Swapnil Sheth

Startup Fund Raising, Investment Banking @IndigoEdge. Ex-Equity Research Analyst @ Goldman Sachs. Tech enthusiast, Football & book lover. MDI Alum.

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

6 years after requesting this feature, glad to see some product manager at #WhatsApp #Meta has implemented this!

WhatsApp Will Soon Let You Set Message Reminders, Just Like Slack https://t.co/sMG3OJyjur

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

Seriously needed feature:
To be able to add reminder to @WhatsApp messages so that those messages pop up as notifications at desired times.

#WhatsApp #productmanagement #FeatureRequest

[Puneet Kumar @puneetiitm]

India spent a decade learning why retrospective tax is poison. We're about to throw the lesson away.
Picture this: your team wins a cricket match, clean, by the rules of the game that day. A year later, the umpire changes a rule and applies it backward — and declares you lost the match you already won.
That's retrospective tax. You broke nothing. They moved the line, then pointed it at your past.
We did exactly this to Vodafone in 2012, chasing them over a 2007 deal. Cairn Energy got hit too. Both went to international arbitration. Both won. India refunded over $1.2 billion and spent years as the cautionary tale that every global investor cited as the reason they hesitated on us.
In 2021, we finally repealed it and called retro taxation a thing of the past. Capital started trusting us again.
This week, the courts upheld retrospective GST on online gaming. Dream11 and an entire industry now owe tax on years of operations under rules that didn't exist at the time.
Retrospective tax doesn't punish what you did. It punishes you for not predicting what the government would later wish you'd done.
As a country, we should not set such a precedent.
#Noretrospectivetax

[Puneet Kumar @puneetiitm]

Three punches in a row.
First, GST on online gaming jumped to 28% on deposits. Dream11 took the hit and rebuilt the business.
Then the government banned real-money gaming. They took the hit again and pivoted to sports and stocks.
Today, the courts upheld retrospective GST — paying tax on years of past operations under rules that didn't exist at the time.
No company survives a third punch like that. It will wipe out the whole industry.
@harshjain85 and the @Dream11 team built something super special. They complied with every rule, always looked after their users, absorbed every increase, and never asked for sympathy. Just kept building.
What got upheld today doesn't punish bad actors. It punishes builders.
The silence on Twitter is the most depressing part of all this. I really hope the government reconsiders — there is still a way to save this industry and the people who built it.

[Murray Hill Guy @MurrayHillGuy1]

If you're a millennial it's time to pick your midlife crisis:

1. Quitting alcohol
2. Running 10 miles before work
3. Divorce
4. Panic baby at 35 with wife you hate
5. Pickleball
6. ADHD diagnosis
7. Dressing like you did in 2004
8. Blacking out every weekend like you’re 21
9. Weekly hinge dates
10. Ice baths and saunas
11. Board games and craft beer in the suburbs
12. Getting into tattoos
13. Quitting your job to explore your “passions”
14. Plants and the environment
15. Traveling

[Simone Syed @SimoneSyed]

Fundamentally I don't think there are enough people trying to actually change the world

[Tosin @tosin_1109]

My mental health for the whole year depends on these 3 games.

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@BadCapitalVC 👋🏻👋🏻

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@InvestRepeat Tagging the creator of chart @refsrc

[khushi suri @khushkhushkhush]

lot of fundraising advice on 'running a really tight process' and creating a ton of fomo to get a deal done. i'll take the counter here. the founders i know that are happiest with their lead investors spent significant time with the partner on their deal to see if it was a mutual fit.

not everything is a game. you are entering into a 10 year partnership with someone, it would likely behoove you to get to know them really well before giving them a massive chunk of your company. also, some investors do really well in the first few meetings and then become totally different people after several hours spent together

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

PayPal’s implosion is wild.

PYPL hit a peak market cap of $356B on July 23rd, 2021. Nearly on par with Mastercard and more valuable than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Amex or Goldman Sachs.

Since then, fell 89% to $39B and is worth far less than all those firms.

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

From "software is eating the world" to "GPU is eating the software"

Software, a high margin business, is now trading at its lowest post pandemic, relative to semis.

h/t @coatuemgmt

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@BojanRadojici10 Please share. Thanks in advance!

[Sameer Nigam @_sameernigam]

Have got numerous inquiries today asking us whether Rahul & I sold $430Mn worth of our shares 'for personal liquidity'. The short answer is - Absolutely Not!

In Sept 2025, all employees of @PhonePe , including both of us founders, were allowed by our Board and shareholders to exercise our vested ESOPs.

Exercise of ESOPs triggers an immediate tax obligation on employees in India. To meet our respective tax obligations, the Board also permitted us to sell a fixed number of our shares (== the exact amount of each employees/founders' tax obligation!) to GA via a secondary transaction.

The entire secondary capital was deposited to the company, which in turn deposited ~6000Cr total TDS to the tax authorities. NONE of us employees or founders got any personal liquidity as a result of this transaction.

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

The crowd on a weekend evening at Litti Chokha Corner in HSR reminded of early days of @RameshwaramCafe in terms of achieving a product market fit.

@peakbengaluru

[Tushar Shinde @dstartupkid]

A few months back, @LightspeedIndia featured @VaaniHQ in their voice AI landscape.

It was reassuring to see our work show up in a space that’s starting to mature.

What it really highlighted for us is that voice AI has moved past demos.

It’s now being used in places where things can’t afford to break (healthcare calls, financial workflows, hiring, and customer ops).

Most of our work at @VaaniHQ goes into this unsexy layer (making voice systems fast, dependable, and usable in the real world).

We’ve built a part of that foundation.
There’s still a lot to figure out.

Thankyou for all the validation!

also kudos to the team at @smallest_AI @kamath_sutra @Devanshpawan1 @dahalerishabh1 and entire team!

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

Food for thought for those building and investing in early stage startups:

"Figure out the experience first and then the economics.

Try it out. See what the experience is. Let’s try to measure out what the value add is, and then the economics will take care of themselves."

[Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj]

Really interesting discussion on how Uber CEO Dara thinks about monetizing AI assistants that are trying to use Uber to book rides

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@businessbarista Claude

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone needs to hear this…

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@rom1trs Editor

[Swapnil Sheth @swapedia]

@airindia Thanks Ruhid Sab for excellent service and going out of way for accommodating my request.

[Aadit Sheth @aaditsh]

The most dangerous addiction today isn't a substance.

Research on 100,000 people confirms that heavy short-form video use is just voluntary cognitive decline. We are actively training our brains to fail at hard tasks.

If you can simply sit with a problem for 10 minutes without swiping, you have a massive competitive advantage.

Basically, boredom is the new IQ.