Nitin Verma

Founder & CEO @ InstaAstro (astrology and spiritual platform), 3X Entrepreneur

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

America protects its market and calls it strategy. India does it and gets called a monopoly.

America keeps BYD out with a 100% tariff and strict rules on Chinese car software. The official reason is national security.

Whatever the reason, look at who benefits. American automakers, and Tesla most of all.

Nobody says Elon runs the US government.

Nobody calls it “monopolistic exploitation of the great people of America.”

Every big country does this. They protect their own first, and open the door later, on their own terms.

So when an Indian company is strong at home, why do we feel embarrassed?

I’m not saying foreign companies are bad. Competition is good. Starlink may even help villages with no internet.

But the more we depend on someone else’s technology, the more we depend on someone else’s mood.

Today it’s satellites. Tomorrow it’s chips, cloud, AI, payments.

Whoever owns the infrastructure owns the choices.

Welcome the world. But build your own first.

Be as little dependent on others as possible.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

FAKE DOPAMINE NOWADAYS:

- Endless reels
- P*rn
- Junk food
- Online arguments
- Notifications
- Gambling apps
- Checking likes
- Sugar crashes
- Impulse shopping
- Validation texts
- Late-night scrolling
- Gossip
- Energy drinks;
- Comparing lives

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Five highest forms of intelligence :

1. Pattern recognition
2. Delusional optimism
3. Quiet discernment
4. Strategic detachment
5. Deep curiosity

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Nobody talks about how quiet your phone gets once all your friends have kids.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

A Harsh Truth!

The bigger your company gets, the more time you spend catching thieves inside it.

Not everyone. A small number.
But a small number is enough to quietly drain you while you're busy celebrating growth.

At five people, you see every rupee. You'd catch a lie in a second.
At fifty, you can't.

You're approving numbers someone else rounded, trusting reports from people you handpicked, because you thought hiring well meant you'd never have to check again.

You were wrong. Everyone is.
A vendor bill slightly inflated.

A reimbursement that doesn't quite match the receipt.
A "market price" that's oddly convenient for whoever quoted it.

Nobody gets caught stealing lakhs on day one. They get caught stealing ₹8,000 for two years, because nobody ever checked, because checking felt like an insult to someone you trusted.

Here's the part that will upset people: trust is not a strategy. It's a hope. And hope has never once stopped a single rupee from walking out a door you weren't watching.

I stopped asking "is this person honest." You can't ever really know that. What you can know is whether your system makes dishonesty easy, or makes it hard.

Most founders find this out the expensive way. I'd rather say it before it happens to someone reading this.

You don't protect a company by believing in people.
You protect it by making sure belief was never the only thing standing between them and your money.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Being alone and being lonely are completely different experiences.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

"I am leaving."
My best performer walked into my cabin last week and said this.

I asked why.

"I need a break now. I am getting bored."

I sat there for a second, honestly a little stunned.

Bored.

I did the thing every founder does first. I made an offer. More money, a new project, whatever she wanted.

She said no. Not angry. Just certain.

It took me a few days to stop being annoyed and actually think about it.
I was trying to solve a compensation problem. She did not have one.

My generation treated work as identity. The job was the answer to "who are you." We stayed in roles that bored us for years because leaving felt like admitting we were replaceable, and being replaceable felt like the worst thing a person could be.

She does not see it that way at all.

For her, this job was not who she is. It was something she was doing right now. A chapter, not a definition.

And when a chapter stops teaching her anything new, she closes it and starts the next one, the same way you would put down a book that has already told you how it ends.

That is not disloyalty. That is not a lack of seriousness about work either, whatever the comments under this post are about to say.

It is a generation that has decided work is an experience to be had, not an identity to be defended. They will give you everything while they are in it. They will not perform loyalty to a chapter that is already finished.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

"Sir, I cleared CAT. Finally, my father is happy."

I asked him one question. "Are you?"
He took six seconds to answer. I counted.

That silence is what I call Borrowed Ambition.

A goal you inherited, carried for so long that you started calling it yours.

The engineering seat your father could not get. The government job your mother wanted for her brother. The MBA because the cousin in Pune did one.

Nobody forced you. That is what makes it hard to see. It came with love, with sacrifice, with "we only want the best for you."

So you worked for it. Fully. Honestly. And you got it.
Then you reached the top of the ladder and realised it was leaning against someone else's wall.

Here is how you know if your ambition is borrowed.

When you achieve it, who do you call first?

If the answer is the person who wanted it for you, and the happiness you feel is mostly relief, you did not win anything. You repaid a loan.

There is nothing wrong with repaying it. Our parents gave up a lot.
Just know that once the loan is paid, the next ten years are yours.

Most people never notice. They keep paying.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

@ikpsgill1 200 surgeries vs 1 phone that folds.
One of them actually changes how someone sees the world.
Respect, Doc.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

A gossip page posted a private moment from a woman's holiday.
Thousands of people watched it before lunch.

I'm not writing this to defend her. She doesn't need me for that.

Here's what I noticed.

Nobody was actually shocked. The comments weren't outrage. They were interest.
And the same people spend their own week doing nothing they'd want filmed.

That's the part worth sitting with. Because look at what she was actually doing.

She was on a holiday she chose.
With a person she chose.
Not asking anyone's permission. Not checking who would find out.

That's it. That's the whole crime.
And I think that's exactly why it travelled.

Most people watching have never once made a decision that free. They've spent their life running every choice through a committee of relatives, colleagues and people they went to school with.

So when someone lives without that filter, it doesn't look wrong to them. It looks unfair.

You don't get that angry at a life you don't want.

Here's the uncomfortable version.

If your own week had something in it, you wouldn't have time for hers.

Attention is the clearest signal of what's missing. People with full lives aren't tracking strangers. The gossip page isn't the problem. It's just supply.

You clicked. Twice.

So here's the actual question.

When was the last time you made a decision purely because you wanted to, with nobody's approval?

If that's hard to answer, that's the post.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Apple's biggest innovation this year: arithmetic.

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

People are buying the iPhone because they're scared of looking broke.

That's it. That's the entire reason.

Your 17 works perfectly. You know it does. You'll upgrade anyway.
And a lot of you will do it on EMI you can't comfortably afford.

People spend on what makes them feel less behind. Not on what they need.

1,64,900. That's a bike. A semester of college. Four months of rent.
But on EMI it becomes 8,000 a month. And 8,000 doesn't feel like a decision.

That's the whole trick. Split a big number into twelve small ones and the brain stops treating it as a purchase.

Now here's the part I'm not going to be sarcastic about.

It's easy to say people are being stupid. They're not.
Everywhere in the world, what you carry decides how you're treated.

At the bank counter. At the client meeting. At the wedding where a distant relative is quietly ranking everyone in the room.

A 20,000 rupee phone works exactly as well. It just doesn't buy you the assumption that you're doing fine.

So nobody is buying a camera. They're buying protection from being judged.
And the price of that protection went up again this year.

Every launch quietly raises the cost of looking like you're doing okay. And the people who feel that raise hardest are the ones with the least room.

The guy earning 40k is not stupid for wanting it. He's responding correctly to a world that treats him differently depending on what's in his hand.

We built that. The phone company just priced it.

#iphone #Iphone18 #Apple

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Can you really rely on someone who quits over 15 minutes of overtime?

One of my Gen Z team members recently resigned. The reason was surprising.
He had to work an extra 10–15 minutes for four consecutive days.

I'll be honest. It made me think.

Not because I expect people to work endlessly. I don't.

I believe work-life balance matters. People have lives outside the office. And nobody should have to stay late every day just to prove their commitment.

But sometimes, things go wrong.

A deadline gets missed. A client needs something urgently. A project falls apart. And for a few days, the team may need to do a little extra.

That's part of working together.

So this incident left me with a question.

If 10–15 extra minutes for four days is enough for someone to leave, what happens when things actually get difficult?

When the company is going through a rough phase?
When the team genuinely needs people to step up?

Maybe I have an old-school way of looking at this. But I still believe reliability matters.

Seems like Gen Z isn't reliable enough.

[Indian Startup News @indstartupnews]

InstaAstro, an online astrology and spiritual wellness platform has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Singularity AMC and Artha Venture Fund, with participation from the company’s founders.

The Noida-based startup said it will use the funding to expand in regional and international markets, strengthen its AI products and grow its Pooja Seva and spiritual commerce businesses.

Read the full story here: 👇
https://t.co/aJBnYQhlWT

[Entrepreneur Asia Pacific @EntrepreneurAPJ]

@InstaAstroIndia, a digital spiritual wellness platform, has raised USD 12 million in a Series A round led by Singularity AMC and Artha Venture Fund, with participation from the founders.

Founded in 2021 by Nitin Verma, InstaAstro has expanded from a single astrology app into a full-stack spiritual wellness platform serving users across 183 countries.

Read More: https://t.co/OhFdjeBsBr

#InstaAstro #StartupFunding #SeriesA #SpiritualWellness #DigitalWellness #SingularityAMC #ArthaVentureFund #Astrology #IndianStartups #BusinessGrowth

[Inc42 @Inc42]

. @InstaAstroIndia has raised $12 Mn in a Series A round to scale its AI-led astrology and spiritual wellness platform 👇

Led by Singularity AMC and Artha Venture Fund, the round will fuel AI-led product development, including sentiment analysis and multilingual support, while expanding pooja seva, spiritual commerce and international markets.

The startup currently has 12 Mn registered users and 5,000+ verified experts across 183 countries, with international markets contributing around 25% of its revenue.

InstaAstro also plans to expand its regional presence as it looks to tap the growing digital faith and spiritual wellness market.

🔗 To read the article in detail, click here: https://t.co/cqlMoGXY2R

#InstaAstro #Funding #SpiritualTech #AIEconomy #News

[Entrackr @entrackr]

#Funding: InstaAstro raises $12 Mn in Series A round led by Singularity AMC and Artha Venture Fund

✍️ @Shashank_ent https://t.co/ieJPoAjMCG

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

My employees fought today. It felt like a gang war. 😂

For 20 minutes, I was genuinely confused whether I should act like a CEO or a college principal.

Honestly, with a Gen Z team, running a company sometimes feels like running a college.

There are arguments. There are groups. There is drama.
And somehow, you're expected to sort it all out. 😂

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

Recently, one of my Gen Z employees came and said,
“Sir, can I borrow ₹5,000?”

I said, “But why?” 😂

He said, “Month-end hai… Raksha Bandhan ke liye sister ko gift dena hai.”

And then immediately added:
“Salary aate hi wapas kar dunga.”

I don't know why, but that small conversation stayed with me.
No formal request. No overthinking. He just came up and asked.

We often say, “We are like a family here.”
But maybe it means something when people actually start believing it.

And honestly, I like that.

Because great companies are built beyond hierarchies and designations.
Sometimes, culture isn't about what you write on the office walls.

It's about someone feeling comfortable enough to walk up to you and say,
“Sir, ₹5,000 udhaar mil jayenge? Salary aate hi wapas kar dunga.”

[Nitin Verma @nitininstaastro]

The obsession with unicorns is just another form of startup vanity.

Not every founder needs to raise millions, hire 500 people and burn cash to prove they are successful.

A profitable business that gives you freedom is not “small thinking.” It’s often smarter than building a billion dollar company you no longer control.