Mint: “Investors have historically underestimated the total addressable market that Indian startups can disrupt, often failing to envision the scale companies can achieve in India, Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV Partners, told Mint in an interview. “I think all of us in India, including us, underestimate how big something can get here. A decade ago, if a consumer brand scaled to ₹100 crore, everybody said ‘wow’. Now, ₹100 crore is nothing — people ask if it can get to ₹1,000 crore or even ₹8,000 crore. A decade from now, we’ll be talking about ₹10,000-crore companies,” he said. Anandan said every decade in India brings a 10-fold jump, which makes it difficult for any investor to envision outcomes. “If you ask me what we underestimated, it’s the scale of India. An India at $7-8 trillion GDP will create companies far bigger than those that can be created at $4 trillion GDP. That’s what to watch out for,” he said.”
McKinsey: “Achieving business value with agentic AI requires changing workflows. Often, however, organizations focus too much on the agent or the agentic tool. This inevitably leads to great-looking agents that don’t actually end up improving the overall workflow, resulting in underwhelming value. Agentic AI efforts that focus on fundamentally reimagining entire workflows—that is, the steps that involve people, processes, and technology—are more likely to deliver a positive outcome. Understanding how agents can help with each of these steps is the path to value. People will still be central to getting the work done, but now with different agents, tools, and automations to support them. An important starting point in redesigning workflows is mapping processes and identifying key user pain points.”
SaaStr: “The tough, honest start-up truth: 1% of your team is epic, 5% of your team is great, 15% of your team gets sh*t done. 50% of your team does OK-to-solid work, 30% of your team adds little value at all. This has honestly always been true. It’s just in 2021, there was so much organic demand for everything in business software, it masked things. And the 50% and midpack could, e.g., still be decent closers. Not today. AI is coming for the last two groups. Faster than most want to be honest about.”
Dean Ball: “A core problem about the thing we today call “artificial intelligence policy” is that different people mean radically different things by the phrase “artificial intelligence.” I mean the term “radically” here in its literal sense: there are some who believe that AI systems capable of end-to-end autonomy of all human cognitive labor are coming soon, and there are others who assert, either explicitly or implicitly, that this is impossible, or who otherwise refuse to take the idea of this technology being built seriously. Both groups are basically bullish: the latter group believes in “really good LLMs,” and the former group believes in “AGI,” “transformative AI,” “powerful AI,” and various other terms used to refer to future AI systems. This creates a policy planning problem.”
WSJ asks if Gen Z is unemployable: “Hiring managers prize achievement, learning and work. Today’s youth value pleasure and individuality.”
