Jai Prakash

Formerly @NITIAayog , Internet Bussiness, Governance, Policy Making & Startups

[Prasanna Viswanathan @prasannavishy]

Tata Group has chosen to place some of the biggest industrial bets that India needs. Semiconductors, electronics manufacturing, batteries, airlines and advanced manufacturing. Many of these investments are yet to generate meaningful returns and may take years to mature.

Building a semiconductor ecosystem, scaling electronics manufacturing, creating battery capacity and reviving a national airline require patient capital and long horizons.

Not every bet will succeed. Some may fail. But if even a few of these bets pay off, it will reshape India's industrial landscape for decades.

Hope Tata's gamble succeeds. Not just for the group, but for India's manufacturing ambitions.

https://t.co/tKQiJOLK7h

[Naval @naval]

It's the Age of Builders.

(sorry financiers and talkers)

[JayPrashanth @JayPrashanth]

Nearly every Mercedes Benz car sold in India comes with an engine produced by Force Motors at its Chakan factory near Pune.

Force Motors just handed over the 200,000th engine to Mercedes Benz. It was a M256 straight six turbo petrol engine that's used in cars like the Mercedes Benz S-Class. The 200,000th motor went to a GLS 450.

Force Motors also produces engines for BMW at a different factory in Chennai. Force has built over 1 lakh engines for BMW, too. It even makes large, 10 cylinder and 12 cylinder industrial engines for Rolls Royce.

Did you know that the OM616 diesel engine that the Tempo (Force) Traveller used is a Mercedes Benz engine?

Force Motors later came up with re-engineered versions of this engine for the Gurkha, Travellers and Traxes, called FM2.6 and OM611.

@CarToq

[48 Laws Of Power Bot @48_quotes]

The powerful must have grandeur of spirit — they can never reveal any pettiness.

And money is the most visible arena in which to display either grandeur or pettiness.

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Nassim Taleb was right when he said risk taking is the highest virtue. It is the only signal you cannot fake.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

the wonders of compounding becomes visible when you pick a skill, get just a little bit better at it every day, and then realize years later that people come to ask for your expertise on that same topic

that is essentially what you sign up for when pursuing high intensity careers like banking and private equity

you get worked a ton, but start to build expertise through sheer reps. after working on 10 deals, the eleventh one starts to make a little more sense. after spending time on 4 deals in the same sector, the fifth one becomes a little easier to underwrite

after enough time, young analysts and associates come to you for advice. Clients and PMs start to value what you think and rely on you for decision making

it is probably the most satisfying part about pursuing expertise in something. all about watching your own skillset compound over time

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

A person who finds no meaning in making money can never influence other people in making money. People copy what we do. Not what we say.

[Aashish Chandorkar @c_aashish]

MBA era is over! Why India's CEA says AI-proof skills and not degrees will shape careers

https://t.co/KRMVkzDEfy

[Ben Horne @benjamin_horne]

This developing story about Dario's failed communications with the White House confirms everything I've ever believed about the enormous power of the Sales Chad.

You can be the smartest, most hard working, well-meaning guy around, but if you can't get people to like you, it's all for nothing.

When the time comes to send one of your own to meet inside the Halls of Power, you don't send the Geek Squad. You must send the affable, beer-drinking, golf-loving Sales Chad.

It literally doesn't matter if he understands the product half as well as everyone else. You send him. It's what he was put on Earth to do.

[Shereen Bhan @ShereenBhan]

In a first move of its kind, IT services company HCL Tech to back India’s LLM play. HCL tech to buy 10.46% in Sarvam AI for ₹1427 crore at a valuation of $1.5 billion @CNBCTV18News @CNBCTV18Live @hcltech @SarvamAI @pratykumar @RoshniNadarHCL #HCLTech #Sarvam

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine.

In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted.

https://t.co/pLMD0krc69

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

Every investor says they’re looking for outlier founders, until one actually cold emails them a deck. An entrepreneur with zero founder-market fit, who wasn’t employee number 8 at Google, no Stanford PhD and no previous time at a unicorn. Someone who doesn’t hit any of the buzzwords on the VC Bingo scorecard. But when we analysed 16,000 seed founders, we saw that the tickboxes many VCs use today to evaluate founders had minimal correlation with huge future outcomes.

Only 15% of unicorns went through an accelerator programme. Less than 10% had previously worked for another unicorn prior to founding their company. The average CEO age at founding for a unicorn was ~40. Only 10% had worked at a unicorn before founding their own. 40% were first time founders. And yet these were the people who built the most valuable companies on the planet. The CV signal did help your Series-A conversion rate, but quickly lost steam beyond the first 2yrs.

What was actually predictive was prior startup exposure (didn’t have to be founder role) and having built something before, regardless of whether it was successful or not. Seeing and learning from catastrophic failure up close was critical. The Cambrian explosion in AI is leading to obsession with “sexy CV” pattern matching, but history shows us that if the résumé looks like a slam dunk, it’s probably not the signal you’re looking for. Most of the best bets walk in on Day 1 looking like an obvious pass.

[Joshua Lisec, The Ghostwriter @JoshuaLisec]

I showed my son this.

Show yours, too.

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

The way incompetent managers disrespect high performers and talents needs to be studied.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Naval Ravikant reveals why getting rich has never been easier in human history and why most people are playing the wrong game:

1. status games are zero sum. wealth creation is not. in hunter gatherer times there was no stored wealth so status was the only game worth playing. high status meant you ate first. today you can build a product, scale it, and create abundance for millions of people without taking anything from anyone. i can be wealthy and you can be wealthy at the same time. you cannot both be number one.

2. there has never been an easier time in history to create wealth. a few hundred years ago you were born a serf and you died a serf. there was almost no way out. that has changed entirely. the leverage available today through technology, code, and media means wealth creation is accessible to more people than at any point in human history. it is still hard. it will not fall in your lap. but it is possible.

3. status is hardwired into us because wealth creation is evolutionarily new. we spent hundreds of thousands of years in hunter gatherer societies where status determined survival. wealth only became real with the agricultural revolution, accelerated with the industrial revolution, and exploded with the information age. your brain has not caught up. it still craves the ranking ladder.

4. get rich first. then go for fame and status if you still want it. trying to build a following to then monetize it is a much harder path than building wealth first and trading some of it for status later. rich people go to davos, donate to nonprofits, start appearing in films. they trade money for status because once you have money that is what you want next. do it in that order not the other way around.

5. you can reach a point where you are satisfied with your wealth. you cannot reach that point with status. the leaderboard never ends. youtube shows you your likes going up and down every single day and keeps you running on the treadmill forever. wealth has a finish line. status does not.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Chenthil @jcrajan00]

Running a distillery in India: your grain is regulated by food ministry, your product by state excise, your water by pollution board, your packaging by weights & measures, your distribution by state-level politics.

Five regulators, five compliance calendars, zero coordination. One expired NOC from any one of them shuts the whole plant.

This is why Indian manufacturing stays small. It's not ambition that's missing — it's regulatory bandwidth.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

India is the absolute first to achieve this and every Indian should be extremely proud of how clever this is.

Let me explain what you are even looking at.

That video shows a freight train carrying shipping containers stacked two high, one box on top of another, running under live overhead electric wires.

Sounds simple. But it is not. No other country in the world has pulled this off. India is the only one.

Here is why it is so hard.

When you stack two containers on a wagon, the train becomes very tall. Around 7 metres. Normal electric train wires in India sit much lower, around 5.5 metres. So the two cannot share the same track. The train would smash straight into the wire.

That leaves you with a choice. Go electric and stack only one container. Or stack two containers and pull the train with a diesel engine.

The US, China, Canada and Australia all run double-stack trains. But they mostly do it with diesel, or on routes that were never electrified in the first place. Nobody bothered raising electric wires that high on old tracks.

India did both electric and double-stack together. That is the world first.

The reason India could do this is a decision from the early 2000s.

So, Indian Railways had a basic problem. Goods trains and passenger trains shared the same tracks. Passenger trains always get priority.

So freight trains crawled at 25 to 30 km/h. For a growing economy, moving goods that slowly is a major problem.

So we built separate tracks only for freight. No passenger trains allowed. These are the Dedicated Freight Corridors.

The government approved the project around 2006 and set up a company called DFCCIL to build two corridors.

The Western one runs from near Delhi to the port near Mumbai, around 1,500 km. The Eastern one runs from Punjab down to West Bengal, around 1,875 km.

Because they were building from zero, the engineers were not stuck with old bridges, old tunnels or old wire heights. They could decide the clearances themselves.

So they made a deliberate call to build the whole corridor tall enough for two stacked containers. And electrify it.

Then they had to solve two hard problems.

First, the wire. On a normal Indian line the wire hangs around 5.5 metres. On the freight corridor they raised it to about 7.5 metres. This is called high-rise OHE.

No railway in the world had run a regular freight wire that high before.

Second, the engine. If the wire is way up high, a normal loco cannot reach it. The arm on the roof that touches the wire, called the pantograph, would be too short.

So India needed a new locomotive. A taller reach. And enough power to drag thousands of tonnes.

This is why we built a new loco called the WAG-12.

It is a beast.

12,000 horsepower. Double the power of the old WAG-9 it replaced. It can haul trains over 6,000 tonnes, and up to 15,000 tonnes in some setups, at 100 km/h. That is roughly three times the old freight speed.

The WAG-12 has its own backstory. In November 2015, Indian Railways signed a deal worth about ₹19,604 crore, around 3.4 billion dollars, with the French company Alstom.

They built a new factory in Madhepura, Bihar. Indian Railways holds 26 percent, Alstom holds 74 percent. It was the largest foreign investment ever in Indian Railways.

Over time the factory reached close to 90 percent local manufacturing. So most of each loco is now made in India.

So, the government approved an infrastructure decision in the mid 2000s, then it got built over almost two decades by DFCCIL, Indian Railways and RDSO. The locomotive came through the Alstom joint venture.

The first double-stack train ran under high-rise wires in June 2020, from Palanpur and Botad in Gujarat. The corridor sections were opened in stages after that.

And finally, why only India can do this.

Three things stack up together.

One, broad gauge.

India runs on a wider track than most of the world, 1,676 mm. A wider track gives a bigger loading box. So India can run plain flat wagons with two containers on top. Many countries need special low well-cars to manage height, and those still do not fix the wire problem.

Two, the fresh corridor.

India built new track with no height limits baked in. Old networks in Europe and the US are full of low tunnels and bridges never meant for 7 metre trains. Rebuilding all of that is close to impossible and crazy expensive.

Three, the system.

The tall wire, the high-reach pantograph and the powerful WAG-12 were all designed to work together as one package. You cannot copy just one piece. You need the whole thing.

Put those three together and other railways simply cannot recreate it without rebuilding from scratch.

But the part I keep thinking about is that India approved this in 2006 and ran the first train in 2020.

Fourteen years. :)

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

I'm a technology optimist. I’ve spent four decades studying disruptive innovation, from the microprocessor, the internet, mobile phones to OpenAI. I'm certain AI will do 80% of the economically valuable work humans do today, for 80% of all jobs, faster than most believe. The question isn't whether mass underemployment arrives, but whether we have a policy framework ready. Right now we don't.