Ananay Batra

building & (acquired) • 3.5mn+ users • foundational judge (ai) @thewebbyawards • mentor @brincvc

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

happy to see @Honda AU become a @listnrai client 🙏

few more billion-dollar corps to join the list soon 🫡

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

@anshulbhide @kushalbhagia Libel/defamation danger brother :(

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

there’s a reason why founders skew towards investors who’ve “built” something before

not rando ex mckinsey b school grads who are as good as being arm chair experts and more often than not, not even that

[nihar bobba @nbobba]

In 2018, was pitching peakxv at their office. The partner badgered us over LinkedIn and email to come and meet them. We’re in a large conference room in Bangalore (has a bit of an echo), partner keeps dozing off through the meeting while the associate asks some of the most braindead questions on the planet that would likely only make sense on an IIT exam. Asked for our deck/data room even though we weren’t raising, said we weren’t raising and then asked us what we were hoping to get out of the meeting if we weren’t raising. Partner has since left, judging by track record I’m pretty confident he’s ngmi with new fund he’s trying to raise, associate is probably going to bed at night solving his IIT question bank and feeling good about himself.

Same thing happened with Accel India. Not raising, associate badgers us to come by the office and meet his partner, naive founder at the time so we go. 45 min meeting on the books, partner walks in 30 min late while associate tries to hold the room politely on his behalf. No apology from the partner, couldn’t care less about us, the story or anything. We hadn’t shared a data room in advance (why would we, not raising) yells at us for wasting his time and not having any data for him to look through and proceeds to walk out of the meeting 5 min early. We politely follow up over email with thoughtful answers to some of the aggressive questions he posed during the 10 min of the meeting he attended and a thank you for his time, he never responded and neither did the associate. Partner is still at Accel India and senior leader of the firm.

Good lesson for me as a VC now to know that the bar is so low at firms that the world thinks are great. Also a good reminder for us at BTV to help our companies navigate away from terrible individuals who are not worth doing business with.

[Rajoshi @rajoshighosh]

2017: we were “invited” to a demo day at a top VC firm in India. We had a backend-as-a-service product and were actively raising our seed round for Hasura.
This was Bangalore. So we sat through horrendous traffic and traveled 90mins across the city for this.
After the first slide - the head of the fund says while eating watermelon: ah you are a tech company. I thought you guys were doing something with food.

Again, we were invited to present 😅

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

@markpinc their loss

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

all this self improving agent hype is BS

fundamentally impossible to have self improving agents unless we figure out infinite context, mem > energy

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

Thanks for sharing.

"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."

Calling it weird is definitely being nice, unethical and unprofessional is more like it

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

We Are Living in the Dumbest Timeline

Donald Trump just posted a photo of a wind turbine next to birds and captioned it “Killing birds by the millions!”

He posted this without irony.

For every single bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel plants kill 2,118 birds. Coal alone kills roughly 7.9 million birds a year in the United States. Wind turbines? Between 140,000 and 328,000. That is not a defence of wind turbines.

We are living in genuinely, historically stupid times. Only rivalled, frankly, by the medieval peasants who blamed the Black Death on cats and promptly killed all the cats, which meant the rats multiplied, which meant more plague.

At least the peasants had the excuse of having no access to information whatsoever.

Trump has the internet. He chose this.

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

ok damn never thought i’d say this but they cooked

[Microsoft Surface @surface]

Introducing - Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.

All the power developers need, right out of the box.

Sign up to learn more: https://t.co/DF0DvEvhOz

Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Built for more.

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

@EricSimons IT’S BIG BOY HOURS CUH 😤😤😤

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

@adilmania no

[Sam @futurenomics]

Anthropic’s last round was apparently a bloodbath behind the scenes. A GP at a prominent fund had dinner with Dario three times before their allocation was slashed to zero. At least four other tier-one funds got pulled at the last minute.

Their crime? Passing on the Series B, the hardest round Dario ever had to raise (led by Spark). In venture conviction is all that counts.

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

Gotta say I’m starting to feel good about Sheel’s chances here

[immad @immad]

You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.

Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.

I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.

The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

PR's/suggestions welcome!

https://t.co/JG8ROmtTjD

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

re-opening dia-multi-lingual

will be making it fully decoder based, strip out dia related components, switch the encoder to a more robust/multi-lingual friendly encoder

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

y'all whats the final consensus on opus 4.8? pretty underwhelming vs 5.5 and even 4.7 in some cases

[Ananay Batra @ananbatra]

@phalgooon @cmdk_email open source it!!

[André @oracles]

Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone.

People losing handles they’ve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands.

I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I haven’t been in years.

Obama White House account got hit.

These aren’t some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised.

The thing is the exploit is so simple it’s almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the target’s location (which now you can find on the about section of the page).

Instagram’s AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie.

They grab a photo from the target’s profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the person’s face moving around, upload that to Meta’s AI as proof.

And Meta’s AI just accepts it because it can’t tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someone’s face
.
Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I don’t know exactly how, just that it did.

Point is even locked down accounts went down.

Then you try to recover your account and you’re talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help.

You can’t escalate to a human. You’re just stuck. Your asset is gone and there’s no one to call.

The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop.

One AI fooling another AI while there’s literally no person anywhere to catch it.

Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute.

Now thankfully it’s patched but I don’t think it will be the last one. Stay safe!

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

'The free lunch is over. Google says demand has risen sevenfold over the past year. But now the real cost of AI is finally beginning to emerge, and the consequences are cataclysmic' I Writes @AndrewOrlowski

'The AI bubble will burst, and how that will happen is becoming discernible' 👇
https://t.co/kMlIa9RVzI