Pankaj Jain 🖖

Managing Partner @SakaVentures. NYC & India. Investing in seed startups targeting large global markets. Previously @500GlobalVC, @TLabs, @SSCGlobeOp.

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

Stop visiting the U.S. market. Start living in it.

If you're building for America from abroad, two-week trips won't cut it. Here's what actually works 🧵

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@marvinliao Easy [big] money brings out the grifters

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@0xSero How can I help?

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@hardik @ku1deep Speak up. The Indian Tech community needs its own Cockroach party

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@octal The VisionPro is the best device of its kind on the market. It’s hard to justify the upgrade, though. I love mine but still have a limit of 30-45 minutes of use before my face starts hurting.

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@christinelu Couldn’t agree more.

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@marvinliao No. They just want to be in the history books for one reason or another.

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@SNeurgaonkar “Influencers” gotta eat and get eyeballs 😂

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The Matrix took its name from a 1984 novel written on a manual typewriter by a man who didn't own a computer. 42 years later, that novel finally gets its own screen.

William Gibson typed Neuromancer on a 1927 Hermes portable. He coined "cyberspace" before he'd ever logged onto anything. The book swept the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick award in the same year, the only novel ever to take all three.

Then Hollywood spent four decades strip-mining it while calling it unfilmable. The Wachowskis lifted the matrix, the jacked-in hackers, the AI pulling strings behind a corporate veil. Every razor-girl assassin in sci-fi traces back to Molly. Johnny Mnemonic, an actual Gibson adaptation, flopped so hard in 1995 that studios treated his work as radioactive for a generation.

At least five directors attached and detached over the years. Chris Cunningham in 2000. Vincenzo Natali in 2010. Tim Miller at Fox in 2017. Each attempt died the same death. By the time the technology existed to film Neuromancer, audiences had watched its ideas in a dozen movies that borrowed them first.

The original became unfilmable because it looked like a copy of its own copies.

Now the timing loops back on itself. A story about a rogue AI maneuvering to escape its corporate constraints, written before the web existed, lands in January 2027 as the least speculative thing on television.

And one detail makes the whole arc perfect. When Neuromancer royalties came in, Gibson bought his first computer, an Apple IIc. Four decades later, Apple is the company putting his book on screen.

[Tim O'Reilly @timoreilly]

@JensenHuang @nvidia I too am a big fan of open weight models, but open source AI doesn't stop there. Push for an overall "architecture of participation." Open source and the web won because they made it easy for people to cooperatively build out the system. Modularity and open protocols matter too!

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@thekaipullai Very cool! Thank you for putting this together. One small request: dark mode please

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@jefielding The conversation ends at the NDA for me.

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@Keshav_Lohiaaa NYC prices range from $25-$40/drink w/o heading into top shelf liquor territory

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@RezaC1 @NYCMayor He’s worse

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@amitranjan Agentic submission of pitches to VC agents?

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@parrysingh Music, in general, has become less interesting these days. There isnt a lot of diversity that plays well with the 40+ crowd. It’s mostly hip hop that the younger millenials and gen z gravitate to. I froze my playlists to music prior to 2015

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

@DanielleMorrill @MisterMorrill What’s your favorite thing to grow in the kitchen garden?

[Pankaj Jain 🖖 @pjain]

“Ban foreign models so we can compete” works in closed, controlled societies. It doesn’t work in democratic, free societies with free markets. If the U.S. decides to ban or heavily tax foreign or open source models, there’s going to be serious problems. India should be looking at open source models to jump start the development of frontier models rather than worrying about OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Why are Indian companies not developing frontier models?

The answer is in economics, not talent. The biggest hurdle for an Indian company trying to develop frontier model is that right from the get go, it has to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI free plans + all Chinese open weight models.

Chinese models mostly flourished due to the demand from their domestic market which OpenAI/Anthropic couldn’t meet as they’re unavailable in China. This unmet demand created space for innovation.

China knows this story well, but here in India, we like unfettered, globalized free market, and that requires an upstart to compete with established companies from across the world.

If India is serious about the AI race, it needs to create a massive guaranteed market for domestic AI or else it’ll be economically irrational for any funder to underwrite a product in a highly competitive, already established market.