Surojit Chatterjee

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.

46

3 Comments

I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode with Shiva Singh Sangwan. We discussed the evolution of Humba Ventures & Susa Ventures; tips for raising and building a fund; how to improve investment sourcing & picking; the role of luck in investing, and so on. https://lnkd.in/eiqsStej

32

3 Comments

I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

41

5 Comments

During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

10

5 Comments

Wow, great stuff on this first episode. I got the run down from Ataes Aggarwal and Arya Satish, and I see that critically important business and life topics will be covered in this podcast series. Follow, tune in, and spread the word. PSA: Some super thoughtful and practical content to be had here with this podcast. 🙌

13

1 Comment

Arvind Narayanan's latest talk delves into the complexities of evaluating large language models (LLMs). A must-view for those keen on understanding the challenges and nuances of LLM evaluation in AI development. Catch the full talk here: https://buff.ly/3ZG68Rq #AI #LLM #Evaluation #TechTalks #ArvindNarayanan #AIResearch

5

Excited to announce the launch of Bracket by BoldCap 🚀 India's first Go-To-Market platform for entrepreneurs building global AI companies. For the past year, Bracket has been exclusively supporting our portfolio founders to tackle the complexities of scaling AI-native products in the global market, especially North America. Today, I am excited to launch Bracket; to provide all AI builders with the same GTM accessibility.. 🎯 The new landscape shift has made it absolutely clear that traditional SaaS playbooks no longer fit the bill for AI-native products. We are redefining this through Bracket – our closely curated community of 50+ GTM operators across North America and Europe who offer the resources, networks, and the new-age playbooks that founders need in their $0-$1M journey of building an AI company from India to the world. 🌍 We work with some of the smartest minds in GTM globally– from the Revenue director at Clari, Pricing leader at DocuSign, GTM leader at Databricks, Sales leader at Outreach to Growth Leader at Snowflake and many more– all exceptionally talented operators who have built multiple GTM motions from scratch and are now committed to support the upcoming generation of entrepreneurs along with us. We deeply believe this is what our ecosystem needs: accessibility to the right leaders in the global market, and we aim to bridge this for Indian founders. Thanks to our early GTM partners Jyoti Swarnkar Samuel Sunderaraj Kiran Surapaneni Merritt Baer Murali K Atul Sahai Ramana Narayanam Sara Archer Sara Jones Shiv Sundar Stan Rymkiewicz Andreas Drakos Andres Lozano Sanudo Ashwath M. Brant W. Cody Harris Connor Williams Daniil Krets Jake Haselden Jeff de Ruyter Karthik Ramamoorthy Kevin Flitcroft Laura Handy LeeRon Yahalomi Paul McGhee Shane O'Neill (and the list goes on.... unfortunately not able to tag more) who shaped Bracket into a powerful community along with us. Big shout out to Aditi Gera for all her effort on putting this together and to the rest of the BoldCap team Shiv Tayal Pratham Chadha Kevin D'Souza. Thank you Bhuvana Kamath and YourStory Media for this exclusive coverage - https://lnkd.in/gZBXTsmv If you're founder in the AI software space, we are excited to work with you! BoldCap

179

22 Comments

its not just about VC/investor appetite for more mature start-ups where the risk is relatively less, its the turn now of VCs being treated the same by LPs. very likely to happen in India as well if not already happening. The infamous long tail in VC universe is very much going to be a reality.

5

If you are in the VC space, you should know one of the early drivers of "Moneyball for VC". That's Gopinath Sundaramurthy, Ph.D Gopi partnered with the Kauffman Fellows Fund on implementing these concepts in their investment process. The results were staggering. 50% of the investments the fund made became unicorns. In Gopi's words 👇🏻 "We knew something was working, so we thought: Let's build this a little bigger." What did that look like in practice? 1️⃣ Gopi's firm uses a single ‘source of truth’ platform to centralize information, improving decision-making and consistency. 2️⃣ They maintain an even 50/50 split between data engineers and investors to ensure they leverage data to gain insights into teams, markets, and products. Want to learn more about what Gopi and the team at Ensemble VC has implemented at their firm? Check out the case study that our sponsor Harmonic published about the firm -->

53

2 Comments

ScaleUp AI has always been a unique platform to get a snapshot of the state of AI by bringing together builders & starups along with CxOs & practioners in one dialogue. This year was no different with insights from thought leaders like Allie K. Miller and Andrew Ng, AI in Healthcare, Finance & Government and exploring a range of technical & architectural considerations. My session on AI Agents was quite engaging with Artem H. and Daniel Vassilev sharing their learnings from developing Agentic platforms and Ruchir Puri offering a reality check from an Enterprise deployment perspective. Some key observations: - From Artem: The key is to build a Agentic platform that can consistently provide deterministic outcomes while harnessing the probabilistic strengths of LLMs - From Dan: It is important to deeply understand the business users perspective while designing the AI Agents and not focus just on the technical teams - From Ruchir: There is a lot of Agent washing going on and Enterprises see thru it. Agentic platforms need to solve complex workflows and prove they are better than current solutions. We are clearly early in the journey towards AI enabled Enterprises and Insight Partners is excited to invest in amazing founders and companies like CrewAI as we drive this consequential transition. Also see : https://lnkd.in/gUx_p-XK #ScaleUpAI #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI IBM Data, AI & Automation Bardeen Relevance AI CrewAI

78

1 Comment

SolarSquare Energy is the largest installer and operator of distributed solar assets in India, and has become one of my favorite case studies of *nailing* product-market fit within the Lowercarbon Capital portfolio. This week, they announced a $40M Series B funding round led by our friends over at Lightspeed - it's go time, chalo! India is the world's fastest growing residential solar market, with more roofs and more sun than just about anywhere on the planet. There's a whole lot of room to run - only 1M homes have been solarized to date out of the 50M ready to install. Add that up, and we see a $100B prize up for grabs by the end of the decade. The jalebi on top? The Indian government has strategically accelerated this industry by rolling out subsidies, reducing permitting friction, and enshrining net metering as a legal right. Solar Square is in the right place at the right time. Huge congrats to Shreya Mishra, Neeraj Jain, Nikhil Nahar, and the entire team. If anyone is looking to join the next Indian unicorn at the center of the global energy transition, look no further. #tech #climatetech #climate #energy #energytransition #solar #electrification #india #emergingmarkets

54

5 Comments

My latest episode is about what you need to know about AI!

37

4 Comments

Fascinating conversation with James Joaquin + Vinod Khosla on venture, founders and investing with intention for returns and a positive future. With a fun bit on the “shoes of AI”.

4

Episode 341 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Somak Chattopadhyay, Managing Partner at Armory Square Ventures. Yes, markets like the Bay Area, NYC, and Boston get a lot of attention when it comes to building startups and having the ability to raise capital, but there are lots of other places to build a successful company. This has always been the case, but the pandemic definitely pushed this reality further.  This is why a firm like Amory Square Ventures exists. There are lots of secondary markets where entrepreneurs need access to capital and it is also a very important matter for the local economy for these companies to grow and create jobs, versus relocating. Somak shares the details of what led him down the path to start Armory Square Ventures, a seed and early stage venture fund, and why their approach of investing in seconday markets has not only been a differentiator for their firm but what they also consider as an optimism engine and a community catalyst for regions outside Silicon Valley. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice on how founders can push back on advice from investors. * Somak’s background story and his early career in startups. * How he landed in venture capital at Edison Ventures and Tribeca Venture Partners. * The details on what they are targeting for investments and portfolio company examples like Machinery Partner and ACV Auctions, a Buffalo company that went public. * Somak’s anti-portfolio, companies that he reviewed and an investment didn’t work out and went on to be a successful company. * Advice on building a marketplace. * And so much more. #venturecapital #startups #marketplaces

5

Grammarly just acquired startup Coda (last valued at 1.2bn) with a goal of a possible IPO. This could be a big move in productivity, especially for product teams. Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra was recently on Lenny's podcast (first comment below). https://lnkd.in/gmgfcm2P

1

1 Comment

Insightful look into bioplatform strategy, and what it takes to raise a Series A from my partner, Omri Amirav-Drory: https://lnkd.in/dFv7GbF6

20