👀 Mafia wars 2023

Most startup’s are not founded with great altruistic purpose to elevate human condition. Most startup’s are founded where founders know they can make money or earn status points through little schemes of leveraging their network of investors. Most of them know they can earn more income by just raising some money from friends or VCs. Build a small tech tool and burn through money trying to acquire and retain customers. All this while hiring 100s of employees selling false narratives. What bugs me the most isn’t the thousands of people getting laid off, salary corrections or bankruptcies, it is the mafiaesque organisation built to “create wealth for some by exploitation of countless others” Most startup founders use brute force of content and media coupled with ignorance of people to perpetuate this cycle. It’s the virtue signalling and holier than thou attitude of most founders and VCs justifying all their mindless brutality in the name of strategy and growth which destroys aspirations and outcomes for the many. It’s more relevant in India because of large scale ignorance about money and large scale trust on educated individuals with the right college tags! If you have seen sopranos, most founders are like Anthony soprano - summarily violent, manipulative and ruthless behaviour primarily driven by selfish greed but juxtaposed with moments of vulnerability and struggle justifying his action with a facade of providing for his family. *Replace Anthony soprano with your founder/ceo name* 1. VSS was playing fast and lose with rbi regulations resulting in stock crash and layoffs 2. Byju’s systematically destroyed his own company and wealth of his employees just to ensure he retains majority control 3. Ashneer G and his wife manipulated company books 4. Zerodha founders cheated in chess match or lied about their system failures which lost a lot of capital PS: I refer to most founders because there are few exceptions who don’t fit into this narrative.

👆 47 LPA

Tight slap to AI nihilists. 👋🏻

I was speaking to an ex-colleague and he mentioned how my previous employer, a lending startup, has been intentionally over-reporting disbursal numbers and under-reporting delinquencies in portfolio. They conveniently chuck the NBFC partners who dare to ask questions and instead catch new fish. During my time I saw sales staff committing rampant frauds and making money on the sides from users. The founders conveniently turned a blind eye till there was new business coming in. They've seemingly moved on to the next level now. The founders have top pedigree and already come from well off families. Makes me wonder how many such skeletons are buried across startups and what leads to such behaviour. Especially in the wake of what we saw with GoMechanic, Zilingo etc.

Seeing this for a few weeks now. Noticed it when PG tweeted about how there are 100 ai startups in the batch and all are legit. That is none of then it’s phony or opportunistic. He also talked about how domain experts are building in AI and great founders. Then saw Garry Tan promoting the batch and retweeting others doing it. A couple of other partners talked about the companies they are excited about too. To me, this signals that yc isn’t getting the kind of interest they used to get and they have to promote the quality of the batch to be able to generate enough interest. For the first time in 10-15 years maybe. If they have to do it to ensure the companies are getting enough funding interest, what about startups without a brand name behind them. We will see more of these as we get close to the demo day. Most startups are just ai wrappers or agents. Not sure about the exact differentiation between them. Not clear from the descriptions or websites.

[2011- 2021] Employees at 22b $ valuation: upto 10K [2022 - 2024] Between this period byjus employees count went upto 50k and within a year came down back to original. [2024] Employees at 3b $ valuation: 12k So what went wrong in 2022 and 2023 ? The Answer to this is CORPORATE MAFIA You can identify them from their operation 1) At first couple of the members of the mafia will join any organisation as a leader. 2) Initially they will build good relationships with leadership and set imaginary sweet goals for organisational growth and sell lies. 3) They lay off / underpay existing loyal employees 4) Finally they replace existing employees with their ex- colleagues and friends who were comparatively less productive but more expensive. 5) They will take all the growth opportunities and share among themselves. 6) At the end the organisation cost increases but the actual goal is still far enough to be achieved ever.