Prakash Srivastava

2x founder with 1 successful exit. Building of Relevel by Unacademy and Rheo TV.

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

During a pitch, a tier-1 fund asked us to show the live streaming demo on our app.
We started the demo, it went live, and the first thing he said was: “koi baniya hai tum mein se?” (“is anyone among you a Baniya?”)

And that too got live streamed with live viewers. 😂

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.

12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.

I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.

You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.

It's a dance.

And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.

If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.

No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.

It is weird.

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

Player who brought my interest back in cricket #vaibhavsooryavanshi

[Will Ahmed @willahmed]

You have no experience.
You’ve never started a company.
You’ve never had a full time job.
Nike is going to kill you.
You’re a kid.
You don’t have technical skills.
You shouldn’t build hardware.
Apple is going to kill you.
You can’t build hardware.
You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively.
Athletes don’t care about recovery.
Under Armour is going to kill you.
It won’t be accurate.
You don’t listen.
You’re an ineffective leader.
You can’t recruit great talent.
You’re going to have to pay every athlete.
You can’t measure sleep non-invasively.
It’s too expensive to research.
Athletes are a small market.
The product costs too much to make.
The product costs too much to sell.
Your valuation is too high.
Consumers aren’t going to want it.
Hardware is too hard.
You should measure steps.
Fitbit is going to kill you.
You can’t build a marketing engine.
You can’t raise enough money.
You need a real CEO.
Google is going to kill you.
You can’t be a subscription.
You can’t build a brand.
You can’t do consumer in Boston.
Your valuation is too high.
You shouldn’t make accessories.
You shouldn’t make apparel.
Lululemon is going to kill you.
You can’t predict Covid.
Stay in your niche.
You are going to run out of money.
You can’t build a health platform.
Amazon is going to kill you.
You can’t measure blood pressure.
You can’t get medical approvals.
The market is too small.
You don’t understand AI.
The market is too competitive.
It won’t work internationally.
The supply chain is too complicated.
You can’t build an AI.
You can’t raise enough money.
It’s too competitive.
Healthcare isn’t going to want it.
…

Just keep going ✌️

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

The movie left out all the details I loved in the book.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Had to go see Project Hail Mary right away (it's based on the book of Andy Weir, of also The Martian fame). Both very pleased and relieved to say that 1) the movie sticks very close to the book in both content and tone and 2) is really well executed.

The book is one of my favorites when it comes to alien portrayals because a lot of thought was clearly given to the scientific details of an alternate biochemistry, evolutionary history, sensorium, psychology, language, tech tree, etc. It's different enough that it is highly creative and plausible, but also similar enough that you get a compelling story and one of the best bromances in fiction. Not to mention the other (single-cellular) aliens. I can count fictional portrayals of aliens of this depth on one hand. A lot of these aspects are briefly featured - if you read the book you'll spot them but if you haven't, the movie can't spend the time to do them justice.

I'll say that the movie inches a little too much into the superhero movie tropes with the pacing, the quips, the Bathos and such for my taste, and we get a little bit less the grand of Interstellar and a little bit less of the science of The Martian, but I think it's ok considering the tone of the original content. And it does really well where it counts - on Rocky and the bromance. Thank you to the film crew for the gem!

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

😂

[David K 🎹 @DavidKPiano]

If you willingly use `useEffect` for data fetching, that's fine, just please go into your GitHub settings and set this to disabled

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

@AvisharDutta 😂

[MrBeast @MrBeast]

I see so much negativity about the future so I thought it’d be fun to showcase the positive things that could fundamentally change humanity for the better in our new video :D

https://t.co/6QhJyukrTq

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

@ravihanda Grateful to Mahindra for the "Black Edition" warning signs on our roads. Staying away is better than becoming a statistic.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Facts below (1/5):

In 2025, average earnings per hour (EPH), excluding tips, for a delivery partner on Zomato were ₹102.
In 2024, this number was ₹92. That’s a ~10.9% year-on-year increase. Over a longer horizon also, EPH has shown steady growth.

Most delivery partners work for a few hours and only a few days in a month. But if someone were to work for 10 hours/day, 26 days/month, this translates to ~₹26,500/month in gross earnings. After accounting for fuel and maintenance (~20%), the net earnings for the partner are ~₹21,000/month.

Note: Earnings per hour are calculated on total hours logged in, including the time when the partner might be waiting to receive an order. Earnings per “busy hour” will be higher but that’s not the right metric to look at.

On top of this - delivery partners earn 100% of tips given by customers. The average tip per hour in 2025 on Zomato was INR 2.6 and in 2024 was INR 2.4 per hour. Tips are transferred instantly, with zero deductions. We absorb the payment gateway processing cost ourselves. About 5% of the orders get tipped on Zomato; 2.5% on Blinkit.

[kuldeep @ku1deep]

Every single day on this place you find cherry picked examples that we as Indians are somehow “less” ; a dirty mean people, scrabbling in the dirt. You should know, that it is the “Big Lie”. Propagated through simplification and repetition, designed for emotional appeal over rational rejection. All to create a common enemy. Ourselves. The Indian people.

That is how Goebbles “Science of the soul” worked . That is how you get a people to give up their freedoms and make their own subjugation possible.

We hate our own people so much that we direct our anger at ourselves and not those who bargained for power promising a better world. We cry for those in power to use those powers to punish the mean, the poor, the uncivilised among us. To bring them into conformance. We forget that we forge our own subjugation and we sit in a prison of the mind of our own making.

This is a great nation. forced to be one by geography. Fractured by historical forces and ravaged by economic currents. We emerge. Slowly from the ruins on which our forbearers lived. I ask you to look forward, where plenty lies. Where we are not embarrassed by our meanest but proud of the fact that we continue to push forward and build a life of more, despite of wheat we had to go through.

[Gaurav Munjal @gauravmunjal]

Unacademy turns 10 today

I thought it's a good occasion to jot down some thoughts on this day about the wild ride that we have gone through.

Ten years ago, we started with a simple mission: to empower great educators and make their content accessible to everyone.

This is when the company was started. Unacademy started as a YouTube channel in 2010, 15 years ago. When I was in the 3rd year of my college. And I started making videos on computer science to help my friends.

It continued as a side project with @RomanSaini joining in 2014, and us blitzscaling the YouTube channel. His UPSC videos would get millions of views that helped us in becoming the number one education channel in the country.

We thought that the biggest problem then was that the smartest people are not teaching, and we need a platform where we'll get the best educators who'll create videos for learners for free. Kind of like what Twitch had done to gaming, we wanted to do that to education. Create a YouTube-like platform.

And on 10th December 2015, Unacademy was launched.

For the first four years, we kept adding more and more great educators to the platform, which would lead to millions of learners joining the platform. There was a point in 2018 when we were doing millions of views per month on our own platform, with Unacademy being the number one education app on the Play Store. And it was all organic growth, because we had a rule to not spend money on performance marketing.

These were exciting times. Roman would personally go to the houses of potential educators to convince them to start teaching on an Unacademy. That's how some of the best educators joined the platform.

From the beginning, we always thought of ourselves as a tech company operating in education. Unlike every other player in the market which behaved like an education company using tech to enable them. That's why we had features like streaks, knowledge hats, and a lot of gamification built in for educators and learners. Educators would get massively addicted to the knowledge hats which the learners would gift them on crossing certain milestones.

Even till today, some of the biggest educators that we have are the ones who grew on the free platform that we had built as our first product.

Then, in 2019, just one year before Covid hit, we launched a subscription product where learners could buy a subscription and get access to live classes from the best educators for their exam. The product was an instant hit. From zero revenue in January 2019 to $1.8M revenue in September 2019, we were one of the fastest growing companies to get to almost $20M Bookings ARR in nine months.

The next one year was crazy because our revenue kept scaling and especially post-Covid, we were growing even faster. Almost 1M Paid Subscribers were now enrolled on Unacademy. There were three back-to-back funding rounds. From being a $100M valuation at the start of 2019, we were at a $1.5B valuation by September 2020.

We had spent less than $50M to reach a valuation of $1.5B.

But soon the distractions began.

In the next few months, we did another round, ended up raising another $440 million. Totalling the fund raise to more than $700 million in just less than two years. We thought that what we are seeing in COVID would sustain forever and that's the new reality. And started burning a lot of money to acquire a lot of market share, without realizing that education business is slightly different from a normal tech business, and here your first transaction is basically your LTV.

We had become the number one test prep brand in terms of recall. We were the number one test prep player in terms of online business, which had scaled to almost $100M in revenue.

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

@KrauseFx I was facing the same issue. Use this - https://t.co/7broG3aygb

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

When I was just a year old, my dad got kidnapped and we had to pay the ransom. We kids had to drop our Srivastava surname and change it to Kumar/Kumari. After multiple dacoities, my family left all our land to relatives and came to Delhi when I was just 5 years old.

[Vivek Sinha @viveksinhaisb]

I grew up in Bihar in the 90s, right in the heart of Lalu's Jungle Raj. Saw it firsthand - it's not a myth and lalu is no 'pichdon ka maseeha', as the intellectual media wants you to believe.
My father, a govt servant, battled chronic renal failure. To withdraw his own GPF he had to pay a bribe. To get medical committee approval for expenses? Bribe. Postings? Pay up or rot in hellholes. A sadakchap party wroker (gunda) could have come and insulted/ assualted civil servants anytime
Mom lived in fear for me and my sister. Kidnappings, lawlessness was rampant.
Lalu's defeat isn't politics. It's justice!
This shameless dynasty dreams of power again? They belong behind bars. For 100 years. Minimum.
Bihar rose from the ashes through perseverance. Never again.

[Vivek Sinha @viveksinhaisb]

I grew up in Bihar in the 90s, right in the heart of Lalu's Jungle Raj. Saw it firsthand - it's not a myth and lalu is no 'pichdon ka maseeha', as the intellectual media wants you to believe.
My father, a govt servant, battled chronic renal failure. To withdraw his own GPF he had to pay a bribe. To get medical committee approval for expenses? Bribe. Postings? Pay up or rot in hellholes. A sadakchap party wroker (gunda) could have come and insulted/ assualted civil servants anytime
Mom lived in fear for me and my sister. Kidnappings, lawlessness was rampant.
Lalu's defeat isn't politics. It's justice!
This shameless dynasty dreams of power again? They belong behind bars. For 100 years. Minimum.
Bihar rose from the ashes through perseverance. Never again.

[Muthukrishnan Dhandapani @dmuthuk]

Warren Buffett is 95. He is completely retiring and Greg Abel would be the new head for Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett would no longer write annual letters to shareholders or participate in AGMs ( Annual General Meetings).

Yesterday he wrote a farewell letter. I've reproduced a section of it in the screenshot.

Two gems:

Kindness is costless but also priceless.

Keep in mind the cleaning leady is as much a human being as the Chairman.

[Gaurav Baheti @gbaheti]

Procol automates procurement for >10% NIFTY50 companies in India

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

Want an easy, beginner-friendly explanation of @karpathy 's NanoChat and how LLMs work end-to-end?
https://t.co/aUXwxSWGLz
It includes file-level tags and explanations, so you can get started quickly.

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

@volklub Totally agree with the other points, but software engineers really get paid well. Even entry-level coders often start with salaries higher than those of people with several years of experience in other fields.

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

This is not expected from @zomato

[Prakash Srivastava @Prakashkumar09]

@vijayanands The output image’s resolution is based on the input image’s resolution.

Try https://t.co/snzwTXYiEx

It will work for your case.