Vamsee Dilli

Curious, Tinkerer

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

Given a choice, I'd always recommend working on the supply side of a marketplace than the consumer side. This is why 👇 (Disclaimer: I worked on the seller side of Amazon India, so feel free to discount any familiarity bias that may creep in) 🧵 1/n

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

Can’t wait for the mental gyms and competitions that would emerge - to do math, write SQLs, solve calculus problems, read maps.. 😄

[𝘬𝘰𝙗𝙞𝙡 @bukalakap]

“Hyrox itu kegiatan kuli yg dibikin fancy dan mewah oleh orang kaya”

Pas diliat, lah bener juga 😭

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

Yeah - and while you are at it, why don’t you make some starch from sunlight too?

[👑 @coffeededo_o]

It means we could built muscles without meat

[Inverse Billore Index @InverseBillore]

Say no more.

[Sidu Ponnappa @ponnappa]

until llms, computers had to be instructed with perfect 100% clarity using the unambiguous grammar of a programming language because (obviously) the ambiguous grammars of human languages become the problem. as you may imagine, this is pretty hard because perfect clarity is pretty hard to establish. (tangentially, especially so in a business context, 100X especially so in a large enterprise).

ai doesn't change this, and this is the trap waiting for the unsuspecting new vibe coder who thinks they can now code using agents.

code was never the hard problem. code merely enables defining exactly what you want with 100% clarity.

getting to perfect clarity is the problem.

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

India has a strange blind spot when it comes to eggs. For starters, we have, against all common sense, declared it non-veg, which automatically comes attached with moral baggage, and then on top of that, even in families that eat meat, the idiotic idea that eggs are “heating” (taseer) reduces its daily/weekly consumption.

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

Birkenstock went from 1 India store in 2020 to more than 50 today. And that isn’t the victory it looks like.

It’s a distress signal.

Brands don’t walk into India when they’re winning in the West. They walk in when they’ve stopped winning. The Indian premium consumer has quietly become the last chapter in a lot of Western brand stories — and if you squint, you can see the pattern stretching back a decade.

Starbucks arrived here in 2012, seven years after US growth peaked and “mall Starbucks” had become shorthand for corporate blandness. H&M came in 2015, just as “fast fashion” stopped being aspirational in the West and started being a slur. Victoria’s Secret shipped up when American teens had moved on to Skims and Aerie. Uniqlo, Pottery Barn, and Zara’s aggressive Indian expansion — all arrived in the second half of their Western growth story, never the first. The pattern is almost comical once you see it. Brands land here right when their home market stops being easy money.

Birkenstock is textbook. Their stock is down around 20% this year. Their FY26 guidance disappointed Wall Street last month. The Crocs CEO said recently that customers are “migrating back towards athletic.” The New York Times ran a piece calling the potato-shoe era over. The Western ugly-shoe cycle — the one that put Birkenstock on every Brooklyn influencer’s feet for the last five years — is visibly closing.

Meanwhile, Birkenstock India grew 31% last year. APAC is now the company’s fastest-growing segment globally. In their last earnings call, management told investors this growth will “reduce exposure to the US dollar.”

Translation: we need India to save the story.

And we’re showing up right on cue.

Influencers are doing Birkenstock-with-socks posts in 2026, two years after TikTok in New York was already over them. The aunty who called them chappals at a family function in 2019 bought a pair in taupe last month. There’s an Arizona in every third Uber in Bandra. Wedding sangeets now feature cousins sliding into Bostons for the after-party.

They’re good shoes. I’ll say it twice because the comfort is real. That’s not the argument.

The argument is that the story we tell ourselves about “the brand arriving” is backwards. What actually happened is the brand ran out of easy growth somewhere else, and we became the escape valve. We get to feel arrived. They get to extend the runway.

The Indian premium consumer has become a useful last chapter in a lot of these stories. We show up exactly when the West gets bored, which means we’re buying peak narrative the moment it’s losing its edge.

We always run this cycle two beats behind. We were getting into skinny jeans as they were dying. Oat milk landed in Mumbai cafés the same year America started complaining it was everywhere. Athleisure became a serious Indian category after athleisure had been absorbed so completely in the US that nobody called it athleisure anymore. The pattern is consistent enough that you could almost trade on it — if you could stomach buying the thing your rich cousins in Manhattan are quietly moving on from.

The consolation is that we don’t really care about being first. Indians buy brands for what they signal, not what they predict. A Birkenstock in 2026 Bombay says “I’ve made it.” A Birkenstock in 2026 Brooklyn says “I’m still here, for now.” Those are different jobs, and ours is frankly the more fun one.

Being fashion’s last reliable customer is also its own kind of power. The brands know it. That’s why Birkenstock is opening forty new stores globally next year with India as a focus, even as they guide Wall Street to expect slower growth overall. We’re the hedge. The hedge works.

Maybe that’s fine.

Or maybe it just means we’ll spend the next decade wearing what America is quietly taking off.

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

One of those instances where this guy drops some truths (without mixing in some scam)

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

@tzu_kanon I still don’t know what Agentic AI means in a non-jargon way nor what Jevon’s Paradox is without going to Grokipedia

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

100% At this point, I am silently judging anyone who says - "chat is the eventual interface for any tool that is AI native. everything will collapse into chat"

[Hardik Pandya @hvpandya]

The biggest issue with replacing all purpose-built UI with a text box is that it shifts the burden of figuring out how to get to the right intentful UI, on the user.

It sounds easy for the makers. Easy to justify too. The feeling of ‘simplifying complex interfaces’ that has eluded most enterprise software builders for decades.

If you’ve built anything at scale, you know users don’t intuitively figure out ‘what to prompt’. An empty text box, just like the empty document is one of the hardest starting points for any clear JTBD.

On top of that there’s a million other issues too: the system you can only ‘look through’ a small prompt box is inherently un-navigable. And what’s un-navigable is unusable at scale. Such a system also does NOT expose its capabilities to the user. What’s the scope of things I can ask here? What do I type for what I want? What if my input is imprecise?

A text box is not the end-all UI for enterprise software.

We need to do better.

[Chirag Barjatya @chiragbarjatya]

China rural population was going through malnutrition and growth stunting. They increased the 3 yuan to 5 yuan per student per day and made it mandatory for the government officials to eat the same meal as what those kids were eating. They added more meat, more milk, allowed more eggs and tofu for the kids in everyday meal.

Result? 13-year-old males have seen the most growth in height and weight over the decade, with an average height of 7.5 centimeters taller and an average added weight of 6.6 kilograms from 2012 to 2021.

12-year-old female students who experienced the most growth had added an average of 6.3 cm in height and 5.8 kg in weight in 2021 compared to average levels by 2012.

This is what happens when you keep your schools separate from your religious identities and don't do drama and rr on allowing eggs or meat or chicken in the mid day meals.

(now a certain X users with low attention span will take this post as 'oh so you are saying veg food has no protein wow')

Read it again.

[komal 🤸🏽‍♀️ @komal_42]

The Indians who left India back l between 70s to 90s … think that India is stuck in the same place as they left it. They have kids outside of India and their kids also grow up thinking that.

And it’s very evident when they talk about India. They don’t realise how stupid it comes across to people actually living in India rn.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

An extremist group in Washington, DC has claimed credit for the terrorist attack on the Iranian bridge, promising further attacks on civilian infrastructure if its demands aren't met

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The worst thing you can do is just dabble with AI a *little bit*. That’s the spot where you use it and see its capability but over-generalize on the use cases and how easy the automation is. You almost have to use it too much, develop psychosis, then get to the other side and realize how much care and feeding and management of the agentic workflows is required. On that other end you realize you actually need to probably hire more (or new) people to then do all the new things agents can do.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

And we're told it's the other side that's a fanatical theocracy...

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

Surprising that paulg has been the only one who has been openly speaking his mind, and isn't just being a mute spectator. So much for the "free-thinking" spirit of silicon valley and its tech bros

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If you wondered why we're attacking Iran, Trump's counterterrorism head explains.

[Citrini @citrini]

I currently estimate the notional size of the crude oil futures short the US government ends up putting on to be roughly whatever $10 billion in margin gets you.

Attached tweet unrelated.

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

Picasa, a photo viewer app used to do this locally on your laptop back in 2010. The one software I loved to bits, until it got acquired by Google and got killed (or transformed) into Google photos which is now completely online.

[M Mohan @mukund]

Best use case of AI so far. Attended a Jaipur destination wedding. Amazing event with over 300 people and 7 cameramen.

Atleast 100K photos over 2 days.

The camera team put it all in a folder. Then each person took a selfie. They were only shown the photos they were in.

Impressed.

Some of the photos I was in were just me in the background very far away. Still recognised me in those.

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

My current shift to FirstClub and Amazon Now from Instamart and Blinkit aligns with this so perfectly.

[pnorm @paleonormie]

the future is just an endless churn of adapting your consumption habits to whatever venture-capital-backed seller is currently selling at a loss to capture market share

[Tanning Salon Don @TheSalonDon]

Get in as many group chats as you can at a young age

As you get older, those are the only friends you have left

Friends outside of group chats will completely fall off

[Vamsee Dilli @vamseedilli]

I don’t know why but Irfan Khan from lunchbox was whom I was imagining in my head as I read this

[Pratim D Gupta @peedeegee]

A couple of days back at a cake shop in Calcutta, I had stepped in for a quick snack. The man in front of me had the look of someone who had been very careful, for a very long time, not to inconvenience anyone. White shirt, collar gone a bit yellow.
He was buying a pineapple cake. The kind with the aggressively yellow icing. The girl at the counter asked whether any name needed to be written on the cake. The man shook his head. But she wasn’t done. “Kaar jonmodin (Whose birthday), Jethu?” she prodded.
He pushed his glasses up. “Aamar (Mine),” he said. Quietly, trying to make it sound very matter-of-factly.
She went still for a second. Exchanged glances with me and another customer. Then she turned toward the back where two boys were loading something in the fridge.
“Shibu! Mondal!”
What followed was not polished but more touching than any great musical performance. They all sang Happy Birthday to this man, and meant it, the way you can only mean something that wasn’t planned.
The man turned red. He looked at his shoes. He looked at the cake. He looked at the girl. And I thought I saw a tiny smile.
He didn’t say anything. Took his change, took the box. His shoulders sat differently as he stepped out onto the pavement and got swallowed up in the street crowd.
I kept thinking about him for the rest of the day — this man who had turned up alone to buy himself a cake, and left a little less alone.