Vishal Chandra

Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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🎉 Excited to share as an indirect investor that DevRev, backed by Khosla Ventures, has officially become a unicorn. Dheeraj Pandey, CEO at DevRev, puts it perfectly: "At the end of the day, every developer is either building something new or fixing something related to the product. But inefficient systems and processes keep developers further from their consumers. We believe there's a better way to build, operate, support, and grow your business through code. That's why we've embarked on a journey to create the Developer Customer Relationship Manager (DevCRM) that we hope will help makers build the most customer-centric companies on earth." Here are some key points about DevRev: - Co-founded by Dheeraj Pandey (co-founder of Nutanix) and Manoj Agarwal (former SVP of Engineering at Nutanix). - Offers three modern CRM apps tailored for support, product, and growth teams. - Already making waves in Southeast Asia. If you're in the region and have questions, reach out to Jeffin Mathew. 💡 Fun fact: Nutanix was also backed by Khosla Ventures. Congratulations to the entire DevRev team on reaching this incredible milestone in under 4 years! I'm thrilled to be part of the journey as a Limited Partner in 2 | Twelve one of their seed investors.

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Truly inspiring to listen to Dax Dasilva tell the story of Lightspeed Commerce on 20VC. With $900M in ARR I was thrilled to learn that Dax bootstrapped the company for 7 years to get to $10M in ARR. I hope it doesn't take us 7 years to get Liquid360 there but it makes me feel better about the 3.5 years we've put in to date. For me these stories are deeply encouraging. When you're building something very big it can take time to get to launch. A couple of weeks ago we met with a global player in the VC world. They were looking to invest $5M - $10M and we said we weren't there yet. We'll get there but it wouldn't be the right move today. They then jumped to another conclusion. The wrong one. I get it. They have a multi-billion dollar fund and capital to deploy. We have a company to grow and too much cash will not help us do it right. We've made good decisions being lean. Our customers are starting at $500K. This is an enterprise/gov't product. We have to satisfy a very discerning customer. No bugs, no glitches. A dependable and reliable product. We are excited by the feedback. We are making the world safer. Harry Stebbings suggested that Lightspeed is one of the most misunderstood companies. It's market cap is $2.6B which seems really low relative to the ARR. Very interesting episode.

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India is not just catching up in the AI race; we're innovating and leading in ways that are uniquely ours. The Economic Times recently highlighted how our approach to Generative AI goes beyond just Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing the specific challenges and opportunities within our diverse market. Rahul Agarwalla, Managing Partner at SenseAI Ventures, shared his invaluable insights into this AI revolution. His leadership and vision are truly driving innovation in the field, and it's an honour to be part of this journey with him. For anyone interested in the developments in AI and how India is making its mark on the global stage, this is a must-read.

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Great course by Andrew Ng and Shreya Rajpal on guardrails. And the best model on Guardrails hub for minimizing hallucinations is none other than our Bespoke-MiniCheck model. It is better and cheaper than frontier models. Get started with it today: https://lnkd.in/gKzciipz PS: If you are wondering how we beat GPT-4 or other frontier models for this task, it's basically cool synthetic data creation. We are cooking a library so you can also fine-tune models that beat frontier models on your narrow task. DM if you are interested in testing an early beta.

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We’re facing a deluge of ecommerce enabler startups, and honestly, I don’t quite know why. I’d like to figure out if there is a bigger trend at play here, and also see as many more companies as possible in this space to help develop a thesis. So if you have any gyaan to dispense, please share your thoughts here or DM me (and we can setup a call thereafter if needed). And if you are a founder in this space/ know somebody who is building in this space, please write to/ refer them to [email protected] Dilsher Dhupia Pranav Sanghvi Tanuj Saraf Merak Ventures

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Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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There are two interesting and relatively new/emerging revenue models in hardware space. (1) Software Enabled Hardware Hardware is sold at lower but slowly improving gross margins (eg 20-40%), and software recurring revenues layered on top. Software sells at higher margins, enabling blended margins to appear in 50%+ category. These are applied in situations where hardware is not expected to be replaced or greatly improved upon in deployment for a significant number of years to come. Consider your car, or military equipment, or even infrastructure equipment. As always, there are often multiple business/revenue models utilized by different players in the same industry. (2) Hardware As A Service Hardware and software are bundled and sold with annually recurring revenues. Often multi-year contracts are signed to be able to amortize hardware over time, and enable blended gross margins over the length of the contract to be high (approaching 60-75%). This is more common in situations where vendor takes responsibility to upgrade hardware as needed along the way to provide maximum and highest functionality to the customer. Hardware inventory costs are, over time, passed on to suppliers or third party financing parties in lieu of few gross margin points. Consider robots as a service in factories (ala Formic), or AI-enabled equipment (eg Evolv, Lumafield etc). Hardware innovation will require deeper investigation, experimentation, and understanding of business/revenue models to fit customer needs as well as to maximize value for the innovating company. Strong and experienced management teams work hard to minimize sales friction, inventory costs etc, but also maximize gross margins, customer stickiness, and ability to upsell during the life of a contract.

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Attached is NVDA's price chart for the last year - up c.175% (up 2500%+ in L5Y period!!) 🚀 I nonetheless have conviction that it currently remains undervalued... Among other things, due to strong competitive positioning as a GPU-maker, AI-driven demand fuelled by investor and consumer interest, and moats it has built. This is mirrored by equity analysts – GS’ latest price target was $800, BofA’s $1,500. I do believe the growth is capped, and driven in equal measure by under-supply and bubble-like demand as it is by fundamentals. Even so, Nvidia remains an attractive medium term investment. ⚖️ Demand – Supply Dynamics: AI is a generational innovation, and agents /apps are already upending SaaS, or at least so think VCs who deployed $64.6B in AI start-ups in 2023 alone. As early movers and now the industry standard (c.80% market share), Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips are not only the most efficient option, but also crucial for large scale AI training and inference (chips are the biggest cost head for LLM companies). With unprecedented interest in AI (ChatGPT acquired 1M users in 5 days of launch, OpenAI reported $3.4B ARR in Apr’24, AI agents are widely recognised as the tech of the future), Nvidia stands to capture a large portion of the $250-$500B data centre conversion market over the next 5 years​. This is proven by the $22.6B in data centre revenue Nvidia brought in during Q2’24, up 23% from the previous quarter and up 427% from a year ago 🥇Competitive positioning: While Intel, AMD, Arm have been active, the only credible competitor, AMD, has a relatively smaller market share in the high-performance AI GPU segment, and Nvidia’s consistent technological advancements keep it further ahead, e.g., Nvidia’s Rubin which will succeed Blackwell in 2026 is orders of magnitude better than anything on-market. 🤝Moats via ecosystem building: Collaborations with hyperscaler cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure have expanded Nvidia’s reach. Moreover, acquisitions like Mellanox have strengthened its position in high-performance networking, critical to AI infrastructure. Coreweave, a prominent cloud services partner / distribution channel for chip capacity is an NVIDIA investee and is built almost entirely on Nvidia chips. Finally, they continue investing in networking, software tools, data centre solutions but also purpose-built AI PC and smartphones to create an ecosystem that not only locks in customers and enhances switching costs, but pivots more of their revenue to more predictable recurring contracts. 📈 Financial underpinnings: Nvidia’s expected FCF for next 2 years stands at $100B, providing huge ammo for R&D, strategic investments and M&A (only $30 to $35B earmarked for buybacks) and in turn, growth. Even so, their shares trade at a P/E ratio of c.20x  NTM earnings, far below historical median of 35x+, indicating the market expects them to grow in the medium term. KEEN TO HEAR THOUGHTS! #Nvidia #AI #Compute #Chips #Tech #Growth

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This hard reset is required for all AI founders from India building global B2B products: Product Innovation > GTM muscle Product innovation is happening at a rapid pace in each of your categories, valley competitors are building thought through features that can help them win customers mid-long term, GTM muscle alone without product differentiation wont help you win in the first half of this AI decade. We are doing this hard reset within BoldCap on what we are looking for in AI founders. Ping us if you are tinkering in global AI B2B products. Shiv Tayal Pratham Chadha Aditi Gera

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Together with Dr Jussi Westergren, Emmy Network Fellow in Computer Science at Keble College, Oxford, I’ve written for Sifted on the importance of the budget tomorrow for the future of UK tech. It’s absolutely vital that the Government invests in developing the country’s next-generation compute capacity - or ‘supercomputers.’ Next-generation compute is set to drive breakthroughs in everything from drug discovery to financial modelling via supply chain and how we understand language in the near future. And will also create value for businesses and enable startups to accelerate their development exponentially. If the government does not adequately support home-grown supercomputing, the UK risks losing its status as a leading tech hub as its startups struggle to compete with rivals in Europe and the US. But by delivering funding and fostering a conducive wider investment environment, Britain could thrive in the supercomputing era. The depth of tech, research and business talent in this country is second to none, and the appetite from start-ups, corporations and researchers is there. A great deal of work has already been undertaken in Edinburgh in preparation for this investment. Additional schemes can be balanced around the country, and indeed there are a number of sites which would be suitable to host a supercomputer system. Bletchley Park is such a site: with obvious historical symbolism, geographic advantages and the recent host of the global AI safety summit. Alan Turing brought enormous benefits to humankind, and it would be a fitting tribute to him. Turing Machines still influence current computer science and the Turing Test is more relevant than ever. Close to Oxford, Cambridge and London - home to many of the finest brains in the world - the Bletchley Park SuperCompute is a project that must happen. Full piece here:

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OpenAI's Sam Altman interviews serial founder and legendary VC investor Vinod Khosla. Sam asks "What percent of investors are good company builders?" Vinod responds with 3 powerful statements: 1️⃣ 90% of VCs add no value 2️⃣ 70% of VCs add negative value 3️⃣ If you haven't built a company before, you haven't earned the right to advise an entrepreneur #VentureCapital #Fundraising #Founders

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It took us < 30 mins to integrate Llama3 to our health AI stack. It takes our customers < 3 mins. Within a week Llama3 went live with all the 101 GenAI healthtech customers. We’ve curated and integrated 15+ models over last 7+ months to enhance healthcare workflows. Don’t spend weeks or months integrating with just one model; instead have a “team of models” power your “network of copilots”. Great post by Prashanth Aditya Susarla about how to build a high performance AI product with team of LLMs.

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Check out our extensive directory of 850 #B2B #Enterprise VC firms. Connect with leading venture capitalists in the B2B space. Get the list here. https://lnkd.in/dvg5rJKe #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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Check out our extensive directory of 850 #B2B #Enterprise VC firms. Connect with leading venture capitalists in the B2B space. Get the list here. https://lnkd.in/dvg5rJKe #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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🧩 One thing we've noticed with #VentureIQ technology is how well it can distill and communicate complex technical material 🧩 Whether it's a #deeptech venture, a novel #AI application, or even a patent submission, we can quickly distill the business and strategic implications for investors...and sometimes even the founders/PIs themselves! 🤯 Based on our work so far, the tech can handle a wide array of research areas and technological sectors -- anything from blockchain algorithms to vaccine development. It handles the nuance of the field, the specific terminology, and extracts the key concepts which matter for venture-building. 🤓 To demonstrate, I took a patent I helped write with Eric Laber on reinforcement learning. I ran it through #Ventureiq to build a commercial assessment (key differentiators, target markets). Then for fun I had #NotebookLM make a podcast out of it. I've uploaded the result it here (DM me if you'd like the actual report): https://lnkd.in/eiTejsny This is more than just automation or streamlining operations - it's about unlocking clarity and insight when it was previously unattainable, and the ability to do it over and over again no matter the sector or vertical. Interested in more info? DM me so we can chat.

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