Category: Thinks

Akash Prakash: “Space is one of the few technology-intensive sectors where India is relevant. This is because of the confluence of long-term government support to develop indigenous capabilities, combined with very progressive policy support to private players and a maturing domestic funding environment. We should take the lessons from our success in space and apply them to other industries where we need to develop capabilities. We can apply the same playbook.”

NYTimes: “Start by identifying what you want to resist, she said. It could be an expensive shopping habit, a weakness for viral products or scrolling through ad-saturated social media at all hours. Then, Dr. Milkman said, create rules that will make it harder to buy the new things when you feel the urge. Researchers call these rules commitment devices. You could remove your saved credit-card information from your favorite retail platform. You could cancel a subscription service that automatically sends you products every month. You could delete shopping apps from your phone.”

NYTimes: The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century.

Adam Grant: “Pre-AI, what was rewarded and valued and promoted was how much information you had in your head; we’re now in an environment where information is a commodity. So the differentiating skill set or capability is: Can you recognize patterns? Can you synthesize lots of disparate pieces of information? Can you figure out what perspectives are credible and which ones aren’t? All of that is a long way of saying that human judgment is going to supersede human expertise.”

FT: “India has its own version of the “China shock”. Instead of exporting high volumes of competitive manufacturing goods across the globe, the world’s most populous nation sends millions of workers abroad. India churns out roughly 5mn graduates each year and around 1mn people enter its workforce every month. But just as the Chinese economy lacks the demand to absorb more of its industrial production at home, India’s cannot produce enough suitable jobs to employ its expanding labour supply. Youth underemployment is rife, despite the country’s rapid growth rate. As a result, many Indians, often well-educated and English-speaking, move abroad to pursue careers. The country is the world’s largest source of international migrants, with an estimated 18.5mn living abroad in 2024. The Anglosphere and United Arab Emirates are common destinations.”

SaaStr: “In most B2B categories, you can and probably should try to do even better than this.  You should try to kill your top competitor.  Dead.  Because it pays.”

Pamela Meyer: “Often, I ask executives to walk into a meeting and avoid speaking for ten minutes. For example, if they typically have a half-hour meeting, during which they speak for most of it, instead they would enter and not talk. Instead of speaking, executives would observe people’s facial expressions and bodies, listen more carefully to how they tell stories, and note their interruption patterns. Regulating themselves not to invade the meeting with their own ideas is a muscle people don’t usually flex. When they do this, the room starts to light up. Suddenly, they see something completely differently.”

NYTimes: “Cognitive shuffling is a mental exercise that involves focusing your mind on words that have no association with one another, as a way of signaling to your brain that it’s time to fall asleep. The task is meant to be engaging enough to distract you from the thoughts that may be impeding sleep, but not so interesting that your brain perks up. You start by taking a random word — “Pluto,” for example. Then think of as many words as you can that begin with the same first letter, like so: “Plane, poodle, play, peaches.” When you run out of “P” words, you can move on to the next letter of your original word, which is “L,” and do the same thing: “Love, light, lemur, linger.” Take a second or so to visualize each word. Research suggests that when people naturally drift off, their minds are often peppered with vivid images or distant thoughts, said Luc P. Beaudoin.”

Nitin Nohria on what CEOs learnt tracking their time: “Two things were almost always surprising to C.E.O.s. One was, “I didn’t realize I spent more time with consultants and bankers than I spent with my customers.” And the other one was they spent less time with frontline employees than they imagined.”

Jensen Huang: “Two hundred years ago, we were able to power anything and everything with electricity. And then 40 years ago, 30 years ago, with the internet, we were able to find anything. Today, or soon, we’ll be able to know everything and do anything. That’s the concept that’s really quite exciting. That out of the ether, instead of doing a search and then going through one link after another link and reading all these different websites trying to figure out what’s going on, in the future, you just ask it a question, and it comes back with an answer. You give it a project, it comes back with a solution. You give it a task, it comes back and gets it done. It comes out of the ether, it comes out of the cloud, and that’s the magical thing.”

NYTimes: “For decades, mathematicians, scientists and engineers had been wrestling with a basic fact about the real world: Its signals and images are full of structure. They’re not random jumbles of numbers; they’re intricately patterned. A photograph of a landscape, a piece of music, the sound of a voice — each harbors mathematical regularities that allow it to be summarized economically. The trick is to find the right building blocks. Expressed in those terms, a natural data set that seems to require millions of numbers can sometimes boil down to just a handful of ingredients. As people learned to exploit this feature of natural images and signals — a feature known as “sparsity” — the mathematics around it kept mutating and migrating. Fourier analysis showed how complicated signals and images could be built from simple waves. Wavelets gave a new way to pick out the most important building blocks. Work in statistics and optimization showed how to identify the most informative components among a host of possibilities.”

Debashis Basu: ” India needs to identify the factories and technologies it wants to attract. It needs to forecast the occupations they will require, define the competencies, redesign the curricula, and train the workers. It has to put them into factories through apprenticeships, measure employment, wages and productivity; and then change the curriculum again. China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam have all built versions of that loop. Until India does that, billions will be wasted in the name of “skill development” and India’s manufacturing dream will remain just that – a dream.” 

Rajesh Shukla: “India’s private consumption expanded by 7.1% in real terms in the first quarter of 2026–27. That is encouraging news for an economy whose prospects depend substantially on domestic demand. But a growth rate is not a market strategy. It tells businesses that expenditure is expanding, not which consumers sustain which markets, what they can afford or how much financial leeway remains after meeting their expenses…PRICE’s estimates for 2025–26 illustrate this clearly. Dividing the population into ten equal groups ranked by per capita household income, the top 10% account for about 30.2% of income, 24.2% of consumption and 48% of saving. The bottom half account for 23.8% of income and 29.5% of consumption, but only about 6.7% of saving.”

WSJ: “A tiny California startup founded earlier this year is taking the “Bring Your Own Power” trend that is dominating the AI race to a whole new level—it is relying on 3-D printing technology to help make backlogged power equipment.  Parallax, which was founded by a Stanford University graduate who previously co-founded a defense hardware company, has raised $117 million to enter the market for a key piece of equipment made by industrial giants: gas turbines. The company aims to make smaller, gas-fired turbines designed specifically for on-site power for data centers, leaning on 3-D printing technology instead of the specialty supply chain for turbines. The market for large turbines used at power plants has multiyear backlogs due to rising demand for power, much of it coming from the artificial intelligence boom.”

Epoch: “Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter, faster than for any other transformative technology in history.”

Jim Bildner: “Hope is not in short supply. More importantly, everyone has the ability to harness hope, turn it to action, and make a difference in the lives of others.”

FT: “Directors raised on video games have finally cracked how to translate them to the big screen — by focusing on their logic rather than their stories…With stories told primarily through space and action, this new breed of game-literate cinema has a different flavour: immersive and frequently overwhelming — experiences that bear down on the viewer as a video game often does on the player. Filmmakers have finally learnt to follow the rules of games, rather than just recycling their stories.”

WSJ: “Chess engines can beat grandmasters—but they can’t agree on a single infallible strategy. And, instead of ruining the game, artificial intelligence is now uncovering new ways of playing.”

FT: “Nearly four years after ChatGPT triggered the chatbot boom, a new type of service with the potential to change how consumers use AI is starting to come into focus. To judge by the tremors that went through the stock market this week, it could also reverberate across the broader digital landscape, with knock-on effects for a wide range of consumer services. The technology in question is the personal AI agent, a piece of software designed to carry out actions on behalf of a user. A dream since the dawn of the internet, digital assistants like this have become an intense focus in Silicon Valley. The question has been not simply whether the technology is ready for primetime, but whether anyone could package it into an easy-to-use form capable of striking a chord with a mass audience.”

WSJ: “The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet. Total investment in data centers and related artificial-intelligence infrastructure is projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, according to new estimates by economist Stijn van Nieuwerburgh published by the Brookings Institution. That is a staggering 3.6% of gross domestic product a year, on average. Never before has the U.S. economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry.”

CNBC: “Global debt rose by $10 trillion in the first half of the year to top $365 trillion, according to research published by the Institute of International Finance…The Washington-based group found that advanced economies paid over $3.3 trillion in interest on internationally traded government bonds last year, more than global spending on AI ($2.6 trillion), defense ($3.1 trillion), or clean energy ($2.3 trillion).”

Geoffrey Hinton: “Suppose I said to a very intelligent AI agent, Do whatever you can to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Well, a moderately intelligent agent would figure out the best thing to do is just get rid of people, and then they’ll stop burning carbon, and then we’ll be okay. That is, the other animals will be okay. A really smart AI would figure out, Yeah, when they said reduce carbon dioxide, they meant that in order for people to have a better world to live in. So actually getting rid of people isn’t probably what they intended, and it would do some figuring out, and maybe even ask you questions about, Did you really intend this? But the worry is they’ll do things that we didn’t want and, in particular, things to do with their own survival, because they’ll have a strong subgoal of surviving, and we’ve seen that already.”

Gita Gopinath: “If you look at just what goes into a trade balance equation, it depends upon the relative price of your goods in international markets, but it also depends upon the relative level of demand in the two different countries for just overall consumption. For example, if in the US consumption is strong, while in China consumption is weak, even if relative prices were to favor, for example, US goods, just the overall level of demand being lower in China would reduce the overall level of exports from the US to China. Both those variables matters, not just the relative price, but also the relative levels of demand in countries.”

WSJ: “A peptide is simply a short chain of amino acids, often used by the body as a message to do things like quiet inflammation or release insulin. That precision can make peptides useful drugs. Insulin is a peptide. So is Ozempic’s active ingredient, which mimics the gut hormone GLP-1 to control blood sugar and curb appetite. Until recently, peptides had to be injected because the gut treats them like a piece of steak and digests it. That is what makes the recent breakthrough in pharma so important: Companies are figuring out how to put peptides into pills.”

David M. Rubenstein on the difference between owning a business and owning a sports team: “First, in business you’re not usually facing 29 other competitors in every product you sell. Here, we have 29 competitors. Second, people pay much more attention to how the team does every day than how a business does every day, as a general rule. Therefore, you will be subject to more questions, criticisms, commentaries, and objections to what you’re doing. Also, there’s less you can do to change the day-to-day or week-to-week output of a team than you probably can do to change the output of a business. If a business isn’t doing well, we can quickly bring in someone else, change a strategy, or do other things. It’s much harder to change a baseball team midseason. Sometimes, it’s hard to make trades, players sustain injuries, and you can’t just replace the team overnight because it’s not doing very well. So, owning a sports team is much more difficult, much more challenging, and produces much more gray hair.”

WSJ reviews What Could Possibly Go Right?: “In the past 20 years, Danny Meyer has opened 27 restaurants and closed 10. He’s also launched more than 700 Shake Shacks in 24 countries.”

Mint: “Microdramas are moving onto advertisers’ radar, with some brands going beyond conventional sponsorships and advertising to integrate their products directly into the storylines. The approach remains nascent, but advertisers are testing the format to build long-term engagement with viewers…Interest is growing as brands seek faster, lower-cost ways to create content that holds viewers’ attention across multiple episodes. Factors driving advertiser interest in microdramas include a shift towards brand-funded storytelling and integrations, repeat engagement through serialised storytelling, the growing use of vertical video, and the relevance of regional-language content, said Diwaker Chandani, managing partner at creator marketing agency Influential India, part of communications firm Publicis Groupe India.”

WSJ: “Booms need continuous flows of fresh capital to perpetuate themselves. History shows they can start turning into busts the moment the window to raise new capital closes. Tipping points can happen suddenly, or as a slow-motion capitulation. But we’re not there yet. Here is a signal to watch for in the meantime: See if the term “funding gap” returns to the market’s vernacular. Along with “burn rate,” funding gap became part of the financial lexicon in 2000, as the dot-com bubble was starting to deflate. Back then, burn rate measured how much cash a money-losing startup was blowing through each quarter and how many months it had left before it ran out. It was popularized by a famous Barron’s article in March 2000 that helped prick the bubble. A funding gap meant a company still needed investors to keep supplying fresh cash until it became self-sustaining—and that the chance to raise new money had already vanished.”

Bethany McLean: “At some point the house of cards that we’ve been building for several decades, will come tumbling down. It’s not just A.I. It’s the credit/usury industry. It’s military contractors. It’s insurance and communications and real estate and Crypto and Gambling and VC and P.I. and Hedge fund monsters. They are not based on value added, they are based on market manipulation. Labor and value have become orthogonal forces. When all this fake value finally comes home to roost, it will make CoVid seem quaint. We are treating the mega-companies like we supposedly treat our children. Everybody’s a winner… even when you lose.”

FT: “For years, in-house lawyers have wrestled with ever-tightening company budgets while trying to instruct the best lawyers to negotiate, defend and advocate for them. This has been achieved using a panel system — a roster of external law firms that are appointed as the go-to advisers, and usually refreshed every two to three years. Companies attempt to control pricing by making firms sign up to certain fee terms to have the privilege of being on the panel, while outside counsel get the security of repeat revenue. Now, AI looks set to swing a wrecking ball into that model.”

USV: “Declining costs in intelligence, hardware, and sensors enable data loops in previously inaccessible areas like ambient speech, the human body, and the physical world. Early commercialization in robotics and infrastructure, exemplified by Generalist and Tutor Intelligence, creates market-shifting opportunities.”

NYTimes: “Where we won’t use A.I. is during the discovery, listening and thinking phase. Crucial information surfaces in early conversations. We learn what people are afraid of, what they’ve tried that didn’t work and what they believe versus what they have learned to perform. A.I. can scan annual reports and map the competitive landscape, but the strategic picture that actually matters doesn’t live in documents. The same is true for a great recipe, a great story or even a thoughtful PowerPoint presentation. A.I. may be (mostly) accurate, but it’s not considerate. The greatest contributions to humanity — art, inventions, even products — show evidence of people who got lost in a problem and came out the other side with an idea they would not have found otherwise. That does not happen by taking a shortcut to the center. It happens in the detours.”

BCG newsletter: “Capital is not the constraint. Corporate balance sheets and PE funds still hold substantial dry powder, and financing conditions remain workable despite significantly higher rates. But according to PitchBook, PE firms were sitting on more than 33,500 unsold portfolio companies as of June—more than double the count of a decade ago. That backlog shows up in holding periods too: the median US portfolio company now sits with its sponsor for 5.3 years, up from 4.3 years in 2020. AI is creating new dynamics. It’s pulling capital into deals within the AI ecosystem itself—power generation, semiconductors, data centers. For assets exposed to AI-driven disruption, however, it’s widening the gap between what buyers will pay and what sellers think they’re worth. The correction in software valuations earlier this year was evidence of this emerging dynamic.”

FT: “Airlines sell miles to banks by the billions, and for some carriers, that revenue exceeds 10 percent of their top lines. American Airlines, for one, sold $6.2 billion worth in 2025. But the money, however important, is almost beside the point. What matters more is that these programs function as collateral, giving the biggest airlines access to inexpensive capital that their smaller rivals can’t match.”

Ajay Shah: “The Indian state lacks the strategic depth of having access to vast resources if faced with a special moment. When faced with a crisis such as the pandemic, the Indian state is down to hand wringing: An economic response like that seen in the US is inconceivable. A state that cannot borrow massively when faced with a crisis is a state that cannot defend the nation. Reforming public finance and earning the respect of private lenders are not merely matters of economic efficiency. They are requirements for nation building. A capable state requires low baseline debt and deep institutional trust so that it can have the strategic depth of borrowing on a massive scale a few times per century.” 

WSJ: “We need a science of the AI Mind…There has never been a more promising time in history for making rapid scientific advancements. If we want the next few years to go well, we must allocate the best minds we have—in science, law, government and increasingly in the data centers themselves—to the problem of understanding the nature of what we’re building and the consequences of building it.”

Ryan Streeter: “Hume criticizes “parties from principle,” those organized around ideology. “Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phaenomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs.” He contrasts them with parties “from interest,” which form around professional and geographical interests. The interests of farmers and sea merchants are different, which is reflected in their political allegiances. Parties of interest are alive and well on K Street in Washington. Parties from principle produce fanatical behavior in a way that parties from interest don’t, Hume observed. Parties of interest compromise to get what they want, but ideological purists don’t.” [via Aronold Kling]

FT: “Two years ago quantum physicist Dolev Bluvstein opted for a post in academia rather than the business world. Practical quantum computers, he had concluded, were “too far away to commercialise”. Today things look very different. Oratomic, a company Bluvstein helped found and now heads, recently raised $300mn — the largest first financing round for a quantum start-up — and is racing to build a full-scale machine before the end of the decade. The about-turn reflects a surge of optimism that has swept through the sector, as a series of technical breakthroughs raises hopes that the dream of harnessing the quirky world of quantum mechanics to power a new form of computing, first proposed in the 1980s, is finally close to reality.”

Mint: “Overall investment in the [Indian] economy is showing an improvement. There is increased participation by the private sector in this investment cycle, though there are still some mixed signals. It will be interesting to see if the pick-up is sustained amid an uncertain global environment that features the risk of higher commodity prices, rising inflationary pressure and higher yields in domestic and global markets. The other question is whether these investments will create jobs. A lot of money is going into sectors like data infrastructure that does not create too many job opportunities. On the other hand, investment in sectors like electronics, transport infrastructure, pharmaceuticals and renewable energy is generating significant employment.”

FT: “It’s the pitfalls and pratfalls that make a career…Given the chance, many would do the failed deals and punishing schedules all over again.”

WSJ: “Today, phones are as common in a table-setting as napkins and silverware. If diners themselves aren’t pulling them out to check messages and social media, they’re likely in the background as others record Instagram videos or make FaceTime calls. Many restaurants and patrons alike are pushing back against the shift that has turned collegial, communal spaces into places to watch TikTok while you eat.”

Paul Graham: “One of the most useful heuristics I have when doing office hours with startups is to ask: what would make this company more powerful? Asking how the company could make more money is a good heuristic too, but it tends to yield incremental improvements. Whereas thinking about how to make it more powerful will sometimes make it orders of magnitude more valuable…The only way they can become powerful is to make customers’ lives better. In fact this constraint is so rigid that you can run it backwards to generate ideas. What would the perfect world look like, from the customer’s point of view? If there’s a component of that world that the startup could transform itself into, it probably should.”