Ash Kumar

I recently had the privilege of moderating a fireside chat at Stanford University Graduate School of Business with Vijay Krishnan, Founder & CTO of Turing, alongside Prateek Sharma (Managing Partner, Ahead VC). Moving beyond the usual buzzwords, Vijay shared some deep-cut insights on the AI landscape, market dynamics, and career strategy. Here are a few that really stayed with me: 🌐 Market Alpha Gets you the Global Maximum Vijay echoed Marc Andreessen’s idea that market is the biggest determinant of startup success. After his first exit, he resisted investor pressure to “move fast” and instead invested heavily in exploration, searching for the right market with the best opportunity. He prioritized a global maximum vs shuffling around local peaks. Strategic patience is super valuable. 🔄 Agility + Open-Mindedness = Reinvention Turing began as a developer marketplace and reached unicorn status. But when OpenAI approached them for GPT-3 work, they leaned into a new frontier, evolving into an AI accelerator powering frontier labs and enterprise deployments. Agility and open-mindedness helped them embrace “right-place-right-time” opportunities, as they dared to reinvent. 🏗️ Vertical AI Still Has Moats The narrative that foundation models will swallow every vertical? Vijay pushed back. Companies with deep system integrations, compound products (vs point solutions), and strong distribution create defensible value. Vertical players that solve real workflows wouldn’t vanish overnight just because models gets better (unless there’s AGI…then all bets are off!). 🔧 Consulting Will Focus on Plumbing + Context In the enterprise AI wave, strategy decks won’t cut it. The winners will be the ones who can do context engineering, who identify high-value use cases and actually implement, customize, and plumb AI into complex legacy systems. 🚀 Career Advice: Stay Close to the Frontier For early-career folks, Vijay’s message was clear: “The closer you are to the frontier of AI, the better.” That’s where the opportunities compound. What do you think? #AI #GenAI #FrontierAI #AIInfrastructure #EnterpriseAI #FutureOfWork #TechCareers #VentureCapital #StartupStrategy #Turing #StanfordGSB

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VC Diaries - 241: ONDC, the open commerce network, has crossed hundreds of millions of cumulative orders, live across hundreds of cities. It is still small next to the incumbents. That is the point. Now here is the interesting bit. Every Indian digital public rail looks trivial in year three and inevitable in year ten. UPI was mocked at exactly this stage, by exactly the same confident voices, for exactly the same reason: it was small, and the incumbents were not. The real question about ONDC is not “is it big yet?” It is “what happens to platform power if it works?” If commerce becomes a rail instead of a walled garden, the commissions compress, the small seller gains distribution, and the platform’s moat evaporates. The founders building on it today are buying the cheapest available option on that future. And the adoption curve is the proof. Every rail that looked trivial in year three and inevitable in year ten followed the same shape: slow, then sudden. The mockery at year three is the buy signal, not the verdict. And the small seller is the beneficiary. The platform’s commission is the tax the rail abolishes. The shop that could not afford the walled garden gets the open road. And the adoption curve is the proof. Every rail that looked trivial in year three and inevitable in year ten followed the same shape: slow, then sudden. The mockery at year three is the buy signal, not the verdict. And the small seller is the beneficiary. The platform’s commission is the tax the rail abolishes. The shop that could not afford the walled garden gets the open road. And the founders building on the rail are buying the cheapest option on the future. The one who builds for the open commerce network today owns the position the crowd will want in year ten. And the slow-then-sudden curve is the rail’s signature. The mockery at year three is the buy signal. The founders building on it today own the position the crowd will want at year ten. And the rail’s victory is the ecosystem’s repricing. The commerce that becomes a rail compresses the commission, frees the small seller and evaporates the platform’s moat. The open network is the redistribution. The pattern has run before, in payments, in identity, in commerce. Bet against the rail in year three if you like. Just know that the last people who did that spent year ten regretting it. PS: We at Dexter Ventures are always on the look for good folks building tough things and solving big problems in India, one small way at a time. If you are on that course, we would love to learn. Do share more with my team and me at deals@dexter.ventures!

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Yesterday at the VC Grid gathering at Quorum, I heard Satya Narayan Bansal from Blue Ashva Capital share some powerful formulas around asset allocation and compounding. Simple math. But big impact. It reminded me of something. In the startup ecosystem, we obsess over valuation. But we rarely talk about: • Rule of 72 • CAGR • MOIC • Portfolio allocation logic • Risk-adjusted returns And on founder calls, I still see many who don’t know: • Burn • Runway • CAC • LTV • Dilution math Capital is emotional. But allocation is mathematical. Investors think in formulas. Founders often think in stories. The ones who understand both — win. Grateful to Vansh Oberoi for the invite. Always good to sit in rooms where numbers matter.

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The recent IPOs of startups like Urban Company, Meesho, and Groww show how years of disciplined scaling - supported by talent, capital, and a strong ecosystem- can unlock tremendous economic value. But if we are to become Viksit Bharat in the real sense, we also need to solve our major social development challenges, and we need to solve them at scale. This is where Nonprofit Unicorns come in. We studied 30+ such organisations including Educate Girls, Lend A Hand India, ARAVIND EYE CARE SYSTEM to understand their scale playbooks. And in a recent BW Disrupt piece, Varun and I share steps we believe can create a supporting environment for the next generation of nonprofit unicorns. 1) Celebrate nonprofit unicorns the way we celebrate startup entrepreneurs, and give them their deserved place of pride. This is what attracts talent and capital into the sector. 2) Build supportive government policies and financial instruments, similar to Startup India and the SIDBI FOF, to enable nonprofits to scale effectively. 3) Encourage donors to fund organisation-building, innovation, and technology not just program delivery. And to ask nonprofits about their scale impact strategy and not just short-term metrics. Here is the full article: https://lnkd.in/gPTv_CiD Varun Aggarwal, Shailendra Nath Jha, Raman Uberoi, Arvind Saraf, Gayatri Nair Lobo, Raj Gilda, Luis Miranda, Tanvi Bikhchandani, Geeta Goel Change Engine #NonprofitUnicorns

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Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam AI, the company that just shipped India's first foundation model trained from scratch, warned yesterday that India risks becoming a "digital colony" if it does not build foundational AI itself. At the same summit, JioStar, India's largest media conglomerate, partnered with OpenAI. I recently wrote on Substack about why this keeps happening: "Indians Rule Big Tech. Why Can’t India Build?" (https://lnkd.in/ewQBMCYf). The structural forces are thirty years deep. Source: The Economic Times (https://lnkd.in/eGEgSb95)

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