Punit Gosrani

[Rahul Srinivas @whizkidd]

Don’t know about Rang De Basanti, but let me tell you what some of us millennials actually grew up watching.

I was in primary school during the 1993 Mumbai bombings -- too young to even understand what terrorism meant. But I distinctly remember my mom repeatedly warning me not to pick up anything lying around while playing outside because, you know, it could be a bomb.

That was childhood.

Then came the seemingly endless procession of attacks: the 1993 Mumbai blasts, Red Fort in 2000, Parliament in 2001, the Mumbai bus bombings and Akshardham in 2002, three separate blasts within eight months in Mumbai in 2003, the 2005 Delhi blasts, the 2007 Hyderabad bombings, and the 2008 Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts.

In July 2006, I was supposed to be on one of the trains that was bombed near Mahim. I stayed back at the office because of a meeting. A completely mundane change of plans is probably the reason I’m alive to type this instead of being a name on a list of the dead.

I remember that evening far better than I remember any stupid movie. Our office went into lockdown. Phones were jammed. People were crying and frantically trying to reach their families. Nobody knew what was happening, whether there were more bombs, or whether someone they loved was lying dead inside a mangled train compartment.

Two years later came 26/11.

I had the misfortune of watching uncensored footage of the aftermath. One clip showed bodies being piled and stacked inside a makeshift room at CST while someone wheeled in another load on a bloodied wheelbarrow, with blood dripping onto the floor. The sanitised footage shown on television didn't come remotely close to what actually happened inside that station.

So yes, us millennials lived through an era where we went to work knowing that the crime of simply boarding the wrong train, getting on the wrong bus, eating at the wrong restaurant, or standing on the wrong street at the wrong fucking moment could get you blown to pieces or riddled with bullets.

Some of us literally went to work wondering, somewhere at the back of our minds, whether this would be the commute we wouldn't come home from.

So please, spare us millennials this sanctimonious horseshit about Rang De Basanti and what some Bollywood movie supposedly should have taught us about how to vote.

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

[Suresh Kochattil @kochattil]

If life gives you a chance.
Be a Skyroot. Not a Cockroach.

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

The US Rust Belt has a 25-yr head start on tech & finance in terms of experience about how this movie ends.

Spoiler alert: By the time you're begging for government protection, it's already too late.

US tech & finance cheered as this happened to Rust Belt USA ("Learn to code".)

[Mungerilal @satindia]

@1shankarsharma @riteshmjn Can't see any students from top institutes (IITs IIMs) protesting at CJP. by the way Skyroot made at least 200 new millionaires with its test flight of Friday. Positive people creating value for all and losers crying for little reason.

[Ritesh Jain @riteshmjn]

My nephew runs a startup..

He is ready with proof of concept and till now he has not taken any outside money.

There are enough startup India program under various ministries, state govt and even IITs ( they ask for stake) that funding a good startup is not difficult in India… obviously tied up with milestones.

He also employs 3-5 member team( part time) with the funding provided by these programs.

I have been closely working with him for 3 years and can assure you that if you have an idea in India today, funding is not a problem.

I am truly impressed by the programs/ support which govt,IIT”s.. CSR of large corporates have for startup eco system in India.

[Ritesh Jain @riteshmjn]

Just sharing the way world is changing.

You want to travel the world

You want study permit for western world

You want a govt or even a private sector job.

You want to keep a bank account.

You want a good credit score

👇👇👇

[Ritesh Jain @riteshmjn]

Government control isn’t theoretical anymore—it’s visible. Visa scrutiny in the U.S., bank freezes in Canada, police visits in parts of Europe over social media posts. The kind of social credit-style control where you are cutoff from Jobs market, society, bank and even from renting an apartment seen in China is no longer unthinkable elsewhere.

If you choose to protest in streets or speak out as social media warrior, do it knowingly the downside which will come with it and because you believe in it—not because others are prodding you.

[Punit Gosrani @punitgosrani]

@Sahilpahwa09 HEG!

[Swarajya @SwarajyaMag]

Some NEET candidates, who did badly, used AI to forge their answer sheets, turning a score of 95 into 522.

Then they took the fakes to protest sites and TV studios and called it a scam by the NTA (National Testing Agency).

A student fails, fabricates proof of a cover-up, and is treated as a whistleblower before anyone checks the document.

Parents go along with it. News channels air a crying student holding a sheet of paper without verifying a thing.

And the honest aspirant pays for it. When fake complaints flood the system, the real grievances get buried under the noise.

@BBTheorist in @SwarajyaMag on what the NEET forgery says about the normalisation of deceit in Indian society.

https://t.co/LNvxP2asmB

[Prem Soni @ValueWithPrem]

There is a deeply disturbing financial sickness spreading among Gen Z right now.

At 23, they don’t want to build an empire. They just want to retire.

I ask many to learn a high income skill, start a small cash flow business or take a career risk and they have zero interest. They are completely exhausted by the idea of actual work.

But ask them about their monthly SIP, their crypto portfolio, and their passive income strategy, and they will talk for hours.

A massive salute to the Indian Mutual Fund industry. You have executed the greatest marketing campaign in history.

You successfully sold an entire generation the Dal Roti dream. You convinced ambitious 22 year olds that the ultimate goal of human existence is to scrape together a ₹3 to ₹5 Crore portfolio by 40, quit the rat race and exist off dividends while doing absolutely nothing.

You cannot compound peanuts. Passive income is what you build after you have maximized your active income. But this generation is trying to skip the active income phase entirely.

They are obsessing over squeezing a 15% CAGR out of a ₹40,000 salary instead of figuring out how to build a skill or a business that generates ₹4,00,000 a month.

You cannot passive income your way out of a low value skill set.

You cannot SIP your way to true wealth if your primary engine your active income is stagnant.

Stop trying to retire before you have even built anything.

[Āyudhika @Ayudhika1310]

The chief priest of Badrinath traditionally comes from Kerala.

The chief priest of Kedarnath traditionally comes from Karnataka.

Pashupatinath has for centuries been served by priests from Sringeri.

Adi Shankaracharya established Sharadamba at Sringeri, preserving the spiritual legacy associated with Sharada of Kashmir.

Our temples never believed in dividing Bharat. They connected it.

If our sacred traditions transcend language, region, and state boundaries, why are we fighting?

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

What Skyroot pulled off this morning is genuinely stunning.

Most people think a rocket's job is to go up. It is not. Going up is the easy part. The hard part is going sideways fast enough that you never come down.

Let me explain this one idea in simple words.

So orbit is not a height. It is a speed.

Throw a ball. It falls. Throw it harder, it lands further away. Now imagine throwing it so hard that as it falls, the Earth curves away underneath it at exactly the same rate.

It keeps falling forever and never hits the ground. That is orbit. So a satellite is not floating up there. It is falling around the planet, endlessly, because it is moving sideways at about 28,000 kmph.

That is roughly 25 times the speed of a passenger jet.

So a rocket does two jobs. It climbs out of the thick air near the ground, then it tips over and spends most of its fuel building sideways speed.

Almost all of the energy goes into that second part.

Now let's understand what Vikram-1 has achieved.

It lifted off from Sriharikota at 12:05 pm today. The launch got held for 35 minutes at the T minus 5 minute mark because of a navigation issue.

They fixed it and went. Fifteen to sixteen minutes later, the payloads were in a 450 km orbit.

Fifteen minutes from a launch pad in Andhra to a stable orbit around Earth. :)

The rocket is 24 metres tall, about a seven storey building. It is built from carbon composite instead of steel, which makes it far lighter, since weight is everything in this game.

Every kilo of structure you save is a kilo of satellite you can carry.

Now, Vikram-1 has four sections stacked on top of each other. Three solid fuel stages named after Dr Kalam. Kalam-1200 at the bottom, then Kalam-250, then Kalam-100. On top sits a small liquid engine called the Orbital Adjustment Module.

As in most rockets, once the bottom stage has burned all its fuel, that huge empty tube is just a heavy metal shell you are dragging along.

So the rocket throws it away mid flight. Lighter rocket, same engine push, faster acceleration. Then the next stage lights up.

Think of a runner carrying three water bottles. He drinks the first one and throws it away instead of carrying an empty bottle for the rest of the race.

Today all three stages fired and separated cleanly. First stage pushed it through the thick lower atmosphere. Second stage took over higher up. Third stage, the smallest, pushed it further.

Then came the clever bit.

The top module runs on liquid fuel, and its engine is 3D printed. Liquid engines can be switched off and started again. Solid fuel cannot. Once you light a solid motor, it burns till it is done, like a firecracker. You cannot stop it or restart it.

So the liquid module is the precision tool.

It fired for about six minutes, adjusted the path, and placed the satellites exactly where they needed to go.

That start, stop, restart ability is what turns a rocket from a big firework into a delivery vehicle.

But why this is a massive deal? Rockets have been doing this for years.

See, in 2022, Skyroot flew Vikram-S. That was suborbital. It went up and came back down. Impressive, but going up is a fraction of the energy.

Reaching orbit needs roughly 30 times more energy than just touching space.

Today they crossed that line.

India is now the third country in the world where a private company has put something into orbit.

Only America and China had that before.

Skyroot is a Hyderabad startup. Founded by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, both ex ISRO engineers who quit to build this.

They raised $60 million in May. They have been test firing motors in Nagpur since 2020, one stage at a time, for six years.

So, six years of quiet, unglamorous testing for fifteen minutes of flight.

And they did it because ISRO opened up Sriharikota to a private company. IN-SPACe cleared the way.

A government space agency handing its national launch pad to a startup is not a small cultural shift.

Ten years ago that was unthinkable.

The payload list is lovely too.

Two cubesats, one from Skyroot and one from another Indian startup, Grahaa Space.

A lab grown diamond from a Bengaluru company.

A handwritten postcard from Modi Ji reading Vande Mataram, along with handwritten notes from the team and their families.

Somebody's handwriting is circling the Earth right now at 28,000 kmph. :)

Now, yes this was a test flight. They have said more test flights come before commercial launches, with up to two more Vikram-1 flights planned this year.

First success is the hardest, but the real business is doing this again and again, cheaply and reliably.

Still. A private Indian company built a rocket from scratch and reached orbit on the first try.

Learn the name. Skyroot. :)

[ISRO @isro]

Congratulations to the entire Skyroot Aerospace Team on the successful launch of Vikram-1 (Mission Aagaman) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.
The mission marks a significant milestone for India’s private space sector and reflects the growing capability of the country’s space ecosystem.
Congratulations to IN-SPACe and ISRO teams, who enabled and facilitated the launch and ground testing operations along with technical consultancy and 24x7 safety surveillance.
This achievement is also a testament to the Space Sector Reforms envisioned by our Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji.

#Vikram1
#IndiawithVikram1
#SkyrootAerospace
#OpeningSpaceForAll

[Civic Rise @CivicRiseIN]

🚨BREAKING: Agnikul Cosmos has unveiled Mission-02, aiming to recover India's first orbital-class rocket booster and repurpose the upper stage as an in-orbit platform.🇮🇳

If successful, it would mark a major leap for India's private space sector and reusable launch technology.🚀

[Skyroot Aerospace @SkyrootA]

ORBIT ACHIEVED. 🚀

Vikram-1 Test Flight-1 has reached orbit. India's first privately developed orbital rocket has completed its final burn and injected its payloads into a ~450 km orbit, making India the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability.

History is made. 🇮🇳

#Vikram1 #JourneyToOrbit #SkyrootAerospace

[Punit Gosrani @punitgosrani]

Software bottoming out soon!?

[J.C. Parets @JC_ParetsX]

👀

[Normal Guy @Normal_2610]

China compressed US factory margins over 30 years that hurt but factories have a cost floor because every unit costs money to make and move

Software does not. Kimi K3 beat Fable 5 on Arena coding leaderboard with 76% pairwise win rate and Moonshot releases full model weights for free on July 27

Anybody downloads it and runs it on their own servers. Chinese open-weight models went from under 1% of global API traffic to over 30% in one year

US hyperscalers plan to spend $725B on AI infrastructure in 2026, Token costs dropped from $60 to roughly $0.50 per million for GPT-4 level work in under two years.

Chinese open-source models are 60 to 90% cheaper than Anthropic and OpenAI on equivalent tasks. In manufacturing you needed factories, ports, shipping routes. Building those took decades.

In AI the weapon is a downloadable file. Moonshot went from $4.3B valuation to $30B in six months on the back of models US developers are already using

Washington spent 3 years trying to slow China with chip export controls. Chinese AI labs responded by building sparse architectures that cut compute needs by 90%.

Kimi K3 runs 2.8 trillion parameters on infrastructure the US tried to deny them, Cursor uses Kimi to build its coding agent. DoorDash routes lower-level work to K2.6.

Export controls were designed to starve Chinese labs of computing power, Instead they pushed those labs to optimize so hard that American companies now voluntarily send them revenue

Even Indian are using it even me personally :)

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

We are pretty screwed with respect to China and LLMs, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I have been trying to warn everyone for a long time. In January 2025 for example, I warned that:

•  the US would not achieve a decisive victory in AI over China if they continued to focus largely on LLMs

• that we would instead converge on a tie

• that the lack of a technical moat would mean that companies like OpenAI would remain unprofitable.

• that Nvidia would be vulnerable

• that the CHIPS act would backfire, without doing much to hold China back

• that models will continue to get more efficient and less expensive, but that hallucinations and reliability problems will persist.

• that racing endlessly around LLMs would sap resources that could instead go into developing more original ideas.

I wish more people had listened.

[Ritesh Jain @riteshmjn]

This is important to understand.

China is vacating low end manufacturing as it is not feasible for $10000 per capita economy.

So many of these low hanging fruits are getting plucked by Indian companies.

On top of that , INR has depreciated by almost 20% vs CNY in last 1 year.. so massive delta getting created in these Indian companies.

Unfortunately as I have mentioned before, these companies are not significant part of any Indian benchmarks.