Shailesh

Builder

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@OndoFinance Damn.. so shocked to hear this.. may his soul rest in peace.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

Every era has its utility barons. The 19th and 20th centuries gave us:

• Rockefeller — oil
• Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan — rail
• Edison and Westinghouse — electricity

Each of them built the substrate that everything else ran on. Each of them was priced, at the time, like they were crazy. In hindsight, they were underpriced.

The founders of today's frontier model labs are new age utility barons. Compute tokens are going to be as fundamental as electricity of this century — the metered unit that the next wave of productivity, science, and software will be billed against.

But there's one structural difference that I think is still underappreciated:

The titans of the past were regional. Standard Oil dominated American refining. The New York Central was a U.S. rail network. Westinghouse electrified American cities first, then exported.

Frontier model labs are global from day one. The same model serves developers in US, Europe, APAC etc.

That changes the potential of these businesses. They are poised for 10x to 100x growth over next 10-20 years.

Price them and position yourself accordingly.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

As AI is decimating cost of building products, the bar for pre-seed and seed has gone up across the board.

Just building product is not enough. Good luck raising funding without traction.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

this is the new version of:

My grandfather migrated from our village to the city of dreams - Mumbai - with nothing more than a pair of clothes and some loose change.

[Vatsalpandya333 @Vatsalpandya333]

Mumbai to San Francisco.

18-year-old me came to the U.S. with two suitcases and no roadmap.

Now I’m in SF building an AI startup with my cofounders.

Crazy how life works sometimes.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

India and Indians have everything — resources, talent, will, culture, raw intellectual horsepower.

what we don't have is a common goal. centuries of colonialism trained us to optimize for the self, not the collective. that single broken wire is the gap between where we are and where we can be.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@senamakel @X waiting for lots of @tinyhumansai to be playing around in my mindspace.. haha

[Shailesh @SGYield]

every person you follow on @X is like installing a piece of them in your mind.

be mindful of who you follow and don't follow

[Shailesh @SGYield]

claude CLI is the new browser for me.

remember in college when the internet went down and we'd all troop over to Mutiny? that's me right now.

claude server is down and I'm just sitting here, blinking 👁

[Shailesh @SGYield]

but why?

[Paul Yacoubian @PaulYacoubian]

never met a founder that wanted to build in the same category as their first startup, almost always like, "man, i fucking hate that market"

[Shailesh @SGYield]

Guys borrowing $10k from friends are also virtue signalling investing / angel
Investing on twitter.

Why?

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@aya_kantor Who carries / underwrites the credit risk during redemption window? LPs or the issuer?

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@mert It’s good for spamming and it’s free

[Shailesh @SGYield]

at this point, is there anyone who is not affected by hacks in defi?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Shailesh @SGYield]

Great job by @hf0 on using AI to automate introductory calls.

What excuse other VC firms have for not doing it?

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@mignano Hi @mignano check out https://t.co/JQbe0xMaNF. Fully self coded. Agentic as hell.

Have DMed you.. would love to know what you have in mind.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

@iamjakestream @Computershare their market cap is not bad.. I think few startups who recently got TA license will start eating their lunch.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

My AI agent booked meeting with another AI agent using calendly link, and we both are on zoom and neither of us knows why we are on the zoom link.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

3/ Case in point: we've been waiting 3 weeks for a crypto-native company to send a commercial agreement we already verbally agreed on.

A fintech would have sent it by end of day.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

1/ DeFi's growth from 2021–2025 was fueled by OG relationships and crypto money rotating between protocols.

Crypto companies never built the muscle to run a proper sales and marketing funnel.

[Shailesh @SGYield]

2/ In 2026, as regulations get clearer, adjacent fintechs will enter crypto and eat it alive.

They have the muscle to build top of funnel and convert 10–100x more effectively than crypto-native companies.