Sid Ratnam

My bio says founder and ex-finance because POSIWID. @BITSPilaniIndia

[lauren @poteto]

never ask a model her weights

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Been to tons of these, but there was a @JonathanRoss321 talk in Bangalore that I can comfortably call life-changing

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“We were going to run out of money.”

Groq was 3 weeks away from death and @JonathanRoss321’s leadership team put together a list of layoffs that also would have killed the company.

He realized that the only way to survive was to convince their employees to take a salary cut. The wild story of Groq Bonds:

“We had an all-hands and put up World War II-looking pictures of war bonds. We called it ‘Groq Bonds.’”

80% of Groq’s employees participated in exchanging their salary for equity.

Half of them went to the statutory minimum salary by law.

“Engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks cut their salary down to $50,000 to $60,000.”

“By doing this, we put everyone's hand on the steering wheel. They were participating in saving our runway and we had less than 10% attrition. It might've been closer to 5%, which was probably better than our attrition rate before then.”

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

There could be a day where PSG & AS Monaco compete in a league sponsored by a Bala Krishna Tyres

[Sanghapriyo @SanghapriyoM]

How many of you know that Jindal Steel sponsors the Oman Football League? It is officially known as the Oman Jindal League.

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Will sit the fence on this one, chief

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

I use AI for a lot of things, but this is a pretty bonkers anecdote from Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub. https://t.co/laDuOWiUir

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Slaps.

https://t.co/DwMnhcW51q

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Yes, minister

[signüll @signulll]

a bureaucrat thrives in every environment.

you could drop them in the nazi party, a tech org, a church, a hospital, it doesn’t matter.

more than just survival, they actually rise. fast. & in rising, they hollow the thing out from the inside.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ it’s an absolutely remarkable skillset.

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@Nayan_Sarawgi @kushalbhagia @allin_adi @All_IN_CAPITAL Thanks, man!

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Proud to partner with @kushalbhagia, @allin_adi and the @All_IN_CAPITAL team for our pre-seed round.

Partners from Day Zero in our journey to change this world!

[Kushal Bhagia 🇮🇳 @kushalbhagia]

🚨Announcing our first Golden Ticket winner 🚨

Sid and Yash are building Vasuki AI - the agentic Bloomberg terminal for commodity hedging!

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@kushalbhagia @siddharth17 The lore is from the Sagarmanthan episode in mythology. They use the serpent as a tool to churn out 'nectar of immortality'.

Our clients use us to hedge their risks. That's trading to stay immortal amidst market volatility, and not for profits or speculation.

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@kushalbhagia @siddharth17 haha long story.

To our clients, it's just a random aggregation of syllables in the same way Google is.

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@hpgk Thanks, king!

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@ashishgpt2 @kushalbhagia lessgo, king!

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

@aishwaaryy @kushalbhagia @sharmafication To infinity & beyond 🫡

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

https://t.co/rd4lsBbuXX

Approved by Fireball.

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

"the best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement"

[Tanmai Vully @TanmaiVully]

Gathering the Blr crew for the Artemis launch. 🚀
Pull up!
https://t.co/ZNAdzyQPYq

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Software is chicken.

[Suhas Sumukh @suhasasumukh]

storytelling is quietly becoming the most valuable service layer in software.

we're in this moment where building has gotten weirdly fast. the cost and time to ship are collapsing.

which means the old assumptions about what protects you are breaking down.

if your product can be recreated in days by anyone decent, features stop being the defense. execution becomes expected, not special.

so what actually holds?

it comes down to whether people have a reason to stay with you specifically when the alternative functions the same way.

and that reason isn't in the interface. interfaces can be copied. it's about whether what you made actually means something to them. whether it connects to how they think about themselves or what they're working toward.

code is forkable. meaning isn't, at least not easily.

storytelling works here not as persuasion but as recognition. you're not making people want something new. you're reflecting back what they already sense about themselves and showing them you built with that in mind.

as everything smooths out technically and starts looking similar, real depth gets rare.

story creates that. it's what makes people stay when the clone works just as well but doesn't mean anything.

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

Commoditize the Complement 🫡

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Let me explain exactly why VLC is free despite 6B downloads, because no one seems to get it.

VLC doesn’t make money because making money would destroy the only thing that made it reach 6 billion downloads in the first place.

The player grew through a specific distribution loop: tech-savvy users install it once, it works perfectly on every weird video file they throw at it, and they recommend it to everyone forever. IT departments deploy it across entire companies. A Reddit comment from 2009 still drives downloads in 2025 because the answer never changed.

That recommendation engine dies the second ads appear. Not slowly. Immediately.

The users who drive VLC’s distribution are the exact people who understand what ads mean. Your incentives just switched from “make the best player” to “maximize impressions.” They see it, stop recommending it, and your growth engine shuts off.

Run the actual numbers. VLC gets maybe 50 million active users daily across 6 billion total downloads. Typical video player ad rates run $1-3 CPM. Even if you served ads on every playback session, you’re looking at maybe $50-150 million annually at absolute peak optimistic assumptions.

Sounds like a lot until you realize what Kempf actually traded it for.

VLC reaching 6 billion people made Kempf the person who built the infrastructure everyone depends on. He runs a video consulting business. He built dav1d, an AV1 codec that powers modern streaming. Being “the guy who kept VLC free” opens every door in video technology. Clients pay him to solve problems because he proved he optimizes for quality over quick monetization.

“Former ad-supported media player executive” gets you exactly zero of that leverage.

The people celebrating Kempf’s ethics are missing the calculation. He didn’t sacrifice millions for principles. He rejected $150M in highly uncertain ad revenue to build permanent positioning worth multiples of that in everything else he touches.

VLC free generates more value for Kempf than VLC monetized ever could. The trade was never even close.

[Prabhav @prabhav_guddati]

All you “geographically monogamous” wannabes. Comms people have had richer terminology for longer.

Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM)

Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM)

Polarization-Division Multiplexing (PDM)

Frequency-Division Multiplexing (FDM)

[Sid Ratnam @sidratnam]

King.

[Abhinav Kukreja @kukreja_abhinav]

New hero unlocked