Saurabh Kakade

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

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Saurabh Kakade @kakade_eth

6 months ago

#IndiaStartups #AI #AngelInvesting #BuildInPublic #PuneStartups #MumbaiStartups #BangaloreStartups

Saurabh Kakade @kakade_eth

6 months ago

I’m in India 🇮🇳 until mid-Jan and looking to meet founders building in AI. I’m also starting my journey as an angel investor here, focusing on early-stage AI startups. If you are building (or know someone who is), let’s connect. 👇

Who to follow

Here for the Humour, Investment Opportunities & Random Acts of Kindness. memento mori - memento vivere.

Saurabh Kakade @kakade_eth

6 months ago

If you’re fundraising or just want to chat product/AI: 1.Reply/DM/Tag folks I should meet. 2.Or share what you’re building via this form (helps me filter for serious conversations): https://t.co/EqOZgVn6ya Let’s grab coffee or chai while I’m here. ☕️🙏

Saurabh Kakade @kakade_eth

11 months ago

@AMAZlNGNATURE *Saves ocean from the iPhone

Saurabh Kakade @kakade_eth

over 1 year ago

12.12.2015* | BBC News on an Emirates Flight 'Altruistic Al' plan wins $1bn pledge Tech giants pledge S1 bn (GBP659m) for @OpenAI, a non-profit venture that aims to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. *found an old flash drive with my nexus 5x backup

kakade_eth's tweet photo. 12.12.2015* | BBC News on an Emirates Flight
'Altruistic Al' plan wins $1bn pledge Tech giants pledge S1 bn (GBP659m) for @OpenAI, a non-profit venture that aims to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.

*found an old flash drive with my nexus 5x backup https://t.co/sm9deDThut

kakade_eth retweeted

David Marcus

@davidmarcus

over 1 year ago

How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators. By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch. We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed. Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over. One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow. The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions. We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin. And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!

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