Hemant Jodha

FIM Partners, Ex Naspers, Helion VC, JP Morgan, Insead and IIT K. Driven by emerging market tech, economics and fitness.

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@avinashraghava Saddened to hear this; Om Shanti 🙏🏼

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

Last thing, we’ll see this record go down more, likely this year itself, London isn’t the fastest course and yesterday wasn’t a cool day. And, we have Kjelcha who has just debuted

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

2) And, on mental barrier, its not just Kiochoge, its equally Kelvin Kiptum, he showed one can brute force your way to marathon training and go for it way earlier in the career. Kiptum’s training and mileage was off the charts and so was his debut as a professional

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

Great analysis!

Hats off to Sebastian Sawe

The biggest vectors have been the shoe and mental barrier.

1) Shoe energy return improvements each year are directly related to record drops. For reference, Adidas Pro 3 is 1.6% improvement over Pro 2, and record improvements is 0.8%

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

What in the world did we just see!

The 2 hour marathon barrier has been broken. Three guys went under the old world record...

Sabastian Sawe just ran 1:59:30 with crazy negative splits, closing the last half in 59:01....faster than the American Record in the half.

One of the most mind blowing performances we've seen. How did we get here?

Every breakthrough is a mixture of belief and progress.

It takes folks daring to see what's possible, surrounding themselves with a quality team and doing the work to give themselves a shot.

You've got to bet on yourself in a big way.

When asked whether he believed he could run a sub-2-hour marathon before the race, Sawe answered with one word:

"Yes."

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Performance enhancing drugs are the legitimate question mark to every breakthrough.

So Sawe did as much as he could about taking that off the table.

He and his team asked to be tested all the time. His sponsor put up 50K to the Athlete Integrity Unit. The tests are run independently, no advance notice. Over a 2 month stretch, he went through 25 drug tests.

There's always a doubt. There has to be given what we know. Hopefully there's transparency in the results. But hats off to Sawe for addressing it:

"I want to prove that I am clean when I set foot at the start line."

But how'd we actually get here where two guys went sub 2 in the same race?

1. Shoe tech

We've had a revolution in shoe technology that boosts running economy.

For years shoe companies said their shoe would make you faster and was mostly marketing. Until 2016, when it actually did.

Initial research showed a 3-4% saving in economy, while subsequent work has shown it's highly variable.

Now, it's a matching game. Find the perfect shoe for your form and you can get a big boost.

Normally, it takes years of lots of miles and strength training to boost economy.

But now we get that instant boost that not only helps boost performance but often leaves us feeling less beat up in the later stages of the marathon.

So we get a little bit less hitting of the wall...

2. The fuel

For a long time, fueling was limited by biology. You can only take in and process so much.

Then in the 2000s, researchers found if we mixed sugars, we can boost intake because they're processed differently.

Then recently, Maurten found if you use a hydrxogel, you boost utilization without GI distress anymore.

We've gone from pushing 60g/hr to 120g/hr in a few decades.

Again...less bonking.

3. Depth

A few decades ago, you spent your career racing on the track and then once your speed started to fade a bit you went to the marathon.

Now, many skip right to the marathon. That's where the money is.

And with the economy boost from the shoes, you can make that jump quickly.

More depth of talent means more competitors in their prime pushing barriers.

4. Belief

Even with the shoes and tech, a few years ago sub 2 hours seemed a long way off, until Kipchoge pushed that barrier in a series of time trials.

Yes, they weren't official races and had contrived pacing. But it absolutely shifted everyone's thinking on what is possible.

A generation of runners saw Kipchoge go for it.

Our prediction of what is possible changed.

It's mind blowing how far we've come in such a short time.

What once seemed decades away, just got smashed twice in the same race.

Hats off to Sawe, especially for addressing the scourge of doping and showing folks what is possible with a lot of hard work, some crazy belief, and some fortuitous advances.

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@abhishek_tri Need to incorporate view on underlying asset in both cases; your analysis holds for similar real-estate growth across two cities

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

Product launches are ramping up once again

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing workspace agents in ChatGPT—shared agents that can handle complex tasks and long-running workflows across tools and teams.

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

Coding platform popularity is leading indicator of good things to come later;

From my small circle of developer friends; they have been doing more on Codex vs. Claude Code

ChatGPT excel dropped last night; now hoping everything else in Claude (ppt, word, connector) drop soon

[Sam Altman @sama]

Codex hit 4M active users, less than two weeks after hitting 3M.

We will reset rate limits today!

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

The pace of launch, just incredible. This was anticipated when Anthropic CPO resigned from the Figma board recently. I would actually argue he stayed way too long, this product wasn’t built in 7 days

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude.

Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

What an outrageous growth; $1bn to $30bn in 15 months!!

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Our run-rate revenue has surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, as demand for Claude continues to accelerate. This partnership gives us the compute to keep pace.

Read more: https://t.co/XgSjL0And7

[محمد بن زايد @MohamedBinZayed]

To all those who call the UAE home and guests in our beloved nation.

The UAE places its security and the protection of all citizens, residents, and visitors at the very top of its priorities. With God’s grace, the UAE is fully prepared to confront these threats.

I extend my deepest appreciation to our brave armed forces, our committed security services, and all national institutions and teams working tirelessly to keep our country safe. They represent the highest standards of readiness and cooperation. We are truly proud of them.

I would also like to underscore my sincere gratitude for the awareness shown by our community of Emiratis and our resident brothers and sisters, partners in this nation, who have expressed their genuine love and loyalty to the UAE through both words and actions. In the UAE, everyone is Emirati through their love for this land and their contributions to it.

May God have mercy on the victims and grant the injured a speedy recovery. With God’s blessing, the UAE—the land of Zayed—will remain strong in its unity, steadfast in defending its sovereignty, and steadily advancing towards the future.

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@dvbydt @akm1410 @peakxvpartners Congratulations @dvbydt

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@Fateh_happy @finshots Journalist put an extra zero in excitement

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@banglani @alokgoyal1971 @rchowdhri @namanlahoty @jainmayank_943 @sarkar1028 @ArpitM7 @AditiS90 @shreyan_puri @joveenaabreo @Aditi1289 Great story, thanks for sharing in detail. You are now the similar size to Helion when you had left it :-)

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@gokulr @_groww Not just premium for listing; especially for fintechs regulator will not give licenses if HQ continues to be outside. So for a fintech there is no option other than to flip

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@sehaj23 Not commenting on Groww’s decision back in the day. Building something is hard and I don’t want to take benefit of hindsight. I was referring to the current wave of Indian YC applications who are going ahead with US domicile knowing the cost well enough

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

This is the YC tax; whole point for Groww to domicile in US was YC.

So 7% dilution for $500k and now 5% to taxes.

12 % of company given away; probably founders have lower stake than that individually

My point being; I hope Indian startups (maybe SAAS still ok) don’t line up for YC

[Madhav Chanchani @madhavchanchani]

🚨 Groww has paid $160 million in taxes for the US to India flip.

That's about 5.3% of its last valuation.

PhonePe paid nearly $1 billion in taxes for the Singapore to India flip.

That's about 18% of its last valuation before the flip.

https://t.co/540tePkaLE

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@Fateh_happy @datta_arvind Yes, I am the trend setter 🤣

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

First time spotting UPI outside India. So exciting!!!

9 years ago I sat in a presentation by NPCI to VCs that UPI is coming, and it is a game changer.

Who had expected that it will be such a Tsunami!!

PS: I had half expected TDS on foreign transactions :-| 3% fx was expected, atleast they are transparent about it

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

@Akshat_World I hope you recover it; you are the brand and not Youtube. So if not Youtube, people come to whatever platform you put content on

@YouTube @YouTubeCreators

[Hemant Jodha @hemantjodha]

At this point its just fashionable to beat up Google; pure laziness to generate clicks.

Google launched good and useful tools yesterday, which are integrated into their existing products. No unnecessary hype that world is changed forever; just here and now on how you can use AI in daily life

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

In case you missed today's #GoogleIO keynote presentation, we summed it up for you