parts.
One with disqualifying features.

The other with qualifying features.

Disqualifying features immediately disqualify a company as a possible investment as soon as I recognize them.

The advantage of inverting the usual approach and starting with disqualifying features is that you sort out bad companies fast and reliably.

3. The Company Analysis Checklist

After we've found a possible investment, we can start with the company analysis.

I ask questions based on five topics:

1. Business
2. Competition
3. Financials
4. Growth
5. Management

Depending on the company you analyze, one topic might be more important than another.

A large-cap company, for example, might be less dependent on good management than micro- and small-caps.

At the same time, a specific focus on key metrics of the business might be more critical at smaller operations than complex ones with many subsidiaries at large companies.

Again, because of this difference, I didn't include strict numbers but rather qualitative questions that can be expanded with numbers depending on the company and industry you research.

4. The Investment Review Checklist

After you've invested in the company, the real work just starts.

You need to keep up to date and regularly assess whether the investment still makes sense and the thesis is on track.

For that purpose, I have a Review Checklist that I go through once a quarter (or when big news are announced).

It's a short list that ensures I'm still focusing on my thesis and don't make the mistake of holding on to an investment or panic selling without the facts backing that decision.

5/6. The Two Psychology Checklists

Investment psychology is extremely important to me.

When you've done good research and valuation work, rational decision-making is the only thing that stands between you and investment success.

I have two checklists for this topic.

The first is part of the research and valuation process and deals with all the biases that influence the valuation.

The second is part of the reviewing process and deals with all biases that influence you in assessing current holdings.

In total, the two checklists cover 22 biases.

Avoiding biases in everyday life is impossible. They happen whenever we are unconsciously thinking, and that's a huge part of every day.

But these checklists help me reactivate my conscious thinking, and whenever I look at them, I find mistakes I've made and can correct them.

The thought process these lists initiate helps me immensely.

I've sent my Checklist System ( a quick 40-pager with some explanations and all 6 Lists) to all Paid Subscribers of my Newsletter for free.

If you want to grab it, too, you can do that here:
https://t.co/NmOwuX727u

I didn't turn it into an unnecessarily long book, course, or anything like that to charge more money.

It's just the 6 Checklists with Introductions to each list and a Details Section that elaborates further on points that might need further explanation.

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

Startup’s solve the problems with creativity when they are low on capital.

[Michael McGuiness @mikemcg0]

Q: Why is capital not always a predictor of success when it comes to startups?

Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel gave a great answer when asked how they would compete with giants like Apple and Facebook on AR hardware:

“One of the things that’s so exciting about the technology industry is that capital is not always a predictor of success. I think that’s one of the things that draws so many people to this industry and excites them. True innovation—especially long-term, complex, technical innovation—can create really breakout products even when your competitors have way more money and are hiring more people.”

He continues:

“I think what happens is that many of those companies that are spending a lot more money aren’t having to make hard choices. And design is all about those hard choices and tradeoffs. When you have lots of money and someone presents you with three you options, you say: ‘let’s do all three’. And that means that ultimately over time, you miss the opportunity to learn and to iterate and evolve the product as quickly as you could if you were really constrained by the amount you could invest.”

Steve Jobs expressed a similar view:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

Sometimes it feels like everything we feel to be the end of the world is just generational and as we grow old we think of changing things as the decline of the world order.
But again, the rate at which things are changing is unprecedented.

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

@mikemcg0 I’m building an investment product for the retail investors for which there is already an inefficient solution, these investors are not desperate for an innovation as there is not much education about how the current model is inefficient. How do you solve for this?

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

Just crossed 5k on @StartupArchive_ in 3 weeks!!

Here are 5 strategies I attribute to that growth (and how you can replicate our strategy):

#1: Get Clear On Your Value Proposition

When people see the Startup Archive profile, they know they’re not going to get dog pics, they’re going to receive tactical advice from the world’s best founders and investors.

• What value do you provide?
• Who do you provide value to?
• Are you clearly communicating that value?

The person with the “most valuable” newsletter doesn’t win. The person who can communicate the value their newsletter provides the best wins.

#2: Play The Best Hits

Mike and I were fortunate to start the Startup Archive Twitter account with an edge. Mike’s been creating content since early July. We collected all of his best-performing content into a “Hall of Fame”.

Then we followed the 3Rs to leverage them:

• Repost - post again 3-6 months later
• Repurpose - post on another platform (LinkedIn or Instagram)
• Remix - combine two posts to create a new post

Just like a famous singer will tour the world only playing their most popular songs. Eventually, you want to be sharing your best posts.

#3: Create Your Launchpad

A launchpad group is a group designed to “launch” your post to people outside of your following. How does it work?

• You publish a piece of content
• Your launchpad shares that content within 1 hour
• The more engagement your post gets, the more the algorithm shows it to new people

Your goal is to frontload engagement within the first hour that you publish.

#4: Hustle For Distribution

Another concept we’ve talked about before is Hand to hand-to-hand combat. At the start, your goal is to create a lot of motion to get the ball rolling.

We created a “Hit List” of people who talked often about startups, founders, and investors. Then we engaged daily and plugged our content when it was relevant to the conversation.

#5: Raise The Bar

@mikemcg0 spends 10-20 hours every week watching these interviews, pulling the best insights, formatting each post, and publishing them.

@chenellco spends 25 hours a week reverse-engineering the growth of the top creators so her readers can learn what these creators did BEFORE they were big.

@heydannymiranda spends 15+ hours a week researching his guests before he speaks with them so he can ask deeper questions than other podcast hosts.

You may not have the most expertise in your domain as someone else. But you can always put more time, effort, and research into your content.

In other words… being a Nerd is a competitive advantage. 🤓

Follow @startuparchive_ for more tactical startup advice!

[Michael McGuiness @mikemcg0]

Q: How do the best startup founders make it through the dark times?

As Sam Altman puts it in the clip below:

“No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be because it’s so embarrassing in retrospect.”

Even though Open AI is rumored to be worth $80-90 billion today, the journey to this point wasn’t as smooth as you might think.

Sam talks through just how unpromising everything looked in the early days:

“We were this extremely ragtag group of people. We were mocked by everyone serious in the field. And we didn’t have working technical progress. We had some little things that kind of worked, but it was deeply unclear how we were going to make AGI and we were unbelievably outgunned by Deep Mind at the time. A lot of people were like ‘why are you doing this? Deep Mind is untouchable.’… so yeah, it was pretty hard but we just kept putting one foot in front of the other. We were constantly not able to find enough money or compute or people. But you just keep going and eventually something works.”

Stripe cofounder John Collison then reiterates this:

“Every company that is going to get to some scale definitely goes through a period of the dark times. If I think back to Stripe’s dark times, there was this point just after launch where the endorphins had worn off, and we had a bunch of early people leave all at once. It was very draining. You know, you lose some of your own confidence.”

What kept the Stripe founders going—besides having an idea that they were really excited about—was momentum from serving customers. When you have customers using your product, you kind of have no choice but to continue serving them.

Sam echoes this point:

“Once you have customers that you have to serve, they really pull it out of you.”

In another Startup Archive answer, there’s a quote from Elon Musk that gives similar advice to startup founders:

“Expect quite a long period of high difficulty. But if you can stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights your end customer you have a better chance of succeeding… If your customers love you, your odds of success are dramatically higher.”

Open AI didn’t have customers and was more focused on foundational research, but to keep their sanity, they tried to set up external touch points that faked the equivalent of having customer feedback.

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"Study physics, mathematics, computers, microeconomics, game theory, and persuasion."

@naval

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

@MikeSukhorukov Which one of these you think has the most value trapped inside of it, and has the most to gain with tech advancements?

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

@mikemcg0 @sachinrekhi Tesla's strategy isn't captured by just one statement. Their aim was to redefine what electric cars could be for the world. They understood that turning it into reality would demand iteration and commitment. Being adaptable to change for the cause needs to be a part of the vision

[Arpit Gosain @GosainArpit]

@E_Sheninger Just read it! The tribal approach would surely help I believe! @jockowillink makes an amazing point which we should add to this, a leader should make sure that everyone knows why we are doing what we are doing. I’ve been trying that and I think it works!😁