Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.
Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.
It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe.
Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business.
Singapore open 2026 - Champions 🏆
Congratulations to @satwiksairaj and @Shettychirag04 on an incredible win at the Singapore Open. The first Indian Men’s Doubles team to win the event.
Onwards and upwards 🙌🏽
#WeAreTeamIndia
It has been a very special interaction with Gurindervir Singh and Animesh Kujur, offering a glimpse of why the future of Indian athletics is very bright!
#MannKiBaat
Kashi in Italy!
Giampaolo Tomassetti, an Italian painter, presented his work on Varanasi to Prime Minister @narendramodi.
In the 1980’s he started as an illustrator for books on Vedic culture. From 2008 to 2013 he worked on 23 large paintings relating to the Mahabharat.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
Philippines is a country of 120Mn with average age lower than India! GCash is the largest consumer App with nearly 90Mn accounts
Pine Labs is joining forces with GCash to revolutionize how millions of MSMEs do business!
We’re bringing our world-class payments platform and transaction Services to the GCash network—integrating Installments (IPP), Rewards, and Loyalty directly into the merchant experience. More below 👇🏼
Indian Military releases video on the first anniversary of #OperationSindoor against Pakistani terrorists and their backers in Rawalpindi.
Operation Sindoor continues.. 🇮🇳🫡
Pine Labs
Pine Labs acquires Shopflo to build unified commerce, payments platform in India
27% of revenue comes from online txn payments
Doubling revenues from online txn payments over the last 3 years
https://t.co/HRwgaYsKuv
This is the way.
The past 50 years of computing was about inventing form factors to interact with information. Retrieve information. Search for information. Edit information. Save information.
AI is about interacting with knowledge. It's completely different. Agents and models are there to do the dirty work aka interact with information). We need a new layer - more executive function, less tactical tools.
So instead of trying to jam AI into old form factors, its time to imagine a new form factor. From scratch. From first principles.
It's probably not a phone tbh, but what it is, I have not a clue. That said, like most breakthroughs we'll know it when we see it though.
Good luck to the teams building this.
IIT Madras incubates 100+ start-ups in a fiscal for second year in a row
Overall, the institute's portfolio now includes 567 start-ups that are collectively valued at over ₹74,100 Crore ($8 billion).
@businessline
https://t.co/MiOrEncM6o
Open letter to Indians in America.
--
Dear brothers and sisters from Bharat:
Like I did 37 years ago, you arrived in America with no money but with a good education and cultural heritage from Bharat. You achieved outstanding success. America was good to us. For that we must remain grateful - gratitude is our Bharatiya way.
Yet today, a significant number of Americans, may be not the majority but not too far from it either, believe that Indians "take away" American jobs and our success in America was unfairly earned.
You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself. That is the "hard right" vs "woke left" battle. You are mere bystanders to that conflict.
Meanwhile there is one thing that is true now and will be true in the future: the respect Indians command world-wide will substantially depend on the fortunes of India herself. If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn ("hellhole") and we must not confuse either with respect.
Respect in today's world, along with prosperity and security, comes from one source: a nation's technological prowess. India produces sufficient brain power to achieve that prowess but alas we exported so much of that talent, particularly to America. As we develop that prowess in India, our civilisational strength will assert itself.
As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent. Our vast youthful population needs the technology leadership you gained over the years to guide them towards prosperity. Let's do it with a missionary zeal.
Respectfully
Sridhar Vembu