Category: Thinks

Bloomberg: “Far from freeing up engineers for a life of leisure, increasingly capable AI coding agents—including Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex—have over the past few months created a kind of productivity paranoia among executives and, by extension, the people who work for them. These agents do more than generate text or images, as consumer-facing chatbots do. Instead they plan, execute and complete tasks on behalf of their human users, even creating their own agents to do the work for them. That may mean building and debugging an app, scheduling a meeting or buying a pair of pants, all with minimal human oversight. The fact that AI agents can produce more code than mere humans in less time has morphed into a sense that they therefore must. As OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, recently put it on X, it “feels like such a wasted opportunity every moment your agents aren’t running.””

Ajay Shah on the Indian IT industry: “From the point of view of investment and corporate finance, big changes are required. Historically, Indian IT firms have exhibited the financial characteristics of stable utilities. There was a bias toward distributing cash to shareholders rather than reinvesting it in research and development. This strategy of capital allocation must change. The financial system must transition from pricing these firms as low-risk utilities to valuing them as complex, adaptive, technology integrators. Management teams must alter how they communicate with capital markets. Boards must show their portfolio of technological bets to the financial system, outlining the risk of their AI investment and its potential return. The world will always want intellectual capability. The constraint on growth is not the capability of algorithms but the availability of human ingenuity. The task for India is to double down on producing, owning, and growing intellectual capital, in the emergence of a firm culture of knowledge and innovation.”

TheMaxSource: “Zero based budgeting requires every expense to be justified from the ground up, as if the company were starting fresh. This method is not simply about cutting costs. It is about allocating money only to activities that create real value. For founders and executives, zero based budgeting brings clarity, accountability and speed. It eliminates autopilot spending and replaces it with intentional decision making.”

McKinsey: “India’s retail landscape is deeply fragmented, shaped by decades of traditional distribution networks, regional supply chains, and a political economy that reinforces support for micro, small, and medium-size enterprises (MSMEs) as an important driver of employment. Nearly 60 million MSMEs form the backbone of this ecosystem, collectively contributing close to $1 trillion in value to the economy every year, which is roughly 30 percent of national GDP. These MSMEs operate across multiple subsegments defined by category, geography, scale, and formality. Fragmentation is structural and likely to persist, creating a unique environment where small sellers and local traders coexist alongside large national and international retailers. We therefore believe this large, fragmented, and growing group of sellers will seek services and digital solutions that are fit-for-purpose: unbundled, flexible, lower-cost and more “consumer direct” relative to offerings provided by today’s dominant marketplaces.”

Scott Dyreng: “This term, I am experimenting with AI-assisted tools that are bringing back team culture by using AI to encourage more, not less, human interaction. Teams record their meetings, and internally developed AI tools analyze their interactions. Did one person do all the talking? Did someone interrupt constantly? Did the team ask good questions or slide into polite agreement? Did anyone summarize decisions and assign next steps? Did the team actually debate alternatives or simply divide the work and disperse? When the first results came in, I was blown away. The new tools compelled students to interact and gave them feedback they can use to hone those skills. In the workplace, people often have only vague impressions about team dynamics. In school, we can make patterns visible while students can still change them.”

India Dispatch: “India’s software and IT-enabled exports were roughly $205 billion in FY25, per the RBI’s annual survey of software export companies. The claim that this entire edifice was built on “one value proposition” — cheap developers — highlights great misunderstanding in what these companies actually do for a living. The technology stacks of the world’s largest enterprises are sprawling, non-monolithic, and take years to adapt to each new wave — and the work Indian IT companies do is overwhelmingly not greenfield coding. Custom application maintenance alone accounts for roughly 35% of a typical Indian IT company’s revenue, per HSBC’s service-line framework: incident management, service requests, change requests and problem resolution across architectures where SAP, Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks, Guidewire and ServiceNow coexist in configurations unique to each client.”

WSJ: “The elements of the periodic table that revolutionised chemistry as a scientific field more than 150 years ago are now at the heart of a momentous modern commercial and geopolitical battle. The contest is playing out from corporate boardrooms planning mining megadeals to US efforts to form a “critical minerals” trade zone to counter China’s influence. Dozens of the world’s nearly 100 naturally occurring elements are in growing demand for crucial industrial uses, making their supply expensive, prone to shortages or vulnerable to international tensions.”

Daniel Coyle, author of  Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment: “Things that appear risky on the surface, especially in a business environment where we are averse to risk, actually reflect a deep distinction that not many people understand. We typically suffer from a “straight-line illusion.” Though we think of “complicated” and “complex” as being the same, there’s a profound distinction between those two words. Complicated things come together the same way every time. For example, I can give you the instructions for building a Ford Mustang car. If you have all the materials and you follow the instructions, you will have a Mustang at the end, without question. Complex things change when you interact with them. The question that highlights this distinction is “Is this problem more like building a car, or is it more like raising a teen?” Obviously, there’s no set of instructions I could give you to raise a teen. That’s complex. If you have a complicated system, the best approach is to have expertise. Find an expert who can figure out what to do.”

Terence Tao: “Today there are a lot of very tedious types of mathematics that we don’t like doing, so we look for clever ways to get around them. But AIs will just happily blast through those tedious computations. When we integrate AI with human workflows, we can just glide over these obstacles. I also think mathematicians will start doing math at larger scales. Think about the difference between case studies and population surveys in sciences. If you were to study a disease in the 18th century, if it was a rare disease, you might study one patient who has this disease and record all their symptoms and take meticulous notes. But in the 21st century, you can do a clinical trial and you can administer a drug to 1,000 people and do statistics and get much more precise information about the efficiency of your drug. Mathematics is still very much at the case-study level. A paper will take one or two problems and study them to death in a very handcrafted, intensive way. That’s our style. But what AI tools enable is population studies.”

WSJ: “If the traditional 40-hour schedule gets in the way of your productivity, focus or well-being, it’s time to rethink your workweek. That isn’t feasible for everyone, of course. But a lot of us have jobs where a different work structure makes more sense. Perhaps you’re in a job that would benefit from longer, uninterrupted work periods. Or you focus better when you work early in the day, or late at night. Or you work with people in other countries or time zones, and need to be available during their business day. I’ve worked remotely for more than two decades, and over that time, I’ve experimented with many different ways to structure my schedule. Here are four that have been effective for me, and that could inspire experiments of your own.” ” The suggestions: meeting-free Mondays, the reverse workday, the split workday, and the project sprint.

FT: “Across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of international offshoots and collaborations have been established by Chinese universities in the past decade. These outposts are capitalising on the rising prestige of China’s universities, which have undergone a three-decade-long transformation in both scale and quality. In 2010, only one mainland Chinese institution ranked in the top 50 of the QS World University Rankings, a closely watched global league table. By 2025, that number had risen to five, and they were positioned higher up the table. “Chinese universities’ climbing in global rankings is real. It’s not a ‘mystery bounce’ but the result of three decades of sustained, targeted investment,” says Denis Simon, an American academic.”

Greg Ip: “Technology enables us to produce more or better products with less hours of work. Over time, this makes us richer. It’s why we produce many times more food with far fewer farmers than 150 years ago and our factories crank out more products with a smaller workforce than in 1979. Technological advancements always cost some people their jobs—those whose skills can be easily substituted by tech. But their loss is more than offset through three other channels. The new technology enhances the skills of some survivors, who become more productive and better paid; it helps create new businesses and new jobs; and it makes some stuff cheaper, increasing consumers’ incomes, adjusted for inflation, which can be spent on other stuff, generating yet more jobs. These offsets explain why, through the sweep of U.S. history, technological advance hasn’t, by itself, raised unemployment for the country as a whole.”

SaaStr: “Software engineering accounts for nearly 50% of all AI agent tool calls. Healthcare, legal, finance, and a dozen other verticals are barely touched, each under 5%. That’s 300 vertical AI unicorns waiting to be built.”

WSJ: “Today, even with the rise of videogames, board games in the U.S. are more than holding their own. Thanks to Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, lower costs of production and online communities, players can enjoy hits like Settlers of Catan, Wingspan, Exploding Kittens and Ticket to Ride, a modern game about railroads that brings the capitalist theme of the 1800s full circle. People still play physical games because “they’re totally different experiences,” U.K.-based game historian David Parlett says. “Digital games have only extended the range of games available, not replaced it. Many people prefer to maintain the real-life experience of handling traditional materials in a communal, real-life setting.””

Notion CEO Ivan Zhao: “If your product cannot be used by agents, I don’t think the future is very promising for you.”

CollabFund on cognitive resourcefulness: “When resources are scarce, humans often bypass conventional thinking and take unfamiliar paths to solve problems. In this case, cognitive resourcefulness caused [NBC Sports’] Miller to reimagine what sports television could be. Without dollars to spend, he truly had to think. To solve. To create…The answer to a lack of resources is not to follow others. Rather, the answer is to be different. To be creative. To think outside the box.”

WSJ: ““The Powerful Primate” becomes important when the author departs prehistory for modernity. Hotter furnaces and better steel, he reminds us, produced powerful engines for agriculture and energy generation and led to dramatic gains in food production and long-distance transportation. Public lighting reduced crime. Mr. Ennos highlights the relationships between new energy technologies and improved material life. When natural gas replaced firewood and coal, for instance, home heating was improved. Fossil fuels unlocked the power needed for living standards to rise almost everywhere. Global energy production has grown sixfold since 1950, while the economic output of humanity has increased 15-fold in that period.”

Mint: “The corner offices of India Inc. are increasingly occupied by a new breed of executives: the strategic consultant. Veterans from McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., BCG, and Kearney are swapping advisory roles for the driver’s seat, as top companies seek out executives capable of navigating a leadership depth crisis in a volatile world…“Clients are demanding and experiencing true business partnership, and as a result, many organizations are actively finding senior consulting talent as good fitment,” says Rahul Jain, India head at BCG. According to Jain, this is a strong recognition of the evolving consulting model and its talent, particularly in an environment where leadership depth remains scarce and fiercely contested.”

WSJ: “After a three-year love affair with anything related to artificial intelligence, U.S. investors are flocking to the factory owners, fast-food restaurants and commodity companies that have seemingly strong odds of surviving the technological revolution intact. Call it the AI immunity trade, HALO—for “heavy assets, low obsolescence”—or just another iteration of the jitters that have periodically rippled through markets since the AI investing boom began.”

Ruchir Sharma: “After surging for years, the price of gold has entered the realm where storytelling drives its price. Breaking free of the fundamental forces that long explained its ups and downs, it is now rising on tales of global risk and uncertainty — which make this era feel to some observers like the gold rush of the 1970s. Gold has long been seen as a safe haven because its price has kept pace with the rate of inflation for centuries, albeit punctuated by busts and booms. The booms tended to come in periods when real interest rates declined. As returns fell on money held in savings accounts or bonds, people tended to move their wealth into gold, which offers no yield but at least can rise in price.”

Andy Kessler: “Productivity is a job creator, not destroyer. Desktop publishing meant everyone could create magazines. Spreadsheets meant everyone could be an analyst. Anthropic’s Claude now allows everyone to create code. Technology may kill old jobs but then, voilà, it creates millions of new ones. Sure, generative AI will fundamentally change how businesses operate. So what? We need to embrace AI in education rather than ban it. So many problems not yet solved will match with tons of untapped human potential just begging to be unleashed, creating things not yet thought of. Like what? Most guess cancer treatments, longevity discoveries and inhabiting Mars, but no one really knows…New stuff is unimaginable, except by its risk-taking creators. So ignore the AI hysterics. And mass-unemployment claims. They’re ignorant nearsighted snapshots. The world is much more dynamic. I promise you won’t be anyone’s pet.”

WSJ; “On paper, India packs a powerful punch. The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London estimated last year that India’s security forces total about 5.3 million people—1.5 million active-duty military personnel, 1.2 million military reserves and about 2.6 million total active and reserve paramilitary forces. This is larger than the entire population of many nations. With 721 combat-capable aircraft, the Indian air force is the fourth largest in the world. The Indian navy is the world’s fifth largest by tonnage and is one of only eight navies to operate aircraft carriers. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that between 2019 and 2023 India was the world’s top arms importer, accounting for nearly 10% of global arms imports…As a percentage of gross domestic product, India’s military budget hovers around 2%, or $86.32 billion this year. Only about a quarter of this goes toward capital outlay for weapons. Salaries and pensions swallow more than half the budget.”

FT: “Contrived dissent is better than nothing, especially if the contrivance itself is taken seriously. But the most valuable form of dissent is authentic, even stubborn and brave. There is no substitute for finding one of those people who feel a duty to call things as they see them.”

SaaStr: “For most of the past decade-plus, B2B software had a beautiful, almost boring stability to it. You’d build a product. You’d get it to $1M ARR. Then $10M. Then $100M. And the product you were selling at $100M ARR looked … pretty much the same as what you were selling at $1M. Better, sure. More features, more integrations, more enterprise bells and whistles. But fundamentally the same core product, solving the same core problem, the same core way. Salesforce in 2025 looked a lot like Salesforce in 2015. HubSpot in 2025 looked a lot like HubSpot in 2017. Zendesk, ServiceNow, Workday — same story. You could plan product roadmaps in 3-year increments and not be wildly wrong. That era is over. So, so, so over. And it ended so quickly.”

Tyler Cowen: “If AI produces a lot more stuff, income is generated from that and the economy keeps going, whether or not the resulting distribution pleases your sense of morality.  Along the way, prices adjust as need be.  If unemployment rises significantly, prices fall too, all the more.  I am not saying everyone ends up happy here, but you cannot have a) a flood of goods and services, b) billions accruing to the AI owners, without also c) prices are at a level where most people can afford to buy a whole bunch of things.  Otherwise, where do you think all the AI revenue is coming from?  The new output has to go somewhere, and sorry people it is simply not all trapped in currency hoards.”

David Friedman: “Within the firm coordination is by central control, executives figuring out what workers should do and workers doing it as instructed. If that form of coordination was always and inevitably inferior to coordination by market transactions the result would be an agoric economy, each individual buying inputs and selling outputs, coordinating their activities by market transactions. Why does that not happen? How is it possible for a firm coordinated from above by its owner-manager to compete with the market alternative? Coase’s answer was that while centralized coordination indeed has costs, so does market coordination.” [via Arnold Kling]

TheMaxSource: “Forty-two percent of startups fail because nobody wants what they built. This number comes from CB Insights analysis of 110+ failed companies. They didn’t run out of money first. They didn’t lose to competitors. They built something and discovered the market didn’t care. The median time to learn this lesson: eighteen months and six figures in wasted capital…Fast-moving companies test three things in sequence: problem intensity, solution appeal, willingness to pay. Each layer requires harder evidence than the last.”

Economist: ” A recent study by Ivan Yotzov of the Bank of England and co-authors found that executives spend only about 1.5 hours a week using AI. Nine out of ten senior managers see no measurable improvement in labour productivity. The organisational rewiring, in other words, has barely begun. Something big may indeed be happening with AI itself. For now, it remains largely invisible in the macroeconomic data.”

ET on the National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP 2.0) : “At the heart of the NMP framework is a distinction that policymakers have repeatedly stressed that asset monetisation is not outright privatisation. The government retains ownership of the underlying assets. What is transferred is the right to operate, maintain and earn revenue from brownfield infrastructure for a fixed concession period, typically under transparent bidding frameworks such as toll-operate-transfer models, infrastructure investment trusts, long-term leases or public-private partnerships. The economic logic of NMP 2.0 is straightforward. India has invested heavily in creating physical infrastructure such as highways, transmission lines, ports, airports, pipelines and railway freight corridors. These are capital-intensive assets with long gestation periods. Once operational and revenue-generating, they can be leased to private operators who are often better placed to extract efficiency gains and bear operational risks. The upfront proceeds realised by the government can then be recycled into new greenfield projects, creating a virtuous investment cycle. In effect, the state converts illiquid public assets into liquid financial resources, without relinquishing ultimate ownership. This recycling of capital is the core principle of NMP 2.0.”

Andy Hall: “We are getting much better at predicting the future. AI forecasting systems are climbing leaderboards that were once the exclusive domain of elite human “superforecasters”—and they may soon surpass us at divining the trajectory of our messy, contingent world. Developments in AI dangle the tantalizing prospect that, some day, we might actually be able to see what’s coming next with increasing precision. Prediction markets are the coordinating layer; they attract information by offering monetary rewards to those with useful information about the future. They promise to be platforms where millions of people—and increasingly, AI agents—put real money behind their beliefs about what’s going to happen, generating live probability estimates on everything from Federal Reserve decisions to legislative outcomes. The vision is powerful. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour calls his platform a “truth machine,” arguing that “people don’t lie with their money” and that prediction markets are “replacing debate and subjectivity with markets and accuracy.””

Andy Kessler: “Everyone wants to be a rebel. So here’s a modern paradox: Many who rebel against the status quo don’t realize it when they become the status quo. Non-nonconformists! So out they’re in.”

WSJ: “Right now, workers are potentially training AI how to make them obsolete. And they often don’t realize it. The kind of AI used by companies, called an enterprise AI system, can capture everything you do at work and use that information to train itself. These systems can record your interactions within the platform—the prompts you write, the documents you create, the queries you run. In other words, the company can potentially track—and claim ownership of—every keystroke you make within the system, every idea you document there, every tool you build using that platform. It can identify what approaches worked best, what email language got responses and how you approached those clients. And all that knowledge can become part of the company AI, so it may eventually know, down to increasingly fine details, how you do your job.”

Mint: “AI is already delivering value across sectors—improving productivity, democratizing access and aiding livelihoods. In healthcare, AI-assisted diagnostics improve early detection and clinical decision-making. In agriculture, precision advisories and crop intelligence tools help farmers increase incomes and manage risk. In education, adaptive systems personalize learning at scale. Even ‘small AI’—narrowly designed, task-specific systems—is demonstrating measurable impact, reducing delays, errors and manual workload in daily operations. These are important gains. But India’s long-term economic shift cannot be determined solely by digital-native businesses. It will eventually be shaped by whether AI can modernize legacy industries like textiles, food processing, leather, auto components, light engineering and chemicals—sectors where depth of capacity exists, but production processes are often uneven, partly digitized or manually monitored.”

Chris Roth: “If software moats are eroding, what still holds? Compute — physical infrastructure that’s hard to replicate. Human relationships — partnerships, contracts, brand recognition. Capital — cash in the bank to weather competition. Proprietary data — data that can’t be scraped or synthesized. Team — rare talent that competitors can’t easily poach. Exclusive rights — patents, trademarks, copyrights, regulatory licenses. Network effects — value that scales with users.”

NYTimes: “Companies are realizing they can no longer simply promote themselves to potential customers. They have to win over the robots, too…“There is a new influencer you need to reach, and it’s this A.I. model,” said Brian Stempeck, a co-founder of Evertune.”

Nicolas Bustamante: “The real threat isn’t the LLM itself. It’s a pincer movement that vertical software incumbents didn’t see coming. From below, hundreds of AI-native startups are entering every vertical. When building a credible financial data product required 200 engineers and $50M in data licensing, markets naturally consolidated to 3-4 players. When it requires 10 engineers and frontier model APIs, the market fragments violently. Competition goes from 3 to 300.”

SaaStr: “You Must Be AI Infrastructure — Not “AI-Enhanced SaaS”. The market is ruthlessly punishing companies that “added AI” to existing products. Salesforce (Agentforce), HubSpot (Breeze), Adobe (Firefly), Monday.com (AI blocks) — all down 30-50%+ even though these are real products with real adoption. The market doesn’t care. The winners — Palantir, Cloudflare, Snowflake — are AI infrastructure. They don’t add AI to a workflow tool. They are the infrastructure layer that AI runs on. Palantir is the operational AI decision layer. Snowflake is where the data that feeds AI lives. Cloudflare is the edge where AI inference executes. As SaaStr has been saying: Don’t build SaaS and add AI. Build AI and add SaaS economics.”

NYTimes: “Right now, 21st-century geopolitics seems like it’s defined by the struggle between America and China. But the major power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population isn’t China. It’s India…Its large and spreading diaspora gives it a unique cultural influence around the world, one that may only increase as other major powers grow old and people remain India’s most important export.” Amitav Acharya: “India is not going to have the industrial revolution like China had — that stage has passed. It’s not going to become the factory of the world like China has become. That window has closed. But the next stage of economic development, a combination of industrial and high technology services — India still needs to find that niche and still move off from exporting raw materials or textiles and the like.”

Allen Grubman: “When you walk away from negotiation, both sides should feel the same way—happy, but also a little sad that they didn’t get everything they wanted. That’s a success. If you walk away delighted that you got everything, the guy who got screwed will be waiting for the opportunity to get you back. Getting everything you want is the beginning of the end of the relationship.”

Paul Ford: “Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system.”

WSJ: “The publication of John O. McGinnis’s “Why Democracy Needs the Rich” comes at an opportune moment. A law professor at Northwestern University and former U.S. Justice Department official, Mr. McGinnis seeks to defend the ultrawealthy from the growing number of accusations leveled against them. Although incomplete, Mr. McGinnis’s argument deserves to be taken seriously. Who are the rich? If they’re defined by wealth, Mr. McGinnis would include people in the top 0.1% of asset-holders—$61 million and above—as “truly rich.” What matters to the author isn’t how much they are worth, but how free they are to express their views, take risks and support innovative activities.”