Mohit Lalvani

Moved from 🇮🇳to 🇬🇧 on the Global Talent Visa, Tech junkie, Non-conformist, Fintech entrepreneur, exited @quikwallet, now building @livaround & @joulegram

[Naval @naval]

Co-founder is marriage without the sex.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

Goa need this

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

this is just the most ridiculous AI application i've ever seen lol

a Peter Thiel-backed startup that makes AI collars for cows is now worth $2 billion

and the more I read about it the cooler it gets. here's how it works:

every cow wears a solar-powered collar that talks to a network of radio towers and an app on the farmer's phone

instead of building physical fences, the farmer draws the fence on a map in the app, and the collar keeps each cow inside that invisible line using GPS

when a cow drifts toward the edge, the collar plays a sound to steer her, and a gentle vibration tells her which way to go.

it's like how a car beeps as you back up toward a wall

the cows learn the cues in a few days

so now a rancher can move an entire herd to fresh grass by sliding the fence on a map, without driving out to open a single gate

and that same collar is reading each cow's body the whole time.

it takes five readings per second on every animal, so the AI can catch a cow that's sick, injured, ready to breed, or about to give birth before a person would ever notice walking the field

so it's basically like WHOOP for cows too lol

and they gave the AI behind it the perfect name: the Cowgorithm

it's been trained on more than 7 billion hours of real cow behavior, which is why Halter calls the data its real asset and moat.

they know what a normal cow looks like better than anyone, so they can flag the odd one out instantly

it's already on more than 1M cattle across New Zealand, Australia, and a bunch of US states.

California even used it on public land to graze cattle in patterns that clear dry brush and slow down wildfires

costs about $5 to $8 per cow per month

a job that used to mean barbed wire, gates, and driving the fields all day is now mostly 1 person on their phone

[Sabeer Bhatia @sabeer]

Building a great business through innovation, competition, and customer value is one thing. Winning through monopolistic advantages, regulatory favoritism, or proximity to political power is another. True entrepreneurship creates value; cronyism extracts it. A nation that wants innovation must reward merit, not connections.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

I'm calling it now - the Bitcoin story is over. There is no need for a store of value, proof of energy spent unit; when AI makes energy spendable and transferable

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

@sabeer India is an NPCI economy. Any Fintech IP you create ultimately is executed by NPCI

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

Lol, 1st step, the country needs an educated leader as prime minister, someone students can look up to

[Monica Jasuja @jasuja]

The brain drain is real.

We need the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Startup India and DPIIT to stop treating this as a statistic and start treating it as a problem statement.

Why not create a working group focused on the top 100 students every year and understand what would make them build, innovate and create jobs in India?

Administration is not just about policy making.

It’s about solving problems in real time.

If we can track them all the way to IIT, we should be able to track why we’re losing them afterwards too.

[Nicolas Dessaigne @dessaigne]

Drafting a basic will cost ~$400 in 1995, ~$150 last year, and only ~$0.50 today with AI.

That may be the biggest price collapse in legal work history. And weirdly, it could show up in the data as inflation because only the hard documents are left for humans.

We’re terrible at measuring abundance when it arrives this fast.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

[Sabeer Bhatia @sabeer]

I was an A student in India—top grades in school, a 10.0 GPA at BITS Pilani. Yet it was only after coming to the US that I realized EQ often matters more than IQ, both in the workplace and in personal growth.

Too much hubris has been injected into the minds of ordinary Indians. Many have been led to believe that India is an IT superpower. The reality is far more nuanced. Technical skills matter, but curiosity, creativity, empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to work with others matter just as much.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

@illscience @tejeshwi_sharma @joulegram

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Exactly right. The bottleneck has never been compute or capital. Its taste and judgment about what humans actually want. Infinite compute just makes the great founders faster and the confused ones more confused. https://t.co/AmPmal8NYF

[Zhuo Chen | Katrina @SouthernM46171]

India's well-connected money isn't building anything new. It's building data centers to run Western AI — Claude, Codex — that will directly undercut the 6 million Indian programmers those same investors once bet on.

Cheap solar feeds the servers. The servers train the agents. The agents replace the outsourcing workforce. Margin gets captured in San Francisco.

Korea is in a semiconductor wage boom. Taiwan owns the foundries. India's big startup news this week? CarryMen — pay someone $1 to carry your shopping bags, rebranded as tech innovation.

Net FDI was $56 billion in FY2020. By early FY2026, it had fallen to $29 billion — and local firms are deploying capital abroad fast enough to cancel even that out. The rupee is the worst-performing Asian currency over two years.

When Hormuz reopens, everyone will exhale and call it a recovery. The imagination problem will still be there, just better fed.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The best pitch test: can you tell this at a bar to a friend?

Not the market size, not the TAM, not the deck. Just the story. Why you built it. What you saw that nobody else saw. What happened.

If you can't tell it naturally over drinks (or it would feel weird to your friend and they would think "this isn't you"), your idea or pitch or endeavor needs to bake some more.

The 9pm-at-a-bar test for your startup idea is a defining authenticity test. And without that, nobody will buy your product, let alone come work for you or invest.

[Milk Road Macro @MilkRoadMacro]

Gavin Baker is one of the best tech investors alive and he explains why the AI cycle might actually avoid a bubble.

Every major technology in history ended in a bubble. Railroads, canals, the internet and even the PC. Every single one.

The pattern is always the same:

1. Investors get excited about a genuine breakthrough

2. Diversity of opinion breaks down

3. Everyone converges on the same thesis

4. Valuations disconnect from reality and then it collapses.

But Baker thinks AI is different this time and that's because of a physical constraint that no past technology ever had:

Watts and wafers.

TSMC is run by what he calls "flinty old men and women" who view themselves as the guardians of the most important institution in Taiwan. Jensen Huang flies to Taipei every three months and pushes them to double or triple capacity. They expand about 5%.

Here's Baker's math:

If TSMC actually gave Jensen what he wanted, Nvidia could probably sell $1.5 to $2 trillion worth of chips next year. He really believes that. The demand is there.

But a boom that size would almost certainly end in a bust. And a bust is catastrophic for TSMC. So TSMC's conservatism isn't a bottleneck. It's a release valve. A real-world physical constraint that enforces discipline on the whole cycle and prevents the kind of overbuilding that turned the internet boom into the dot-com crash.

Baker believes TSMC is the key reason why we won't have an AI bubble.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

@NPCI_NPCI are a bunch of jokers

[Rushil @RushilM_]

🚨 FASTag has a MASSIVE security loophole & nobody is talking about it.

Today, literally anyone with access to your car & RC can get a NEW FASTag issued on your vehicle in THEIR name & mobile number.

No OTP.
No owner authorization.
No consent from the actual vehicle owner.

The moment that happens?
Your existing FASTag gets blacklisted/deactivated instantly under the “One Vehicle One FASTag” policy.

That’s exactly what happened to me.

I’m currently transporting my car from Mumbai to Delhi & handed over the vehicle to the transporter’s driver on Saturday.

He casually asked me if there was balance in the FASTag.

Next morning, I received a message from ICICI saying a new FASTag had been activated on my vehicle & my existing FASTag would be deactivated.

Within minutes, it was blacklisted/deactivated.

Honestly, God knows what the plan even was.

Maybe he thought the balance would transfer.
Maybe he wanted to misuse it during transit.
Maybe something worse.

The scary part?
The system ALLOWED this without a single authorization from the actual vehicle owner.

The NETC FASTag portal was down the entire day.

After 4+ hours of calls, ICICI finally told me the new FASTag was issued via Airtel Payments Bank.

Later, I checked the Airtel Thanks app & guess what?
The FASTag had been registered by the SAME driver who took the car.

This is where things become ridiculous.

Airtel Payments Bank support told me THEY cannot close the FASTag unless the person who activated it calls them personally.

Read that again.

The actual vehicle owner has ZERO control over the FASTag -
but the person who fraudulently activated it does.

The NHAI helpline at 1033 was equally useless.

No emergency block.
No fraud handling.
No owner protection mechanism.

So if someone activates a FASTag on your car, you’re basically stranded.

How is this acceptable infrastructure for something linked to a vehicle owner’s identity & movement?

This is no longer just a scam.
It’s a massive security vulnerability in the FASTag ecosystem.

NPCI/NETC urgently needs mandatory owner authorization.

At the very least, mandate OTP verification from the registered vehicle owner before ANY FASTag change is approved.

This needs immediate attention, @NPCI_NPCI @FASTag_NETC.

Pathetic support, zero accountability, and absolutely no protection for the actual vehicle owner while someone else fraudulently took control of the FASTag.
That should never be possible, @ICICIBank @airtelbank.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Electric surfboards are about to make jet skis look ancient.

Silent, fast, and way too fun.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

https://t.co/GTGMUCzdM1

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Rowan Atkinson, the guy who plays Mr. Bean, bought a McLaren F1 in 1997 for £640,000, about a million dollars then. He drove it 41,000 miles, crashed it twice, and sold it in 2015 for £8 million.

The 2011 crash near Peterborough threw the V12 engine 20 metres from the wreckage, and the £910,000 payout to rebuild it was Britain's largest single-car insurance claim at the time. Even with that, profit hit roughly £7 million. Atkinson said most of those miles were "going to Sainsbury's or doing the school run."

Atkinson is a trained engineer. He earned an electrical engineering degree from Newcastle University in 1975, then a master's in the same field from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1978. His father had studied at the same college back in 1935.

His thesis was on something called self-tuning control. In plain English, that means any system smart enough to adjust its own settings while it runs, without a person standing there tweaking dials. Aircraft autopilots work this way. Paper mills and chemical plants do too. Other engineers cited his thesis in a 1979 paper published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

Atkinson told The Arts Desk the thesis was "good enough for an MSc but not good enough for a DPhil," which is Oxford's name for a PhD. He had wanted the doctorate. Comedy at the Oxford Revue kept pulling him out of the lab. He left with the master's, which he called "a quite rare degree at Oxford." Decades later, in 2006, Oxford made him an Honorary Fellow of the same college he had walked away from to do Mr. Bean.

The engineering brain never switched off. For years he wrote technical car columns for Car magazine, Octane, and Evo, getting into how cars actually behave on the road with the precision of someone trained in control systems.

The meme has the master's from Oxford right. The rest of the story: a published engineering thesis other engineers cited, a PhD he was on track to finish before comedy took over, an Honorary Fellowship he picked up decades later, and one of the most complicated production cars ever built used as a daily driver for the school run.

[Mohit Lalvani @mohitl_]

I've been to many places all over the world, but never been to Dubai