Kashyap Chanchani

Building The Rainmaker Group. Dealmaker for India's premier venture backed founders. We try the hardest.

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

📉While the public markets are getting roiled and waiting to find a new normal, bubbling under the surface is the promise of coming of age of India's venture backed private markets.
Over the next 2-3 years, our largest and highest quality cohort companies will hit the public markets. Read on.

[Steve Wiesner @SteveWiesnerSMB]

My God, this hits. Love or hate the guy, there is SO much going on in this photo that anyone who has started or run a business can understand.

The number of times everything just blows up. Production environment fails. Negotiation collapses. Client is furious. Employee rips you off. Hormuz cuts off a sole source supplier.

Whatever it is, your business is on the verge of death. My startup once had $22k or cash in the bank and $45k of credit card debt on the Friday before the funding round hit.

EVERY entrepreneur knows the feeling. The house is on fire. The debris is scattered all over the shop floor. Every light on the phone is ringing when the site crashes.

Most normal people would say “fvck it. I’m done.”

A very small number refuse to go there. They look at the problem. They eat the pain. They figure out an answer.

They keep moving. One foot in front of the other.

And one guy - this guy - turned failure into the greatest fortune in the history of the world.

Say what you want about him, his politics, whatever.

He’s beyond historic.

[The Transcript @TheTranscript_]

Elon Musk in this 2012 interview:

" My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180M, $100M of that went into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, and $10M into SolarCity and I literally had to borrow money for rent."

$SPCX $TSLA

[Indian Tintin @IndianTintin_]

Football is more popular than Cricket for the same reason Justin Bieber is more popular than Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Test Cricket was a civilising mission. It was created to promote Abstract Thinking and the Ability to Delay Gratification. To create Gentlemen out of stinky hordes. 15-20 nations are competitive at Cricket, and that is more than enough.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Google's IPO created roughly 1,000 millionaires. Facebook's did about the same. SpaceX just created 4,400, with 400 of them above $100 million each.

The structural reason matters more than the feel-good stories.

Companies that stay private for decades usually concentrate the upside in VCs and founders. By the time regular employees get liquid, the 100x already happened on someone else's cap table. SpaceX stayed private for 24 years, the longest run to a mega IPO in history, and routed that compounding into payroll. Stock grants at every level, plus share purchases through paycheck deductions, down to welders and cafeteria staff.

Run the math on what that meant. SpaceX was valued around $12 billion in early 2015. The IPO priced it at $1.77 trillion. That's 147x in 11 years, roughly 57% annualized. A welder buying shares with $200 paycheck deductions compounded at a rate most funds never touch once.

The part people gloss over: this was financing, and the workforce carried real risk. In 2008 the company was weeks from bankruptcy after three failed Falcon 1 launches. Below-market salary plus rocket startup equity was a terrible deal in every timeline where the rockets kept blowing up. For two decades the employees were, collectively, one of SpaceX's largest investors.

Thousands of startups pay in equity. Almost all of that paper expires worthless. This bet only paid because the company survived 24 years, landed the rockets, and went public at the largest valuation in IPO history.

4,400 people just got paid for holding through every one of those filters. The factory floor was the venture capital.

[Sudheesh @sudheenair]

Vinod Khosla is not for everyone. I’ve known him from Zambeel days.

He won’t coddle you. He won’t waste your time. He assesses fast, tells you straight, and stays ruthlessly fixed on one thing: what’s right for the company.

Sometimes that lines up with the founder. Sometimes it doesn’t. He’ll be the first to say so out loud. I’ve sat on both sides of that conversation with him.

Founders who put the company above their own ego will value him for exactly this. The ones who don’t will resent him for exactly this. Same trait but two reactions.

Startups are not a thing everyone should attempt. Your capacity to grow runs about as far as your capacity to take hard feedback, including the times it arrives in a form you’d never have chosen.

@Tiny_Fish has no investment from @vkhosla, in fact he has invested in a company that overlaps with us. Nothing to gain here, just calling it as I’ve seen it.

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Apologies, I may sometimes be wrong, but I will always give entrepreneurs my best and honest opinion, popular or not.

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

From the upwardly mobile small town India to the anglicized elite that can send their kids abroad for higher studies - the reason why IITs are the greatest institution that India has produced.

[Gabbar @GabbbarSingh]

AIR 1 - Son of a Hardware shop owner in a small town Gaya (Bihar)

AIR 2 - Son of an IITian father working in Gurgaon. Son follows EPL.

Two Indias.

[Rajiv @Rajiv1841]

Just listen to this GOAT conversation between Ian Bishop & Virat Kohli, you will get a cricketing masterclass conversation in 2 minutes♥️

[Nithin Kamath @Nithin0dha]

The news about import duties on gold and silver going up to 15% came late last night. The interesting thing: neither open interest, prices, nor volume in Gold and Silver showed any unusual moves in the hours leading up to the announcement.

If this had happened in the United States, I’m fairly sure some of the people close to the decision-making process would have found a way to trade it, either through regulated futures markets, other derivative contracts, or prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.

We’ve seen versions of this with crude. And during the Iran conflict, too, there were all these reports and allegations about people around the government trading through futures, contracts, and prediction markets before or around important announcements.

It’s kind of insane how casually people in power seem to monetize privileged information. At some point, this stops looking like “market participation” and starts looking like blatant insider trading with better branding.

Just another reason why Indian markets, despite all their flaws, are far more tightly controlled in these grey zones than many Western markets.

[The Khel India @TheKhelIndia]

"My question is, if we don’t celebrate a bronze medal in the Thomas Cup, then what are we going to celebrate going forward?”

“Only six different nations have won the Thomas Cup title and we are one of them, which shows how tough it is to go there and win it.”

HS Prannoy to @RevSportzGlobal

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Let me explain what just happened today because it deserves so much recognition.

GalaxEye is a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Madras engineers. Today they launched Mission Drishti on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is India's largest privately built satellite at 190 kg. And it carries a technology that no commercial satellite has ever carried before.

Normal satellites take photos of the Earth using optical cameras. Like your phone camera, but from 500 km up. The problem is obvious. Clouds. Night. Fog. Smoke. If any of these are in the way, the photo is useless. India has monsoon cover for 4 months a year. That is 4 months where optical satellites are partially or fully blind over large parts of the country.

The alternative is SAR. Synthetic Aperture Radar. Instead of taking photos with light, it sends radar waves down and reads what bounces back. Radar goes through clouds, through darkness, through smoke. A SAR satellite can image a flooded village at 2 AM during a cyclone when no optical satellite can see anything.

The problem with SAR is that the images look nothing like photos. They look like grainy black-and-white radar maps. A military analyst or a trained geospatial engineer can read them. A farmer, a disaster response team, or a city planner cannot.

Until today, if you wanted both optical and SAR data for the same location, you needed two different satellites, passing over at different times, at different angles. Then someone had to manually align and fuse the two datasets. Expensive, slow, and the data never perfectly matched because the satellites saw the same spot minutes or hours apart.

GalaxEye put both sensors on one satellite. Optical and SAR, fused into what they call OptoSAR. Three times more information than a single sensor. Processed onboard by an NVIDIA AI chip at 1.8 metre resolution.

Now in practice, during the next cyclone hitting Odisha, one satellite pass gives you a clear image of which villages are flooded, which roads are cut, and which buildings are standing. Day or night. Cloud or clear. In near real-time.

For defence, it means you can monitor a border area 24/7 regardless of weather. For agriculture, it means tracking crop health across an entire monsoon season without a single cloud gap. For infrastructure, it means monitoring construction progress on highways and bridges without waiting for a clear day.

GalaxEye tested their SAR tech on ISRO's POEM orbital platform. The satellite was tested at ISRO facilities. IN-SPACe provided regulatory clearance. NSIL, ISRO's commercial arm, will distribute the imagery globally. And it launched on SpaceX because ISRO's PSLV doesn't have the right orbit slot for this mission.

Yes, four IIT Madras graduates built a world-first satellite in 4 years in Bengaluru.

Take a bow!

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

The bellwether of India's startup ecosystem for a reason

[Ram Parameswaran @_ram_]

@deepigoyal's annual letters are a master class in taking something complex and re-framing it in a simple manner. Well worth reading this one published last week.

https://t.co/Kp67HAEX32

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

Three minutes that tell you everything about what's driving India's public market languish.

[Anant Goenka @anantgoenka]

The clip that's making a lot of news from Express Adda with Ruchir Sharma

Why foreign investors are not interested in India.

[Cricketopia @CricketopiaCom]

At 14, Sachin Tendulkar scored a century on his Ranji Trophy debut.

At 15, he handled Kapil Dev with ease in the nets when invited by Dilip Vengsarkar.

At 16, he was struck on the nose by a bouncer from Waqar Younis, yet went on to score a fighting fifty and help save the Test match.

At 16, he also took on the premier leg-spinner of that era, Abdul Qadir, smashing 53 off 18 balls and adding 65 runs with Srikkanth, whose contribution was just 12.

At 17, he scored 96 off 75 balls in a Ranji Trophy final while chasing 355, putting on a 134-run partnership with Vengsarkar.

At 17, he registered a match-saving Test century in England.

At 18, he became the first Indian to score a Test hundred at WACA Ground, widely regarded as one of the fastest pitches in the world, in his very first innings there despite having no prior exposure to such conditions.

Just because everything wasn’t recorded at the time doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Comparisons are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean Tendulkar at 15 wasn’t already exceptional.

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

Shubham Dubey. What. A. Story.

[Abhishek AB @ABsay_ek]

There is a calm that only comes from having nothing to lose. Shubham Dubey has it.
Since 2023, he has been the most destructive non-opener in the world. 544 runs, Average 49.45, Strike rate 181.33. Nobody with 500 plus runs has scored faster. Not one middle order batter.

Against Bengal in 2023, Vidarbha needed 213. Dubey walked in as impact player. 58* in 20 balls with 6 sixes. Highest successful chase in their history. He made it look like a routine job.

Last IPL, he took 22 off Pat Cummins. Next over, 22 off Adam Zampa. He treated them like net bowlers. That is what relentless practice does. A wide yorker becomes a half volley. A short ball disappears over mid wicket.

His father sold paan at Kamal Square in Nagpur. The stall gave the family just enough to survive. Dubey bunked classes to play tennis ball cricket. Man of the Match meant money for the house. He learned to clear the rope before he learned to leave outside off. When a coach asked about academy fees, he cried. His family could not afford it. Sudeep Jaiswal, a local advocate, saved him.

Before IPL money, he played for 6 months in Mumbai for Times Shield & earned 10000 rupees a month. Sent most home. Slept with 10 men in one room. Just young men with the same dream, breathing the same air, waiting for a break that might never come.

Rajasthan Royals did not find him by accident. Zubin Bharucha, their Director of High Performance, runs a centre in Talegaon near Nagpur. Dubey went there once with his mentor Irfan Razzak. He was just watching. Watching Yashasvi Jaiswal practice. Watching how professionals train. He met Romi Bhinder, the team manager. He met Bharucha.
They monitored his strike rates across grounds. Checked pace, Checked spin, Checked failure. His base price was 20 lakh. Bidding stopped at 5.8 crore for him. Nearly 30 times. Royals needed a left-handed Indian finisher who could hit high velocity pace.

The impact player rule has been good for him & he has been good for it. Against Punjab Kings yesterday, chasing 223, he came in. 31* in 12 balls. Strike rate 258. Faced Arshdeep, Jansen & Ferguson, All international bowlers & smashed all of them.

He floats now. Sometime Number 5, sometimes Number 6 or 7. Depends on the situation. Depends on who is bowling. Most finishers want a set role. Dubey just wants to bat.

Dubey would have been another tall boy in Nagpur who used to play cricket. Another paan seller's son who had a dream. India produces thousands of them. Most fade away. The system is designed to lose them. Too expensive. Too far from the centres. Too poor to afford the right connections.

Dubey survived because a few people saw something & acted on it. That is the real story. Not the sixes. Not the 5.8 crore. The story of a boy who had every reason to quit & never did. Who slept in rooms with 10 other boys & kept believing. Who cried when asked for fees & still came back the next day.

That is the finisher's mind. That is Shubham Dubey.

[Aravind @aravind]

If you are in India, and have to share one fact to your friends and family this summer, use this:

In the last many decades, the whole world has been heating up. Annual mean temperature in every country has been rising 1-1.5 degrees a decade.

But India has been an anomaly. It has heated up the least at 0.5-1 degrees a decade. This is a scientific fact acknowledged by climatologists worldwide.

India has also increased its green cover, tree cover in cities, and forest cover in the last decade or so. This is not India's own data alone.

This is data by UN in their Global Forest Resources Assessment – GFRA 2025 report based on satellite imagery, which can't lie.

India has also increased ecological conservation efforts in recent decades as its wealth grew. It has improved its populations of endangered animals like Asiatic lion, Rhinos, Tigers and many birds and animals.

This is much better than many other countries - even developed ones (where they will shoot a wolf, shark, or bear if they increase in population, get close to human habitation, and attack a human).

Anyway, there will always be programmed Indians who will come to discount India's tremendous achievements in Paris climate goals and in protecting its environment even as a highly populous developing country.

We can't do much trying to convince these DS programmed and blackpilled bots. Just watch the comments below. They will come to tell you how numbers are fake, how they saw it has become bad, or change the goal post to another topic to berate India.

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

Seminal moment. IT services, that contributes 10 percent to NIFTY 50 degrows for the first time in a financial year.

[Surabhi Agarwal @SurabhiA_ET]

The year FY2026 marked the first fiscal in the history of the IT services industry when leading firms such as TCS reported revenue degrowth. In FY27 too, Tier-1 IT service providers are likely to grow at a slow clip, at 3%–5% as per estimates as AI led deflation gnaws at traditional revenue, reports @ShristiAcharET

https://t.co/0qhDKFfcc0

[Abhishek AB @ABsay_ek]

Since 2023, Rinku Singh's strike rate in last 2 overs of T20 is 256.7. Best in the world for anyone who has faced minimum 75 balls. In 20th over alone, it climbs to 275.6. Again, best in the world, minimum 35 balls. These numbers are acts of violence against probability.

Since 2022, no one batting at 5 or lower has made more runs while carrying a better average & strike rate than his 40.5 & 150.2.(2553 runs) His strike rate is higher than likes of Miller, Pandya, Stubbs. Yet the conversation around him has never been about what he does. It has always been about what he costs.

13 crore. That is the shadow that follows him. The retention price that turned underdog into target. In 2024 & 2025, when the runs dried up & the caught dismissals piled up, the same timelines that once called him "Lord" turned forensic.
Excel sheets appeared. Graphs showed a 68% drop from his 2023 season. Wrist-spin was his kryptonite. He was a one season wonder. A fraud propped up by one over of 5 sixes. The experts did their work with the cold satisfaction of people who have never faced a yorker at 145 kph, let alone buried their father & returned to camp within days.

Khanchand Singh delivered LPG cylinders in Aligarh. Loaded them onto a tempo. Brought them to houses where people cooked dinner. Rinku was so close to taking a sweeper's job as a boy that the what-ifs still hurt to imagine.
His father watched him practice on such grounds that Mumbai kids would not warm up on. In February this year, Khanchand died of stag 4 liver cancer. Rinku was with India's T20 World Cup squad. He left. He performed the last rites. He carried the body. He came back.
"Farz sabse aage hai."; that's what his father taught to him. He posted after the World Cup win that his father's dream was fulfilled. Then he showed up for KKR as vice-captain.

Here is what the spreadsheets miss. In those quiet seasons, Rinku was batting at 6 or. And he is kind of batter who takes his time initially & then explode. The 2026 season gave him responsibility. Number 5. A top order that kept collapsing. A franchise that looked like it had forgotten how to win.

Against Rajasthan Royals, he walked in at 85 for 6. Needed 69 from 39. Scratched to 8. Got dropped. Reset. Took 16 off Bishnoi without swinging wildly. Broke Jofra Archer in the death.
7 days later, 31 for 4 against LSG, which became 93 for 7. Mohsin Khan was shredding them. Rinku made 83 not out. Absorbed pressure for 30 balls. Then 4 sixes in final over & 43 runs in last 2 overs. Took 5 catches in the field as well Including a grab of Markram that made no physical sense. Then hit the winning runs in Super Over.

The same accounts that wanted him dropped were writing apology threads by 26th April. Cricket forgets fast. But Rinku does not. He remembers Aligarh. He remembers the cylinders. He remembers the man who believed in him when there was no reason to.
And he keeps walking back to the middle, every single time, because that is what the job demands.

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

@samidhas @pranavmukul Thanks @sruthijith !

[Kashyap Chanchani @KChanchani]

The best business gathering in the country. By a distance.
Thank you @samidhas @pranavmukul

[The Economic Times Front Row @ETFrontRow]

"The evening may be winding down, but the conversations carry on. The energy is palpable, as the brightest minds of India Inc. come together in celebration and collaboration!

#ETAwards

@DeloitteIndia @EconomicTimes