Deedy
@deedydas
VC at @MenloVentures. Formerly founding team @glean, @Google Search. @Cornell CS. Tweets about tech, immigration, India, fitness and search.
So many Google internal tools have inspired huge startups!
Jira / Asana - Buganizer
CircleCI - TAP
GitHub - Critique
Sourcegraph - cs/
Git - Citc
Slack - GChat
Loom - SnipIt
VSCode - Cider
Glean - Moma
Pave - go/comp
Zoom - Meet
Quip / Notion - GSuite
Superhuman - Gmail
🧵 Thread
Immigration News!
This week, at a roundtable for US-India relations hosted by Ajay (@ajainb), Jen Sudweeks, who leads visa ops for the US Embassy in Delhi, said..
The US State Dept pilot program to stamp H-1Bs within the US will start by END OF SUMMER '23.
🧵 More News
Student Visa 90 to 365 days time.
Student visas (F and M) can now be issued up to 365 days in advance of the I-20 program start date, giving students more time to apply for a visa.
For countries with visa offices with long wait times, this gives students breathing room.
🧵 Thread
This story spans 70 years and is actually ridiculous.
The Salman Khan starring Bollywood movie Hum Dil Chuke Sanam (1999) was based on one of the first documented inter-racial Indian romances between a Romanian and a Bengali in the 1930s Calcutta!
Here's what happened 🧵
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian author born in 1907 with vivid memories of the WWI as an adolescent. He started writing books in his teens, eventually becoming a professor in Philosophy and Religion at UChicago.
When he was 21, in 1928, he set sail to Calcutta..
In 2010, every BigTech company made about $700k–$1.3m per employee.
In 12yrs,
- Number of employees: 11x
- Revenue: 7.5x
- Profit: 5.9x
And the range of revenue / employee is now $300k (Amazon) to $2.4m (Apple)!
🧵 Thread
With AI now being able to
- text like the same human
- generate pictures of the same human
- generate audio like the same human
- listen like a human
Is technology able to digitally immortalize our dying loved ones now?
_____
A rant about how cool but scary AI is today
Begs the question, how much does the lack of linguistic / racial / accent diversity in training data set people back?
If you're not a native English-speaking person, you're probably not going to be one of the first beneficiaries of such tech.
🧵 Thread
$6.4B Indian credit card payment app CRED will probably never make as much money as it raised!
- Raised $800m since founding in 2018
- $48m rev with $156m loss in FY22. Spends $4.25 to make $1.
- Valued at 133x rev multiple
Easy to build brand, hard to build business.
I wonder how these startups can keep fueling a 400%+ revenue growth while trying to cut costs which increase at 200%+ YoY.
With unproven unit economics, and a tiny addressable market size of high credit Indians, I can't see how!
Good products are not always good businesses.
Good businesses are not always good products.