Karan Kumar

BD - VC + Startups @GoogleCloud | Ex- @AWS | Ex-Investor + All Things Execution @venturehighway | ODA2 @beondeck | @SchulichSchool | All tweets are personal

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

Delhi, during Diwali: “Main Nikla, O ‘GADDI 💰 💵’ leke”

#Cards

[Rohit Kaul @SeekingN0rth]

Press one for Hindi, two for English. But if you speak Malayalam, there’s no button for you!

That caller is one of India’s next 300 million customers and mostly unserved by Indian startups/enterprises. @rahultaneja makes a compelling case that spending power was never what held them back.

In fact, they were too expensive to serve. AI is collapsing that cost fast, and it opens up one of the biggest opportunities in Indian consumer tech.

He first laid out his 5 principles for building for the next 300 million at a closed-door session at the Google for Startups x Lightspeed Sprint. Due to popular demand we’re making them public for every founder. Read it on our Substack!

@GoogleStartups @ragingdas @_kkumar

https://t.co/n9Rn8bwfdY

[Papa Kay | Children’s Storyteller @papakaystories]

What if there were enough wishes for everyone?

A little visitor worries the magic will run out. Felix has a softer answer.

Friday-night listen: The Festival of Falling Stars ✨

https://t.co/aoypxgZWIG

[Google for Startups @GoogleStartups]

Less talking, more shipping. 🛠️

A look inside the Google for Startups Sprint in India, powered by @LightspeedIndia

Catch the highlights straight from @RonnieScrewvala, @DubeyEela, @snehilkhanor and @rbkayz on building agentic workflows. 🎥

[Papa Kay | Children’s Storyteller @papakaystories]

A stray cat. Many names. One lesson about who gets to belong.

The Cat With Many Names is tonight's gentle reminder that kindness starts small. 🐱

https://t.co/blQWJHaUzK

[Papa Kay | Children’s Storyteller @papakaystories]

The bedtime story was never really about the story.

It's ten minutes where they have all of you.

No screens. No rushing. Just a voice they trust, going softer and softer.

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

AI agents don’t just have an intelligence problem.

They have a reliability problem.

“Vendor confirmed for 5 PM” sounds like a solved task.

Until nobody shows at 5 PM.

The winning agents may be those that excel at recovering when the real world doesn’t behave as expected.

[Papa Kay | Children’s Storyteller @papakaystories]

Some stories are about dragons.

Some are about your own child, by name.

Noor's Very Own Story is the newest Papa Kay tale - made for one little listener, free for every little listener. 🌙

🎧

https://t.co/zZtcvqCebr

[Lightspeed India @LightspeedIndia]

India’s internet user base grew from 50 million to 900 million in just two decades. Yet the next 300 million consumers have remained too costly to serve. AI is beginning to change that.

Earlier this week, we co-hosted the Google for Startups (@GoogleStartups) x Lightspeed Sprint at Google’s Gurugram office, a full-day build session for consumer and fintech startups. More than 100 founders and CTOs from Seed to Series B companies joined us for a morning of strategy and an afternoon of hands-on building with Google engineers.

Rahul Taneja (@rahultaneja) opened with a keynote on why India is one of the most exciting geographies to build for over the next decade. A fireside chat followed, with Ronnie Screwvala (@RonnieScrewvala), Chairperson and Co-Founder of upGrad (@upGrad_edu), and Karan Kumar (@_kkumar) of Google Cloud (@googlecloud) discussing trust, scale, and building a brand that lasts.

Then it was time to get hands-on.

Participants split into two tracks: Rahul explored how to serve and build for India’s next 300 million consumers, while Ishaan Preet Singh (@ishaanpreet) examined fintech’s next 10x value driver. They identified promising whitespace, joined one-on-one architecture sessions with Google Cloud engineers, and put their ideas into action.

Thank you to Ronnie for his time and candour, and to the Google for Startups and Google Cloud teams for bringing their engineers into the room and making the full-day sprint possible.

We will share the decks from both tracks on our Substack soon. Subscribe here to read them first: https://t.co/01QxnCEDFs

@ragingdas @nityabaskar @SeekingN0rth

[Rohit Kaul @SeekingN0rth]

What a day this was. 100+ founders and CTOs spent a full day at Google Gurugram - strategy in the morning, building with Google engineers in the afternoon.

Thank you @RonnieScrewvala for your time and candour on trust, scale and building a brand that lasts. The room was hanging on every word.

Huge thanks to @ragingdas, @_kkumar and the @GoogleStartups and @googlecloud teams for bringing this experience to life. The founders learned so much and had real takeaways!

And proud of @rahultaneja and @ishaanpreet for leading the consumer and fintech tracks - founders walked out with a deeper understanding of how to build for the emerging Indian customers.

More of these, please.

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

Access isn’t the moat.

Judgment built from access might be.

[Venky Ganesan @venkyganesan]

A few thoughts on the current state of venture capital.

When the Music Is Playing

In July 2007, a few weeks before the credit markets seized up, Chuck Prince, then the CEO of Citigroup, gave an interview to the Financial Times. The line everyone remembers is this one: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." He was mocked for it for years afterward, and he lost his job a few months later. But I have come to think he was saying something honest. He wasn't claiming the music would play forever. He was admitting that he couldn't sit down while it was still going, and neither could anyone else in his seat.

I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately, because right now is the most disorienting period in venture capital I can remember, and I have been doing this for a while.

Here is what makes it disorienting. It's not that things are bad. Some things are spectacular. We have companies in our portfolio growing faster than anything I have seen in my career, and I don't say that lightly. At the same time, we have companies with no revenue, no product, and a founding team you could fit in a conference room raising billions of dollars at valuations of $10 to $50 billion. Both of these things are true at once, and if you try to reason about them with the same framework you will drive yourself crazy.

Two ideas have helped me make sense of it. Neither is mine.

The first is reflexivity, which George Soros has been writing about since the 1980s. In most of life, perception follows reality: the weather is what it is, and your opinion of it changes nothing. In markets, it runs the other way too. Prices change what participants believe, and what participants believe changes the prices. The feedback loop can run for a long time, and while it's running it looks exactly like progress.

Here is how reflexivity is playing out in AI. Full disclosure: Menlo is an investor in Anthropic, so read the following with that in mind. People watched a frontier lab go from a $4 billion valuation to $18 billion, then $60 billion, then $180 billion, then $380 billion, and now something close to a trillion. They drew the obvious conclusion: that is what a neo lab looks like. So the next neo lab gets priced off that path, not off anything it has built. Then it gets marked up in a subsequent round, and the markup itself becomes the proof. Look at Thinking Machines. Look at Reflection. At that point valuation has stopped being an output of the metrics and has become the metric. Nobody is discounting cash flows. They are discounting the last round.

Soros is very clear about one thing, and it's the part people skip: you cannot know when or how a reflexive process ends. You only know that it does. Every one of them has.

The second idea is Chuck Prince's, and it explains why smart people keep dancing even when they can see the loop for what it is. As far as I can tell, there are two groups on the dance floor.

The first group got in early. Firms like ours were in some of these AI companies before the numbers got silly, and the paper gains are enormous. When you are sitting on gains like that, you start to feel like you're playing with house money. I have been around long enough to know that house money is the most dangerous kind, because you don't respect it the way you respect money you had to earn.

The second group missed the early rounds and knows it. Their LPs know it too. So they are trying to make up for lost time by writing very large checks very late, which is the one strategy almost guaranteed to turn a missed opportunity into a real loss.

House money on one side, FOMO on the other, and reflexivity feeding both. That's the whole story. Everyone has a reason to keep dancing, and the reasons are different, which is why nobody can talk anyone else off the floor.

So what do you do? The instinct in our business is to answer with company identification: just pick the right neo lab and you'll be fine. I think that's the trap. When price has become the signal, being right about the company is not enough, because you can be right about the company and still be wrong about the price by a factor of ten. The public-market investors I admire figured this out a long time ago. They spend as much time on how much to own as on what to own.

The winners in venture over the next decade will be the firms that treat portfolio composition and position sizing as seriously as they treat sourcing. How much of the fund is in companies whose valuation rests on the last round rather than on revenue? What happens to the portfolio if the reflexive loop breaks next year instead of in five? Those are not exciting questions. They are the ones that will matter.

The music will stop. It always does. Dance if you must, but know where the chairs are.

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

https://t.co/s6FHBjQv6T

[Papa Kay | Children’s Storyteller @papakaystories]

Big stage. Fluttery tummy. ❤️

Seher practices with Papa, takes a deep breath, and finds her brave little voice.

Sometimes, all you need is practice and a deep breath. 🥰

🎧 https://t.co/KtszX4GfJv

#PapaKaysStorytime

https://t.co/4hV5ov77mJ

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

@americanexpress’s card may be premium. Their KYC experience is definitely not.

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

The strange thing about trust:

It takes years to build,
seconds to lose,
and almost impossible to manufacture.

Technology can disrupt distribution.
AI can disrupt knowledge.
Platforms can disrupt markets.

But trust? Still has to be earned one human interaction at a time.

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

Being early looks exactly like being wrong. Until suddenly, it doesn’t.

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

It’s been 15 years since I wrote my first angel cheque and started my journey of partnering with founders at the earliest stage possible. 250 founder partnerships since (as an angel and VC for past ~5 years) and counting, the one thing that has the highest correlation to success is founders who leverage to fullest other high agency founders and operators on their cap table!

And yet I hear every so often both VCs and founders squeeze out these exact individuals! Truly epitomises being “penny wise pound foolish” about the reward in venture.

Dear founder, your “expert sounding” VC isn’t going to be the sounding board on how to build, hire and scale when they themselves haven’t played a venture outcome. Building a venture is an art, surround yourself with artists, $ brokers are plenty in this world!

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

@SeekingN0rth @LightspeedIndia @HarryStebbings https://t.co/hbwnDsuKQx

[Karan Kumar @_kkumar]

@abhi_s_tanwar Me!

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

Working on something new –
I'm looking to talk to people from, ex-founding teams of Indian unicorns.

Esp people who are a long way away from figuring out what they want to do next.