Shashank Jha

Building a startup is not for the faint-hearted. At first, there will be zero paying users and a buggy product. Your family might doubt your choices, and money will run out faster than you think. There will be days when the urge to return to a steady job feels overwhelming. But startup founders are a different breed—they persist when others would quit. Startup founders always embrace the uncertainty of the journey. They consider each setback an opportunity to grow, to refine the business, and to come back stronger. They turn adversity into fuel and keep trying until they succeed. Video Credit: Dagobert Renouf ~~~~~ ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost it so your network can learn from it, too. And follow me, Fazlur Shah, for more content like this. #startups #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #investing

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OpenAI declared war on Google yesterday and 82% of Indian shoppers are already on their side without knowing it. ChatGPT now has "Instant Checkout." You can search for products, compare options, and complete purchases without leaving the chat window. 700 million weekly users can now shop directly through conversations. Within hours of this announcement: 📌 Etsy's stock jumped 16%.  📌 Shopify gained 6%. The market immediately understood what this means for traditional e-commerce. When people use ChatGPT for shopping, they convert at 4× higher rates than regular websites, and that is because users spend 14 minutes per session on Ai tools like ChatGPT as compared to Google's 5 minutes. India's position in this makes it even more interesting: → 87% of Indian shoppers believe AI tools help them shop faster, with AI-powered interactions showing higher engagement rates (Walmart Retail Rewired Report India, 2025) → 62% of Indians make purchases influenced by AI recommendations vs 30% globally (EY India, Aug 2024) Traditional shopping makes you open multiple tabs, visit different websites, and compare prices manually. ChatGPT collapses this entire journey into one conversation. For small businesses, this could level the playing field. A seller in Jaipur gets the same access to global users as Amazon does. For established platforms, the threat is real. Why would customers visit your website when they can complete everything through a conversation? The companies optimizing for AI discovery today will own tomorrow's market. Is your business ready for AI-powered shopping or still relying only on traditional search?

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How do you build a global smartphone brand from scratch in a market ruled by Apple and Samsung? Once upon a time, after co-founding and scaling OnePlus into a cult brand, Carl Pei walked away to start over. Most people thought he’d lost it. The smartphone market is a graveyard of failed challengers. But in 2020 he launched Nothing, together with his old colleague Akis Evangelidis, who now runs as President of India and co-founder. The early days were scrappy. A small London HQ. A design crew pulled in from Dyson and teenage engineering. Factories in India and China. Their first product, the transparent ear (1), was more than earbuds. It was a statement: design can still surprise and that a new challenger was in town. This was their ticket to play. Then came the Phone (1). With its glowing glyphs on the back, a clean Android skin, and bold branding, it instantly stood out in a sea of identical black slabs. Four years later, Nothing has shipped more than 7 million devices, clocked $500 million in sales in 2023 with 150% year-on-year growth, and is on track to hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024. But the real differentiator isn’t the hardware. It’s how Carl and the team tell their story. Carl goes on YouTube, not just to market but to spar. He addresses negative reviews directly. He even reviewed the iPhone himself, turning the tables on Big Tech. The brand’s content is witty, transparent, and fun. That’s why younger, design-obsessed buyers feel like they’re part of the movement, not just customers. Now, Nothing just announced a fresh $200 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation. The round brought together Tiger Global, Qualcomm Ventures, Nikhil Kamath, Tony Fadell, Steve Huffman, GV (Google Ventures), Highland Europe and others as believers. The new bigger and bolder goal: build AI-native devices and a future where, in Carl’s words, “a billion people will have a billion different operating systems.” India has been one of Nothing’s most important markets. E-commerce has been the great distributor. The appetite for bold, design-first products is massive. My wife just bought a Nothing phone, and I get why it clicks. It feels fresh. It feels different. The bigger question is what this means for India’s own hardware ecosystem. Can founders here take inspiration, be bold, and build for the world in this new AI-native era? We’re already seeing success from Ultrahuman, and big sparks with Deepinder Goyal backing a former team member Surobhi Das with LAT Aerospace and even the team building NeoSapien. Moral of the story: Specs don’t create cult brands. Stories, communities, and founders who show up with authenticity do. Nothing proves that even in the toughest hardware market, there’s space for a new voice. The challenge for India now is to take that lesson and build hardware startups that go truly global.

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90% of startups don’t die from competition. They die from 4 silent traps. Trap 1: No Product–Market Fit Pets.com raised $82M in the 90s and collapsed in under two years. They sold what local stores already offered. India’s quick commerce feels eerily similar. Burning crores to deliver things your kirana already sends for free. Trap 2: Vanity Spending OurBeginnings.com spent $4M on a Super Bowl ad. Their revenue that year? Less than $4M. Today, it’s like a startup with ₹20 crore revenue dropping ₹25 crore on IPL ads. Hype doesn’t pay the bills. Trap 3: Regulation Napster had 80M users before lawsuits shut it down. Closer home, ONDC is rewriting the rules for food delivery. If Swiggy or Zomato lean too hard on data-led cloud kitchens, they could face the same fate. Trap 4: Too Early Z.com tried to be YouTube in 1999, before broadband. It died. YouTube launched in 2005, when the market was ready, and thrived. Being early doesn’t make you a visionary. It makes you broke. Most founders think they’ll die fighting competitors. In reality, the killers are invisible until it’s too late. Which Indian startups do you think are closest to falling into one of these traps?

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INTENSITY: My message to all the Founders, Builders, Operators is to stop obsessing about “How do I win?” and start asking “How can I immerse myself into my craft?”. Deeply caring about what you do is the best way of becoming successful at what you do. Let me share something very fundamental that I have learned over 30 years of my career.  1. Work "intensity" is its own reward: If your job allows you to work like an artist and give everything you have (with room for experimentation) then you are already successful. 2. Success is a by-product: When you truly immerse yourself in your work and ignore the outcome, your chances of a positive outcome increases but success should really be a by-product not the goal. 3. Immersion is key: The more you ignore the noise, cut the distractions and work like an artist or an athlete; the more it increases your chances of a positive outcome. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. When you play with intensity and you get better in your craft you begin to increase your odds at future wins. Most operators, founders and execs spend too much time trying to win, outperform competitors, beat the market, raise the biggest round or increase ARR. When you treat your work as a craft and chase mastery over metrics, the scorecards often take care of itself. If your work keeps you up at night and lifts your spirits fueled by a series of micro-learnings or small wins then you’re already on the right track; everything else is bonus. How many of you B2B Folks find this craft-first mindset resonating with you ?

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He almost got thrown out of IIT Delhi. Later, he led Microsoft’s online ads business. Today, he’s backed 7+ unicorns at Foundation Capital Ashu Garg's journey is nothing short of remarkable. From growing up across Sudan and India in a middle-class, resource-constrained environment… ➡️ To a serendipitous parking lot encounter that turned him from founder to VC. ➡️ To being one of the earliest investors in companies like Databricks, Eightfold, Cohesity, Turing and others. In our conversation, Ashu shares: → Why grit matters more than credentials → How to spot and back outlier founders → Why India will be the next global tech pillar after Silicon Valley → His bet on AI & machine learning nearly 20 years before it became mainstream If you want to learn how one of Silicon Valley’s sharpest minds thinks about founders, markets, and the future of technology — this episode is worth your time. 🎙️ Full episode in comments. #indiandiaspora

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everyone wants to feel “in the know” on ai. few actually touch the tools. but you don’t learn to swim by debating water temp - you jump in. into the deep end. last weekend with Code with AI, 🥃 Agrim Singh and i taught a room full of ppl who never touched code before. folks who usually build skyscrapers 🏢 or theme parks 🎢 suddenly building software. and here's the thing: being “in the know” about ai means accepting that it’s MESSY. you’re going to npm install the wrong thing. you’ll get stuck in infinite loops. you’ll feel like you've been dropped into an alien world 👽 with no language to describe your bug. but that discomfort is necessary if you want to speak from real experience instead of empty speculation. because only builders don't put ai on a pedestal - they know it intimately, flaws and all: - when you pollute your context window and the model hallucinates - when a single missing sentence in a prompt derails your entire chain - when you ask ai to do 10 things at once and it does all 10 badly - when the limits of ai mirror the limits of human cognition - rendered in code and only by building (and breaking, and rebuilding) do you truly live the real power of these tools - not just hear it echoed in panel debates. and yet our students shipped anyway: - an ios app to track stools (yes... 💩 ) - a singapore transit optimizer factoring weather, distance, and price - one person even built 12 apps in 24 hours (shoutout Jelili Odunayo Kazeem!!) this is what “exposure to ai” actually looks like: messy, hard, exhilarating. if you want to dive into the deep end too, waitlist for the next Code with AI class is in the comments.

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From Dream11 to CoinDCX to Slice — they had one thing in common: operating in the grey. Fantasy gaming was never fully legal. Outright “games of chance” like lotteries were prohibited. But sugar coated as “games of skill,” online fantasy platforms operated in a grey zone for years, attracting users, heavy VC funding, and unicorn valuations. That grey zone has just been shut 🛑 The Online Gaming Bill 2025 bans all real money online games with consequences of hefty monetary penalty and jail time. And this wasn’t a fringe experiment. Dream11: $8 Bn valuation, backed by Tiger Global, Steadview, DST Global, D1 Capital MPL: $2.5 Bn valuation, funded by Peak XV, RTP Global, Google, Times Internet, BEENEXT Tier 1 VCs bet big. With one ruling, the core of these businesses is outlawed. Though, this isn’t the first time Take crypto exchanges. In 2018, RBI barred banks from working with them. Exchanges like Zebpay shut down India ops. In 2020, the Hon'ble Supreme Court overturned the ban, a win for the industry. But the Govt. was adamant and in 2022, it struck back with a 30% tax on crypto gains and 1% TDS on every trade! The effect was the same as a ban. CoinDCX, valued at $2.15 Bn with funding from Steadview and Pantera, saw volumes collapse by ~90%. WazirX and others faced the same fate. Or look at BNPL cards. In 2022, RBI clarified that credit lines can’t be loaded onto prepaid wallets. That single circular forced Slice, backed again by Tiger Global, Blume to shut down its flagship product overnight and pivot to term loans - valuation stalled and promised funding was put on hold. A recurring trend is clear. Indian startups often mimic Western models (fantasy gaming like DraftKings, BNPL like Klarna, crypto like Coinbase) without fully grasping India’s regulatory context. Surprisingly, even marquee global investors pile in, probably out of fomo. And then, one ruling, one tax, or one circular, and it all collapses overnight. The learning is blunt: Startups that scale in the grey in India eventually face Govt. scrutiny and the odds are unlikely to be in their favour. 👉 Do you think India’s Govt. / Regulators are being unnecessarily over cautious, hurting foreign inflows, innovation and ease of doing business? #easeofdoingbusiness #startups

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I started my first venture at 21 and sold it in a multi-million-dollar transaction when I was 26. Today, I’m building my second venture, GreyLabs AI, where we’ve raised millions in capital and are scaling fast. Across this journey, here are 10 learnings that have stayed with me: 1. Startups fail on Day 1, not when they run out of money - if the founding team isn’t right. You need shared vision + complementary skills. 2. Sell first, build later. Don’t waste years building what no one wants. Get customer buy-in before writing code. 3. Focus on a small market. At GreyLabs AI, we’re laser-focused on the India BFSI. Shiny distractions exist everywhere, but focus wins. 4. High-impact individual contributors matter. In the AI era, such people can drive more value than larger teams. 5. Hire a strong law firm. Bad contracts (customers, vendors, shareholders, even cofounders) can destroy your business. 6. Customers > Investors. Be frugal, get paying clients, and build proof. Investors follow traction - otherwise, you’ll only get "advice". 7. Control your spending. Many founders start spending mindlessly after raising money. Waste money today, and money will waste you tomorrow. 8. Culture beats perks. My first startup was bootstrapped, with limited benefits. But no toxic managers, genuine care, and empathy earned us a 4.6 rating on Glassdoor (75+ reviews, all organic). 9. Undercommit, overdeliver. Never oversell. Promise only what you can deliver - and then exceed expectations. 10. Stay grateful. To your team, customers, investors, and family. None of this happens alone. Startups are tough, but with the right principles, they’re also the most rewarding journeys one can take. #startups #business #entrepreneurship

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𝐆𝐓𝐌 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐅𝐒𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 And if you’re building in India, you quickly realize: it’s less about speed and more about understanding how things actually move. 1. There’s no single buyer. Product might love you, but Ops is risk-averse. Compliance wants a legal opinion. Tech wants infra docs. Everyone has veto power, and timelines don’t move till all green lights align. 2. Bottom-up sounds democratic, but is painfully slow. You find a champion, you do a free POC, you show result, and still nothing moves. Because decision-making sits way higher. And often, the folks you start with aren’t even in the room when final calls are made. 3. Top-down works better - if you can get in. Senior leaders care about org-wide impact and risk savings. If your pitch solves a board-level problem, you skip 6 layers of internal selling. Otherwise, you’re just another tool in the pile. 4. Security, infra, and compliance are not “later” conversations. If you’re not enterprise-ready from Day 1, most BFSI players won’t even let you inside the building. 5. Everyone’s overloaded. The risk lead is doing 3 roles. The Ops lead is managing 10 vendors. If your solution isn’t dead simple to understand - and implement - they’ll thank you and never call back. This is a market that tests your GTM clarity more than your tech Get it right, and you build deep moats. Get it wrong, and you waste a year chasing the wrong door. #AI #Founderslife

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