Rahul Garg

Tech investor. Ex-entrepreneur. Inspired by all things transformative. Views are always personal.

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

In this #Cryptoconversation with @RTinkslinger, we discuss #Web3, #CreatorEconomy & Challenges of bdling in #Blockchain. We dig deeper into topics like #Tokens vs. Equity, #FounderArchetypes, & #TechInvestors of Choice in this space.

Full Video: https://t.co/C9YH0OHRg7

[anmol maini @anmolm_]

no one is crushing it in india quite like @anjalisardana

[neeraj arora @neerajarora]

1/ We’ve been long India. Not as a side bet - but as a core market on a single global platform.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

AI Agents have the potential to democratize knowledge work in the same way that SaaS democratized software. And as we've seen in the past couple of decades with software, every time you make a service cheaper and more available, you dramatically increase the size of the total addressable market. 

Let's take, for instance, what happened in the early days of SaaS. The biggest mistake that most people and investors made was looking at the market sizes of traditional on-prem software to see how big the market could be for this new crop of companies. In fact, some even felt the markets would actually be *smaller* because the software may be cheaper to run for an enterprise. All these theories were wrong, by an order of magnitude.

What we actually saw happen was not that SaaS initially replaced or went after traditional incumbent software products for existing customers, but instead, the biggest early customers were actually smaller businesses or teams in large enterprises that previously didn't have access to traditional on-prem enterprise software. On-prem software, from CRM systems to ERP platforms, were notoriously expensive, hard to manage, and required significant IT teams and partners to operate. This meant only the largest enterprises in the world could actually implement best-in-class technology for their enterprise.  

Enter SaaS. Starting with Salesforce and NetSuite, for the first time small businesses had access to effectively the same tech stack that a large enterprise had. This led to a gold rush of software. AWS ushered in an era where a one person startup could build an app and scale it without ever visiting a datacenter. Box let businesses of all sizes manage documents and content securely. Shopify let anyone have access to a powerful ecommerce system, leading to a huge boom in direct-to-consumer product companies and other retailers being able to sell successfully online. Stripe gave any developer a full payment stack. All of these new services --and thousands more-- led to a 10Xing (or more) the size of traditional markets by serving customers that previously didn't have access to these types of tools.

Now, if you extrapolate out what we're seeing in the earliest days of AI, the same dynamic could hold true for AI Agents. While large enterprises have traditionally had access to nearly every specialized form talent or an abundance of labor, the vast majority of businesses don't have this same luxury. For most small startups just getting going, they often don't have the resources to do outbound sales, full customer support, specialized legal work, and so on. And as a startup scales, you're constantly making resource trade-offs that are less driven by what's best for the business, but instead driven by how much capital you have.

In the future, by making the barrier to entry to getting knowledge work done as simple as a website signup or API call, we will likely see a massive increase in usage of “services” that previously were near-impossible to access easily. And what's amazing is the vast majority of the usage of these AI Agents will likely come from previous areas of "non-consumption". That is to say, these will be customers that would not have spent anything on similar labor categories in a pre-AI world. Now, of course, in many cases, AI will start out worse on some dimensions than traditional forms of solving these problems, but as tooling gets better, models get cheaper and higher quality, we know the capabilities will improve over time dramatically.

We're in only the very beginning of this new era of AI-driven work, but the scale of the opportunity and the market will be massive.

[ Q-Cap  @qcapital2020]

At a meeting with a Growth US manager.
He mentioned they bought $AMZN in 2006. They ran a search on Bloomberg to see how many institutional manager have held on to their Amazon position since 2006.

The answer: 0.2%

Amazon is a 100x bagger since 2006.

Sitting on your ass is hard.

[Yuri Sagalov @yuris]

ServiceNow, a $150B company with fifteen 250m ARR products (three at $1B ARR!) on their Generative AI efforts:

“In Q4, our Gen AI products drove the largest net new ACV contribution for our first full quarter of any of our new product family releases ever”

[Aviral Bhatnagar @aviralbhat]

We had a lovely evening meeting our founders at our end of year gathering

We reflected on tech v/s traditional which came up as a theme this year in our chats at @venturehighway

Read more here on the evening and our look forward to 2024: https://t.co/E4eepUZAPn

[raagulanpathy @raagulanpathy]

Singapore 🇸🇬 is crushing it. The Token2049 + F1 week is an absolute blockbuster, almost unmatched for a combination of conference & entertainment.

But the truly remarkable thing most visitors took away, is just how far ahead Singapore is as a city compared to others. Nearly 250,000 people at the concerts, reports of over 400,000 at the F1. Crazy parties all over the city, most only closing at 6am.

Still at the worst of times, you could get a Grab or Taxi within 10 mins. Traffic was routed so there weren’t terrible jams. The trains ran like clockwork and cost $1, connecting you to almost anywhere fast. I met people who lost phones and wallets (partied a bit too hard), and retrieved them just fine.

You never see a fight, almost no littering, women are always safe no matter the time of night or if they were by themselves. You could wear a six-figure watch and no one will rob you.

And the Monday after F1, the track is open and all streets are functioning perfectly.

Imagine going back to almost any other city in the world after this experience (Ie. San Francisco 😂)

[Deepak Shenoy @deepakshenoy]

@nikhila310 connected quickly (like super fast!) and confirmed (I cross verified)
* Startup investments are through a CAT 1 Angel AIF (SEBI Regulated)
* Lease assets through listed securitised debt instruments (Again, SEBI regulated as it's listed)
* CRE through AIF

They'll pass the new SEBI rules. Interesting, because I didn't know how big the Securitised Debt piece was - demat based lease rental discounting, at a higher ticket size.

[Polytrade @Polytrade_app]

Stoked and grateful to our investors and advisors for their belief and confidence in our mission to bring real-world sustainable yields to DeFi.

https://t.co/WbqUDRFUiV

[Matt Turck @mattturck]

A rare video of the SVB bank run

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

Love the thought here!

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

Exactly my thoughts.

[Balaji @balajis]

What we’re likely to see in the coming weeks is that this wasn’t a single bank’s issue. It was a central bank issue.

Don’t take my word for it. Just four days ago the FDIC chair said “most” banks are suffering unrealized losses thanks to the Fed’s rapid change in interest rates.

Here’s a graph.
https://t.co/ktSgEUIhkD

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

In a young web3 ecosystem, it's so heartening to see some very promising investors and call them close friends. Both @RTinkslinger @TusharBehl0x are deeply knowledgeable, extremely passionate about web3 and hugely connected. Would endorse them to every founder building in web3 🚀

[Akshay Jain @akshayjain865]

Here's a list of go-to guys from VC funds, Investing in 🇮🇳 #Web3 Startups👇

Let's dive in 🧵

(1/12)

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

A great list of folks who are active in #Web3

[Akshay Jain @akshayjain865]

Here's a list of go-to guys from VC funds, Investing in 🇮🇳 #Web3 Startups👇

Let's dive in 🧵

(1/12)

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

@KyleSamani At scale, interchain borrow-lend is better, simply because it offers less friction in user experience!

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

#Benchmarks: The aggregate performance of US #SaaS startups by size!

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

This just happened. $META down 25% in early trade. Tech sell off will now accelerate. Metaverse narrative will lose belief. Crypto will come under pressure. Big Event!

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

@ZacharyDash Ability to bs ... 😁😁

On a serious note though, wish I had programming skills. Personally, always wanted to learn to play guitar :)

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

In 2017, more than 600 ICOs happened raising well over $15B. The excess led to a massive crypto winter in 2018. In 2021, 1000s of NFT projects came & total trading volume at opensea crossd $14.5B. The NFT craze is no different & it will likely deepen the next crypto winter.

[Rahul Garg @grahul19]

@TusharBehl0x Yes. The tyranny of banks will give way to the tyranny of taxes 😂