Nikita Dawda

GM at @meeshotech | Ex @Flipkart Strategy & @matrixindiavc | ISB | Comic Book Illustrator | Views on Twitter are strictly personal

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

Meetings getting tedious? Here is how we strived for more meaningful meetings at Meesho (1/10)

[The Persian Jewess @persianjewess]

Iranian hairstylist Ami Moghadam received death threats for posting videos of women receiving haircuts on Instagram.

So she decided to troll the Islamic Regime and their oppressive mandatory hijab laws in the most epic, hilarious way possible. 😂

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A swimmer just won $1.25 million for one length of a pool. He beat the world record by a hair, except it won't count: he swam in a banned suit, at an event that lets athletes use the same drugs that get Olympians banned.

The swim was never the point. The company behind it, called Enhanced, put up $25 million in prize money, built a temporary arena in Las Vegas, and reportedly spent over $6 million on a pool it tears straight back down. It handed out the broadcast for free and let fans in for nothing. The whole event was built to lose money.

What Enhanced actually sells is a website. It runs an online clinic that prescribes testosterone for men and hormone therapy for women, and ships out the same kinds of drugs its athletes use to get faster, every month like a subscription you forget to cancel. The company has said its goal is to sign up tens of millions of ordinary people at around $399 a month. Its CEO has been blunt: the real prize is the drug platform, and the games are how they advertise it.

It is the Red Bull move. Red Bull sells a sugary drink by paying daredevils to leap from the edge of space, and Enhanced is selling drugs by paying a swimmer to break a record on camera. You watch someone do something that looks superhuman, you start wondering what those same drugs would do for you, and the order button is one tap away.

At $399 a month, that swimmer's entire $1.25 million payday is about what 260 subscribers pay in a single year, and Enhanced wants millions of them. The company, funded by tech billionaires, went public this month. Even after the stock market shrugged and cut its value nearly in half, to around $650 million, it is a giant bet on a product that barely earns a dollar today.

Underneath the headline, the deal is simple. A drug company paid one man to break a record on live TV, so that millions of people watching would want to buy whatever made him fast.

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

@ananyashasau Went to the police station at bellandur. Didn't have to pay.

[Abhijeet Dipke @abhijeet_dipke]

I know you are desperately trying to hack the account but since you have failed to do so. Let me share the real data.

Why would you call 94% of Indian youth as Pakistanis?

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

I’m incredibly intrigued by the rise of #CockroachJantaParty, which has already reached more than 15 million followers on @Instagram in just five days.

I understand the frustrations of the youth and see why they are resonating with it. This is precisely why the account being withheld on X is disastrous and deeply unwise - there should be an outlet for the youth to express their feelings and so, let CJP’s account function instead of shutting it down! Democracies need outlets for dissent, humour, satire and even frustration.

I am uncertain about the future of this movement but I hope the youngsters behind it find a way to bring this energy into mainstream politics or perhaps express it through their vote to be a voice of change and in doing so, become impossible to ignore. This is an opportunity that the Opposition must seize.
https://t.co/294SHkmpK2

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

Pretty bold.

[Tejeshwi Sharma 🇮🇳 @tejeshwi_sharma]

AI in India is low cost compute starved

If @reliancejio pulls this off, India will see a Cambrian explosion in AI applications across consumer and enterprise.

Internet created $400B market cap in India, AI will be multiple times bigger.

[Giorgia Meloni @GiorgiaMeloni]

Thank you for the gift

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

Today my mom remarked at how my dad has turned into a philosopher. And how his english has improved in old age.

Guess what app Papa is using 😁

[Paul S. Conyngham @paul_conyngham]

https://t.co/bpa3HHt8Mg

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

OpenAI just exited the video generation business entirely. App dead. API dead. No video inside ChatGPT. Disney’s $1 billion deal, signed four months ago, is dead.

Read that again. This isn’t a consolidation into the super app. Altman told staff Tuesday that OpenAI is winding down all products using video models. Disney’s own statement says they respect OpenAI’s decision to “exit the video generation business.” The Sora research team is being redirected to robotics.

The reason is sitting right there in the competitive data. Anthropic hit $19 billion in annualized revenue by early 2026 selling text and code. No video generation. No image generation. No consumer social app. No Disney deal. One product surface: chat, code, computer use, all in one place. OpenAI looked at where every dollar of market growth was coming from and saw the answer: coding and enterprise.

So now they’re copying the model. ChatGPT, Codex, and the browser merge into one app. Instant Checkout killed today too. Every consumer experiment is getting cut. What remains is the Anthropic playbook: one app, code and chat, enterprise and developer focus.

The Sora numbers explain the urgency. Total consumer revenue across iOS and Android since September: $1.4 million. Peak month was $540,000. Every video generation burned GPU compute that could have been running inference for ChatGPT or Codex instead. OpenAI’s own head of Sora announced generation limits because chips couldn’t keep up. At $14 billion in projected 2026 losses, every GPU matters.

Google just inherited the AI video market by default. Nano Banana already lives inside Gemini. No standalone app to manage, no separate brand to support. Among the majors, they’re the only ones left. Runway, Kling, Minimax, Luma, and the other independents are still shipping, but none of them have Google’s distribution.

Disney put $1 billion in stock warrants on a product that lasted six months. The deal was announced in December. Characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars were supposed to be generating fan videos on Sora by now. Instead, Disney is writing a polite press statement about “respecting OpenAI’s decision” while its legal team unwinds a deal that never produced a single licensed video.

Four months from billion-dollar partnership to obituary. That’s how fast the AI product landscape reprices when the unit economics don’t work.

[Vidit Aatrey @viditaatrey]

Introducing Vaani – Your Meesho Dost, India’s first Gen AI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant, designed for the next 500 million users who inherently shop this way.

Most e-commerce is built for digitally savvy users who know what they want and how to find it. A large part of India doesn’t shop that way.

Shopping here has always been assisted. You walk into a store, describe what you need, ask questions and decide with guidance. That’s what we built for.

Vaani brings this offline experience online. It understands natural, real-world queries, asks follow-up questions to clarify intent, and works seamlessly across the app to help users discover, decide and purchase.

Early signals are encouraging. Over 1.5 million users have interacted with Vaani, with strong repeat usage indicating early habit formation and a 22% higher conversion rate among users who engage with the assistant.

When technology understands you, shopping becomes simpler. When it guides you, confidence grows. And with that confidence, millions more people can participate in commerce.

#Meesho #VoiceCommerce #DigitalIndia

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

BIG: Trump’s top counter terrorism official resigns: says ‘we started this war because of pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.. it serves no benefit to American people.. ‘imminent threat’ posed by Iran to America was a LIE..’ As MAGA coalition spilt wide open, there are still ‘patriots’ who tell truth to power! #ai

[travis kalanick @travisk]

Atoms.

https://t.co/nbCnIkI3RD

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

@chiragchhajer @burmaburmaindia Burma burma is synonymous with comfort food for me. Thanks for creating it!

[Tarun Firodiya @tarun_firodiya]

We sold 150 resale homes in Bangalore in 2025. Most buyers are walking into a "liquidity trap" - here’s how to avoid it 🧵

[C. A. Matthius @CA_Matthius]

Well, here's a Thursday night rabbit hole for me:

> Epstein was killed August 10th, 2019.

> The Epstein Files show his YouTube account, username: littlestjeff1

> The files also show he used the same username on the video game Fortnite, and he was an avid player—showing frequent in-game purchases.

> 'Fortnite Tracker' shows his account reached Silver 1 (level 4 of 9—1, 2, 3 for bronze, silver, gold respectively) in the game 'Chapter 5, Season 1.'

> Chapter 5, Season 1 was released on December 3, 2023. It ran until March 8, 2024.

> Jeffrey Epsteins Fortnite account was playing from Israel in 2024, 4 years after his "death."

[Ash Arora @asharoraa]

Overheard in SF:

Person 1: “Rome wasn’t built in a day”

Person 2: “Yes but they didn’t have Claude Code”

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

Walked into a busy office in koramangala 7 years ago. Worked endlessly with the most phenomenal set of people, leading up to this moment. This epic, damn moment. #meeshoipo

[Nikita Dawda @Nikdraws]

7 years ago, I walked into a tiny office in Koramangala. Got to work with this phenomenal bunch of people, leading to this day. This epic damn day. #meeshoipo

[UK (Utkrishta Kumar) @youkaey]

As the Meesho IPO frenzy hits the market in a few hours, flashbacks from the last few years are hard to ignore. In my opinion, Meesho is the boldest Indian consumer story of the last decade. Getting to play a role in that journey still overwhelms me.

This is my Meesho story.

Back in 2012, I walked away from a lucrative investment banking career abroad to join a young startup in India. It wasn’t a plan; it was a gut call.

By 2018, that gut call was looking shaky.

My bank balance had barely moved in six years. Friends were buying flats in Mumbai; I was calculating if I could afford rent in South Bombay. I was tired in a way only startup operators understand. At that point, I was ready to trade up for stability. A multi-billion-dollar popular name made me an offer. They even announced my joining in the Economic Times - the first time my name ever appeared in a newspaper. It was the kind of role where you can finally… exhale.

But something felt off.

I was introduced to @viditaatrey late 2017 and I had stayed in touch. Meesho was scrappy, small, but incredibly ambitious. A role emerged to head Meesho's business, but it wasn’t the "logical" choice.

Friends warned me: “You already lost your hand at startup poker once. Don’t gamble again.” Their logic wasn’t wrong. But I saw the world differently. I didn’t see my previous six years as a failure. I had learned - to build from scratch and to thrive in ambiguity. These didn't look like losses. They looked like leverage. So, when the choice came - slow security or fast uncertainty - I chose optimism. I chose the story that made my heart beat faster.

I chose Meesho.

In a few hours, the success will be visible to the world. But for me, the real win was learning how to play the game, living customer obsession, and discovering that compounding happens quietly… and then shows up loud.

If startup life is a poker table, maybe in hindsight, the table will soon know I had a royal flush.

PS : Thanks @arnav_kumar for being the super-connector you are !!