Harsith

chief prediction officer @anthral

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

A strong predictor of who does extraordinary work is being terrible with everyday life; they get people’s names wrong, forget meetings, constantly lose things or don’t remember to eat because all their mental bandwidth is going elsewhere.

We met a researcher with 87000+ unread emails and a passport that expired the day before an AI conference he was speaking at, and a founder who had worn pretty much the same outfit every day for 10yrs because choosing took up way too much mental effort.

Maintaining a well run life is a part-time job hours-wise. For someone who is juggling a hard problem in their head 24-7, there is no spare capacity to run these background processes. Society treats this as a flaw to coach out (the command is “be more present”), but this level of absorption is necessary to solve a problem nobody else has.

[Jon Chu // Khosla Ventures @jonchu]

There was a time when folks did tech because they likes technology and these types of games didn't happen.

[Harsith @harsith2002]

best founders are idea machines

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

YC CEO Garry Tan: “Moat is not a noun. It’s a verb”

Popular belief says startups win because they have one big, game-changing insight.

But Varun Mohan (Windsurf CEO) argues that’s a myth.

“Every single insight we have is a depreciating insight.”

In other words: the value of your insight declines fast. Competitors catch up. Markets shift. What was once novel becomes table stakes.

He uses Nvidia as the example: Even at a trillion-dollar scale and 70% gross margins, they still have to innovate, or AMD catches up.

The real advantage?

Continuously generating new insights — and executing on them.

“It’s not about the insight you had one year ago. It’s whether you can compound that advantage over and over again.”

That’s why Varun tells his team: being wrong is fine, but being stagnant isn’t. You need to stay sharp, learn from the market, and compound your edge over time.

Or as Garry Tan (YC CEO) puts it aptly:

“Moat is not a noun. It’s a verb.”

Source: @ycombinator (May 2025)

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Some very simple math: if a country has 5% of the world's population and ability is evenly distributed, then 95% of the people who are best at any given thing will be born abroad.

[Harsith @harsith2002]

@abhirajbhal UC's training centres have p diverse setups, do not result in privacy breaches and have trainers to QC task/data quality - perf env to collect data compared to people's homes, sells at $50+/hr, (helps fund the instahelp burn without stock price taking a hit)

[Abhiraj Singh Bhal @abhirajbhal]

In light of recent reports regarding recordings inside customers’ homes by one of our competitors, many people have asked whether @urbancompany_UC engages in anything similar, or intends to do so in the future.

The answer is clear and unequivocal: we do not.

We are in the business of trust, and we take customer trust and privacy extremely seriously. We do not engage in any such activities, have never done so in the past, and have no plans to do so in the future. Our customers’ privacy is paramount to us, and we remain fully committed to upholding the highest standards of confidentiality, safety, and trust.

[Harsith @harsith2002]

I wonder what we do as talent investors at @join_ef if not exactly this!

[Oliver Hsu @oyhsu]

The most underrated skillset right now is the ability to build an effective research organization (recruiting the best research talent, giving them the resources they need).

Seems obvious, but there’s very few places one would have developed this skillset over the last decade.

[Shashwat Goel @ShashwatGoel7]

my worlds are colliding

[Harsith @harsith2002]

Re: indian venture ecosystem - 80% of capital deployed by the mega funds look like nothing but consensus bets packaged as a revolutionary company - will discover sf investors soon

[Soren Larson @hypersoren]

can u imagine being a vc rn and only investing in momentum plays because u have idea what to do when literally everyone can just do things

sad

[sankalp @dejavucoder]

from henrik karlsson's blog.
https://t.co/821pmTfPuu

[Adhi 🛸 @eightyhi]

who is brave enough to be the TBPN of prediction markets

[Chandra R. Srikanth @chandrarsrikant]

"Mr. Patel’s assistant is the brother of Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s chief of staff, who is in turn the fiancée of Leopold Aschenbrenner, Mr. Patel’s friend and former podcast guest from whose multibillion-dollar A.I.-focused investment fund, Situational Awareness, Mr. Patel sublets office space. Sholto Douglas, a researcher at Anthropic who is one of Mr. Patel’s roommates and a repeat guest on his podcast, recently competed with Mr. Patel in a “chestmaxxing” showdown on a YouTube show called “Swole as a Service” (where standing shoulder presses meet A.I. chitchat). “People don’t think of him as a commentator on A.I.,” says Sasha de Marigny, chief communications officer at Anthropic. “He’s very much in the community, in the inner ring.”

One of the reasons smart, rich, busy people like to appear on his podcast is that Mr. Patel goes sufficiently deep in the weeds to ask questions no one else would.

He’ll spend up to two weeks preparing for an interview, using flash cards to help master the material, writing elaborate question trees to anticipate the branching paths a conversation might take, and hiring tutors for topics such as economics, hardware and physics. He spends much of his time reading and thinking and talking to L.L.M.s.

Interesting piece 👇🏽

https://t.co/mkbFDCSGgl

[Alex Kolicich @AlexKolicich]

Has been so fun to work with Apoorva on this new adventure. I've known him (@UWaterloo alum) since he founded @Instacart!

His learning curve on Bio is exponential and ambition unlimited

If you're interested in Capital Markets and AI, you should try to join his new journey

[sphinx @protosphinx]

the modern securities anti-fraud regime started with the securities act 1933 and securities exchange act 1934

polymarket is speedrunning 90 yrs of securities fraud case law from first principles one fraud at a time

[rohit @krishnanrohit]

Honestly I think this deserves props. If markets are this badly set up you should just pay up and next time make better markets

[shubham @ShubhamInTech]

we're building agnost ai and this is our story!

iit/vit grads, $250k raised, born in India 🇮🇳

[The Block @TheBlockCo]

Citadel Securities president says firm could enter prediction markets, eyes non-sports use cases https://t.co/PvcTlkPlDt

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

People don’t really understand how obscenely large the oil and gas industry actually is.

Worldwide oil revenue is $4 trillion per year.

Every year the oil industry collects more money than the US government. Not the US military, the entire US government.

Every year the oil industry allocates $850 billion of capex to new projects, and those new projects increase the oil supply by about 1.8%. It costs half a trillion dollar a year, for every 1% of growth.

Meanwhile, people think the $500 billion datacenter buildout is “unprecedented”.

A year with $500 billion capex means a downturn and mass layoffs in the oil industry.

It’s just a different scale.

The same industry sells $2 trillion a year of gas.

So $6 Trillion of revenue in 2025, and projected $8 trillion of revenue for 2026.

There is a reason that the world has multiple “petrostates” with huge sovereign wealth funds, but no other type of mono-economy country with giant trillion dollar liquid funds.

Many countries, such as Saudi Arabia produce oil and gas at 70% profit margins. So huge volumes and huge margins. That’s how you build multiple multitrillion dollar sovereign wealth funds that own a meaningful chunk of all global equities.

These countries make huge equity returns in times of stability and huge oil returns in times of volatility.

My point here, is that the datacenter capex can go much higher. It’s currently $6-700 billion, but for a major boom it could be double this.

And the “oh noe! We need lots more datacenter plumbers!” is just a complete joke, when there’s an industry 10X bigger that literally does nothing but lay pipes everywhere.

Embarrassing ignorance.

Hyperscalers are still only using cashflow, and still each sitting on $100 billion cash reserves. They need to get off the pot and go and build some stuff, because it’s difficult to take them seriously watching them flap about in “hardware” aka heavy industry, for their fourth year.

[Abhilash Chowdhary @TheChowdhary]

this is the advice I give anyone who wants to get hired by a startup:

1. figure out what the company is trying to do
2. find one thing you would fix or improve
3. build something that solves that problem, or at least tries to
4. then send it directly to the founders (not the hiring managers)

every founder has a soft spot for high-agency people

you would be surprised how few people actually do this

[Harsith @harsith2002]

as someone who's not a dev but currently spends 60%+ of my time shipping code for LLM research, this is life changing

[Brydon Eastman @brhydon]

I know it's self serving to say, but man I would've killed for a resource like Tinker and the tutorials, the cookbook, etc back when I was in undergrad.

Following @karpathy blogs and training RNNs on a crappy Acer *was* fun, but doing bigger things with less setup is such a boon

[Harsith @harsith2002]

@LightspeedIndia @socapinc Deepdive