Deepit Purkayastha

Cofounder & CEO , @inshorts @PublicApp_ || Work: Product, Data, Strategy || Passion: Math, Sustainability, Music

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

Public app is becomes top downloaded news app on Google Play and second overall just behind Toutiao. Thanks to the Great work by the team!!

[Sensor Tower @SensorTower1]

The top #news app worldwide for January 2020 was @ToutiaoApp with 6.3M downloads. Also ranked in the top 5 were Public, @cricbuzz, @newsbreakApp, and @TencentNews. See the details here: https://t.co/Hc6lmVfc5X #toutiao #newsapp #newsbreak

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@aviralbhat +1

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@deepakabbot @artijourno 18% volume contributes to 47% value is in “Others” literally seems like almost matches the second highest AOV of Utilities (after Debt). Very curious what’s inside Others. @deepakabbot

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@pratikpoddar @karpathy 💯

[Tejeshwi Sharma 🇮🇳 @tejeshwi_sharma]

Time is a leader's most precious resource.

As companies grow, there is a lot of pull for a founder's time. Events, industry bodies, other boards, bollywood parties, angel investing, TV appearances etc.

Some of these "Perks" of scale could contribute to business building. But most are distractions lurking around to lure you away from your CORE.

They smartest founders only use the "Perks" that are startegic to their business. Otherwise, they sidestep distractions to FOCUS on their CORE business.

A North Star metric for "FOCUS on CORE" is % work time spent with your customers/selling or team/recruiting or self-improvement.

[India in Pixels by Ashris 🔱 @indiainpixels]

Keep an eye on your @inshorts app for new updates from iipmaps!

[Vaibhav Domkundwar @vaibhavbetter]

🇮🇳Incredible India Opportunity ... wait a second!

There is no doubt that India is positioned the best it has been for startup innovation over the next few decades - talent at its best, unparalleled public digital infrastructure, building-for-the-world at its highest, more venture dollars than ever before & more.

This is also why we, at Better Capital, have been bullish and long on India ever since we started in 2018 -- it is the best time to build and the best time to invest in innovators.

BUT BUT BUT -- it is important to *not oversell* the largeness or the nearness of the Incredible India Opportunity (IIO) because if we have to do this right, we have a long way to go.

I *worry* when people oversell the India opportunity with broad brush comments: look at the rise of UPI, look at the consumption trends, look at the smartphone penetration, look how early we still are in e-commerce, look at the quick commerce opportunity, look at the building-for-the-world opp, look at how Bangalore has become the Silicon Valley of India, look at how good life in India is, look how Satya & Sundar are Indians..we are going to rule the world, look at how India is the next China, look at... the list goes on.

I *worry because* translating all of this high-level broad brush opportunity painting into a real business is incredibly and excruciatingly hard and we are far from it: CACs remain high & have not been solved in spite of burning billions of dollars by many many companies, there is no loyalty in India's lowest-price-seeking consumer so retention still sucks for most and is really hard, the millions of smartphone users are largely freeloaders, age-old lending is currently the only scalable business model, B2B is even harder in India, building-for-the-world sounds great but our GTM capability right now is worse than a 2 person team in Europe or Australia, we deliver everything with a far higher cost basis than our counterparts in the rest of the world so there is literally no India cost advantage on most MISs, we can build good products but we haven't figured out how to turn them into great businesses at scale yet, we are still *inspired* by the west and original thinking is a tiny percentage, our engineering quality has greatly improved but the quantity of that great quality is abysmally low for the hype around the India opportunity, the vast majority of founders still have bookish knowledge of how to build great tech companies because they are just too young and too early, the true venture risk appetite in our investor ecosystem is low and we have far lesser number of investors (for varied views) compared to the largeness of the India opportunity that is painted, high pedigree IITian founders in India are more often building ops businesses than engineering and tech businesses, it has really hard to find a large population of truly missionary founders & early employees which is what Silicon Valley was built on,..... and more.

Every founder who is actually building a company on the ground in India is seeing all the above issues every day and when she/he looks at the hype around the India opportunity, it confuses them because they are not feeling it in their daily grind :)

They are not feeling it because it is going to take a lot more on all fronts - hard work, maturing of the ecosystem, cleansing out all bad behavior, thinking clearly about what end state businesses and sizes we can build & by when, enough mission orientedness more broadly, faster and higher quality learning loops beyond bookish learning, larger and more varied capital pools & more - to truly realize the India opportunity.

AND, it is going to take much much longer than what is concluded from all the broad brush hype.

AND, we might not see true decacorns - one that has fundamentals to support its valuation - for much much longer. The reality may be that we have to underwrite a far far lower end state valuation of a successful company than the hype assumes.

SO, the Incredia India Opportunity is real but not as near, is large but not as large as quickly -- and it is going to take a lot more hard work from everyone working towards it.

WE DON'T WANT to oversell and overhype it, then fall into that trap of believing it ourselves and crash and burn everything because we started to sprint with greed in what is likely going to be an ultra marathon!

Slow & steady wins the race :) 🇮🇳💪💪💪

ps: all of the above learning is not an opinion but more of a conclusion/learning based on working *on the ground in India* with 600+ very very high-quality founders across 200+ companies over 5+ years.

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

Mathematical logic and the code of computer programs are, in an exact way, mirror images of each other.

The Curry-Howard correspondence posits that two concepts from computer science (types and programs) are equivalent, respectively, to propositions and proofs — concepts from logic.

One ramification of this correspondence is that programming — often seen as a personal craft — is elevated to the idealized level of mathematics. Writing a program is not just “coding,” it becomes an act of proving a theorem. This formalizes the act of programming and provides ways to reason mathematically about the correctness of programs.

https://t.co/P3NFMwTsAD

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

Adding to this I also feel there is inherently some bias right at the point of creation of the SAAS businesses. Ones which are closer to the client (read US based) typically would have better access to the A+ rated (taking license of misusing the term) opportunities which will be generally - strong pain points for large companies - solvable heavily via SAAS product with strong DIY and automation components. Indian SAAS generally (please allow exceptions) got built on A- , B+ rated opportunities - ones which might be - strong pain points for large companies - but not completely solvable heavily as a DIY - highly automated SAAS product.

Indian SAAS by default will be advantages to win opportunities where the use cases needs to be complimented with human driven sales, onboarding, servicing and operations layers.

Ofcourse there is additionally a whole other universe of lower priced SAAS which India competes on.

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@tejeshwi_sharma That’s a great point

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

I don't know how many buzzwords I have to drop to sound legit – this new fund is apparently about AI startups.

Understanding what they do is optional.

https://t.co/ftnHfukYOv

[Nithin Kamath @Nithin0dha]

Corporate governance issues coming to light in Indian startups will only increase with time. While founders will be blamed, the venture capital (VC) ecosystem is equally to blame
The root cause of this is the overestimation of the size of Indian markets by founders and VCs. 1/10

[Kushal Bhagia 🇮🇳 @kushalbhagia]

The tragedy of the startup world is that most founders who raise VC, are smart and work really hard, would have mostly guaranteed $10M+ outcomes running slow boring profitable business over 10-20 years.

Instead most end up making Zero while vying for a $100M+outcome in 5-10 yrs

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@aakrit Never missed being in Mumbai more 😂

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

@brijbhasin May the departed soul rest in peace and May the family and you have the strength to grieve the loss. 🙏🏼

[TiE Delhi-NCR @TiEDelhi]

Extending your #cashrunway is more than just trimming non-essential expenses; it's a strategic process. Attend #TiEconDelhi2023 & learn from distinguished business leaders about how to chart your cash runway for the upcoming quarters.

Register Now: https://t.co/JpoV5MEDsL

[TiE Delhi-NCR @TiEDelhi]

Catch @MicrosoftIndia at #TiEconDelhi2023
Don't miss all the action at TiEcon Delhi 2023 - Your Toolkit for Entrepreneurial Success.
Register: https://t.co/gWJkr4xTss | Mar-17,18

[Deepit Purkayastha @d_BIT]

From a Chinese-made charger in 2016 to an Indian-made one in 2023, this photo represents more than just a shift in manufacturing. It symbolizes the remarkable growth of our domestic electronics industry, which has surged from $29 billion in FY15 to $67 billion in FY21, a 2.3x increase. Hopefully there's nowhere but up from here. Lots of work still left to do but important to reflect on these wins!! @GoI_MeitY @NITIAayog @investindia @AmritMahotsav

[WAN-IFRA South Asia @DigitalMediaIn]

.@inshorts was an early adopter of #ArtificialIntelligence in personalising the news experience. @d_BIT and @pradeepgairola will join us at @NewspaperWorld's #DMI2023 in Delhi (16-17 March) to talk about this trending topic.

Register here: https://t.co/6HlfQtlRe4

#AI

[Prashant Singh @pacificleo]

What a mind-blowingly simple but profound idea https://t.co/1B8JH0xCLP

[Vaibhav Domkundwar @vaibhavbetter]

Can’t agree more. Magic happens through little nuanced things.