Ashu Garg: “At moments like this, the biggest risk for founders is not acting quickly enough. Action is what creates opportunities for learning, and your pace of learning is one of the most important variables you control. This also means you need to stay low ego, and be ready (or even actively plan to) to throw out aspects of what you’ve built as the technology improves.”
WSJ: “AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most were written by [Nick] Lichtenberg.”
FT: ““The economy is rewarding scale like never before,” [Larry] Fink noted, observing how the leading companies in many industries were surging ahead while the rest struggled to keep pace. That trend is anatomised in a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute on market competition. The institute had previously identified the strengths of “wizard” companies that could use their technological magic to outperform “muggle” competitors, in the language of Harry Potter. Chris Bradley, one of the report’s authors, suggests nine “super-wizard” companies are now emerging that command enormous resources and are set to dominate many of the 18 fastest-growing markets of the future, such as ecommerce, AI software and services, space, robotics and autonomous vehicles. These “omniscalers” (to revert to more traditional McKinsey-ese) include six US companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and the Tesla/SpaceX cluster — and three Asian giants — Alibaba, Huawei and Samsung. They are all characterised by massive spending on research and development and a proven ability to spin their technology, data and infrastructure expertise into new markets.”
Srikanth Nadhamuni: “Her name is Lakshmi. She lives in a small village in the Krishna delta, Andhra Pradesh, where the fields flood in September and the nearest bank branch is a one-hour bus ride away. She wants to buy a buffalo, not as an aspiration, but as a business plan. A government scheme could fund it. But she cannot read or fill a form and has no one to help her navigate the paperwork. The bank exists. The scheme exists. The money exists. The gap is not financial. It’s procedural. And procedural complexity, invisible to those of us who navigate it daily, is one of the most efficient destroyers of wealth in India. This is the problem at the heart of a white paper I co-authored with colleagues from MIT, IIT Kanpur, IISc and other institutions for the India AI Impact Summit, titled ‘Doot: The AI Agent for Every Indian Citizen.’ It outlines the architecture for an AI agent designed to work for every Indian citizen.”
