Igniting Sparks with Devansh

 5 years ago, or even before covid, protein was mostly “gym wala” stuff. Something only bodybuilders, athletes or hardcore gym people cared about. Today? Everybody wants protein. Students. Office goers. Moms. Even cafes now have “protein shakes” and “high protein meals” on the menu  India’s fitness culture has gone through a massive shift. Fitness is no longer just about muscles. It has become lifestyle + social identity. People want to be healthy, thanks to awareness. And they also want to look healthy, thanks to Instagram reels. For the first time, people actually started understanding how protein deficient (and other nutrients too) Indian diets can be. And brands noticed this shift very quickly. Protein is no longer just a supplement industry. It’s slowly becoming a mainstream food industry. It started mostly with international brands like ON and Muscletech. Then came Indian players like Healthkart with MuscleBlaze. Then the whole next wave started. Influencer-led brands li...

"Not five. Not twenty. Eight out of every ten AI-native startups are building their products, their backends, their futures on DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and their cousins." Venture capital firms like a16z are tracking this quiet mass migration where American companies are literally supplementing expensive American AI models with Chinese alternatives. Even major tech players are shifting. Airbnb recently revealed its customer service agent uses Alibaba's Qwen model because it’s incredibly fast and cheap. The economics behind this shift are simply undeniable. I watched a video of Varun Mayya recently where his team was panicking because they completely exhausted their weekly token limits. They were using Anthropic's premium Opus model just to generate video timestamps. It’s such a classic mistake and honestly it highlights exactly why corporate AI bills are starting to spiral. Two years ago AI was all about experimentation and using the smartest model available ...

On April 6, 2026, at 8:25 p.m. - Something fascinating happened that will change the trajectory of our country. I watched Rocket Boys last year and I still can’t get it out of my head. Seeing Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai on screen makes you realize how amazing their vision was. One scene stayed with me, how Bhabha presented his idea to the Tatas for an India that is self-sufficient in its energy needs. Back in the 1950s, when India was just starting out, Bhabha looked at the black sands on the beaches of Kerala and Odisha and saw our future. He understood that India’s vast thorium reserves could one day become the backbone of our long-term energy security. Most people don't realize how much power we are sitting on. We have about 8.5 lakh tons of thorium. To put that in perspective: if you take all the oil in the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and combine it, our thorium still produces ten times more energy. We are talking of enough potential energy to power India for centuries. It i...

Popcorn Storytime - This can get a little bit heavy to digest. Wazirx - a Cryptocurrency Exchange, once a poster boy of Crypto in India - in July 2024 suffered a cyberattack losing nearly $235 Mn, i.e. 45% of its user funds. (Approx INR 2000 Crores) Imagine you invested INR 1000 in stock, and INR 450 worth of stock gets stolen. Wazirx immediately paused all its operations including trading and withdrawal, and to avoid bankruptcy, went to Singapore High Court (where Parent Entity of Wazirx is registered). - They filed for a Moratorium, which is a legal shield that stops anyone (like users or lenders) from suing the company while it tries to fix its finances. (Thus, as an investor, your money is locked in.) - Proposed a restructuring plan stating "Socialized Losses" : WazirX proposed a 55/45 split. Since 45% of funds were stolen, they suggested every user (even those whose specific tokens weren't stolen) take a ~45% haircut so everyone could get something back. This caused ...

Working out valuations, I came across various complex financial instruments designed for specific purposes - tax planning, shareholding optimisation, among others. For example, the most basic - a company issuing complex instruments (Convertible preference shares/CCDs/Warrants) to optimise the tax liability at exit or IPO listing. Frankly, the terms in these agreements - the complexities are staggering, and one has to respect the sheer ingenuity required to construct them. But what OYO was trying to do with its recent postal ballot was beyond comprehension - it was a daylight heist of ownership from retail shareholders. Kudos to Mohit Gang and Jayant Mundhra for bringing this to light, and the subsequent outrage resulted in the rollback of the postal ballot proposal. ----- What was the instrument? A bonus CCPS! 1 Bonus CCPS - for every 6000 shares But with a catch - It gave an option to shareholders 1. Riskfree -> 1 CCPS = 1 Equity Share 2. Supposedly Risky -> 1 CCPS = 1109 Equity...

The world has the first 5 Trillion $ company, but is it just history repeating itself? It's a classic "Shovels in a Gold Rush" story. Year 2000 - Cisco became one of the first company to reach $0.5 Trillion market cap, peaking to $555 Bn - the most valued company at that point. Nvidia - providing infra for the AI boom. Cisco - provided infra for the web/dot com boom. But.....Cisco in 2000 plummeted by 80%, and it's still not back to its 2000 highs. This isn't fear-mongering, but just a reminder - The real winners after a decade or so, might be very different from what we think them to be. Quoting Prof. Aswath Damodaran,  "NVIDIA, to me, reminds me a great deal of Cisco. It is creating the architecture for AI, which is critical, right? And architecture businesses are the ones that monetize these big revolutionary changes the first.  Cisco started to make money well before Amazon started to make money because you need the architecture there. So, I think NVIDIA ...