Republic Day special — a look at where India is quietly building global advantage, from space access to niche media.

🗞️ Opener & News Signals

• Republic Day; Google Doodles highlight ISRO’s space journey

• Gold hits an all-time high at ₹1,62,380 per 10g

• India’s UPI heads to Japan (NPCI × NTT Data); PhonePe–Google Pay duopoly at ~80%

• Emergent raises $70M Series B (SoftBank, Khosla) at ~$300M valuation; ARR doubles to $50M in 45 days

• India–EU Free Trade Agreement set to be announced — auto tariffs to fall from 110% → 40% (eventually 10%); Europe’s biggest market opening in decades

🚀 Guest Segments

Manu J. Nair — Co-founder & CEO, Ethereal Exploration Guild (EtherealX)

Fresh off a $20M round, Manu explains why India needs its own reusable rocket company, how EtherealX uses re-entry heat to power engines, and why global customers have already signed $130M+ in launch contracts. We talk geopolitics, cheaper access to space, Europe’s launch constraints, and why manufacturing medicines and materials in space is the next frontier.

📊 Suryansh Tibarewal — Co-founder & Growth Lead, EssentiallySports

How EssentiallySports scaled from 1M to 60M page views in months, why niche media wins, the US-first strategy, revenue and subscriptions, and how content formats and consumption are evolving. We also discuss whether India is ready for large-scale niche sports media next.

🧪 Live Demo

Aryan shows a live demo of Clawdbot.

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Today’s episode spans consumer brands, early-stage capital, and healthcare crowdfunding — with builders operating close to the ground.

🗞️ News Brief

• Deepinder Goyal hands over the reins to Albinder — steps back to focus on other ventures; ~$100M in unvested ESOPs let go.
  

• Capital One acquires Brex for $5.15B — largest bank–fintech deal to date; reflects a sharp markdown from Brex’s $12.3B 2022 peak.

🎙️ Guest Segments

Arjun Singh — Co-founder, Gully Labs

Fresh off a ₹30 Cr Series A, Arjun breaks down how Gully Labs was built before inventory: manifesto-first branding, a 5,000+ WhatsApp community, lessons from online controversy, and why India is still massively under-branded. We discuss channel mix, overseas demand (25%+ revenue), experiential retail, and what’s next.

Sanil Sachar — Partner, Huddle Ventures

Inside Huddle’s pre-seed playbook: what they back, how they spot conviction vs spray-and-pray, mistakes founders make early, regrets passed on, and which consumer categories excite them heading into 2026.

Piyush Jain & Khushboo Jain — Carepal Group (ImpactGuru)

How ImpactGuru evolved into Carepal, India’s healthcare crowdfunding infrastructure: scale, hospital partnerships, trust and fraud prevention, how UPI changed access, financing ultra-expensive treatments, and a story from the work that stayed with them.

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On today’s show:

🗞️ News

• OpenAI launches ads on Free and Go tiers. CFO Sarah Friar confirms $20B+ ARR with compute scaling ~3× YoY (0.2 GW → ~1.9 GW). Ads could push OpenAI toward social-scale ARPU, but monetizing decisions (not attention) raises trust risks.

• Sequoia joins GIC & Coatue in a $25B Anthropic round at ~$350B valuation. AGI seen as infra-scale, power-law upside. Anthropic appoints Irina Ghose to lead India.

• The RIP (Ben & Matt) on Joe Rogan: AI optimization pulls content toward the mean; originality flattens when systems optimize faster than accountability.

• Ozempic ripple effects: Weight loss drugs set to save US airlines >$500M in fuel; Denmark’s Novo Nordisk (~$278B) becomes geopolitically significant via GLP-1 exports.

🎙️ Guest Conversation

Anmol Maini — General Partner, Untitled VenturesOn BARBIE founders (Born Abroad, Raised Back In India): how this profile changes ambition, risk, sector choice; skill vs safety net; consensus capital; profitability vs growth; and where deep tech + venture intersect in India.

Anshul Bhide — Executive Director, CalsoftOn enterprise reality vs AI hype: cloud-native modernization in India vs global peers; what’s real beyond AI (edge, IoT); how Indian developers use Replit vs the US; and how Replit Agent compares to Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code.

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National Startup Day special — manufacturing, real estate, and advertising, with founders building at scale.

🗞️ News & Internet Signals

• Supreme Court rules Tiger Global’s $1.6B Flipkart exit taxable in India, rejecting Mauritius routing.
  

• OpenAI invests $250M+ in Merge Labs, Sam Altman’s BCI startup; Thinking Machines drama as key founders return to OpenAI after a $2B seed.
  

• F1 sponsorship boom: ~$2.9B in 2025; Apple secures exclusive US rights from 2026 at ~$140M/year.
  

• a16z culture doc: asymmetric bets, zero public criticism of founders.

🎙️ Guest Segments

Subin Mitra — Co-founder & CEO, Groyyo

How Groyyo built a B2B marketplace for SME manufacturers, cut production cycles in half, standardized small factories, and cracked exports (90% revenue) for global brands. India vs China/Vietnam, and what’s next for apparel manufacturing.

Abhilash Narahari — Co-founder & CEO, Ivy Homes

Inside a 15-day home resale model: refurb + resale unit economics, profit-share vs direct buy, operational bottlenecks Ivy removes, Bangalore dominance, and plans to expand to other metros.

Vaishal Dalal — Chairman, Co-founder & Director, Excellent Publicity

How outdoor advertising has changed, why brands misread brand vs performance, the zero-agency-fee model, diversifying beyond one client, and building a people-first media company.

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Today’s episode sits at the intersection of AI tooling, early-stage capital, and the creator economy — with clear signals on where India is heading next.

🗞️ Cool Things We Saw on the Internet

• Anthropic launches Cowork — a desktop-native AI workspace with local file access. Seen more as a distribution wedge than a hard-tech leap, pushing Claude Code into everyday workflows and challenging Microsoft’s Office-led dominance.
  

• Tamil Nadu announces India’s first sovereign AI park — with Sarvam AI partnership and a ₹100 cr deep-tech startup policy focused on AI, semiconductors, robotics, and biotech.
  

• Government considers curbs on 10-minute delivery — amid safety concerns, worker welfare issues, and repeated strikes.

🎙️ Guest Segments

1/ Gautam Shewakramani — Co-founder & Partner, Inuka Capital

Inside Inuka’s operator-led pre-seed and seed strategy: what they look for in first institutional rounds, themes they’re most excited about, lessons from being an operator and founder, and the kinds of companies they want to back heading into 2026.

2/ Akhil Bhiwal — Founder & CEO, Phyllo

How Phyllo became the data layer for the creator economy: what creator data unlocks for brands, platform trends across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and beyond, how creators monetize outside ads, what AI can do with this data, and what’s next for Phyllo and Clayface.

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Today’s episode moves between venture capital concentration, next-gen aerospace, and building enduring Indian companies — against a fast-shifting AI and startup backdrop.

🗞️ Things We Saw on the Internet

• UpGrad–Unacademy deal called off — all-stock talks valuing Unacademy at ~$300M (~90% below 2021 peak) fell apart; ESOP rollback reversed after employee pushback.
  

• India becomes the cheapest place to train AI models — 50k+ H100s live, government-backed distributed compute, ~65% lower cost than AWS/Azure, inference moving into railways, hospitals, and ports.
  

• CES 2026 launches — early signals of where consumer and industrial tech is heading next.
  

• Universal Commerce Protocol — Google partners with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart; Stripe launches ACP with OpenAI. Agents discover, buy, and pay autonomously. Who wins?
  

• TikTok × FIFA 2026 World Cup — livestreams, ads, creators, and global distribution under one platform.
  

🎙️ Guest Segments

1/ Anmol Maini — General Partner, Untitled Ventures

On venture capital concentration in India, consensus vs contrarian capital, why a small group of firms fund most unicorns, and what Untitled Ventures is building and backing outside the herd.

2/ Shreepoorna Rao — Founder & CEO, Arctus Aerospace

Fresh off a $2.6M pre-seed, Shreepoorna breaks down high-altitude autonomous drones, centimetre-level imagery at satellite-beating costs, real-time aerial data, and what flying at 45,000 ft unlocks for defence, infra, and climate use cases.

3/ Krishnakumar Natarajan — Managing Partner, Mela Ventures; Ex-Co-founder, Mindtree

Lessons from building Mindtree into a $2.5B global firm, how founder evaluation changes with scale, equity vs patient capital like the ₹1 lakh crore RDI fund, and what kinds of Indian companies give him the most hope in an AI-first world.

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First show of the year. We kick off 2026 with industry, healthcare, and security — and the real signals shaping India right now.

🎙️ Guest Segments

1/ Neal Thakker — Founder & CEO, Magma

Fresh off an $8M Series A (Dec 2025), Neal breaks down Magma’s expansion to 12 states and 350+ factories, what Indian manufacturing actually needs next, how AI and automation are entering factory ops, the economics of Magma Green (waste + biofuels), and how SMEs stack up in a China+1 world.

2/ Mayank Banerjee — Co-founder, Even Healthcare

Why Even exists, rejecting fee-for-service medicine, and how the subscription model scales across clinics, hospitals, and cities. We talk break-even hospitals, GLP-1s vs hype, ChatGPT Health, AI-led preventive care, and what better health outcomes could look like over the next five years.

3/ Aditya Uthappa — Co-founder, Accorian & GoRICO

From “all-in-one GRC” to real-world security risk for startups. Aditya explains how compliance and security are changing with cloud and AI, what founders underestimate about cyber risk, DPDPA readiness, and how regulated markets like finance, health, and AI security will evolve.

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We’re closing the year with a live AGM-style recap of what really happened in India’s tech and startup ecosystem in 2025.

🗞️ News We’re Discussing

- Unacademy cuts ESOP exercise window from 10 years to 30 days; M&A talks with UpGrad (~$300M).

- Coursera–Udemy merge in a $930M all-stock deal; combined entity valued at ~$2.5B.

📊 Year-End Wrap-Up

What changed for founders, employees, investors, and operators this year — capital, exits, ESOPs, platforms, and where 2026 feels headed.

No predictions. No hype. Just a clean state-of-the-ecosystem check.

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Today’s episode breaks down how India works now — and why flexible workspaces are becoming the default.

🗞️ Things We Saw on the InternetSpace compute explained in first principle and Storytelling on X — why narratives now matter as much as products

🎙️ Guest Segment

- Utkarsh Kawatra — Co-founder, myHQWhat myHQ does today, its footprint across cities, workspaces and members, and how office design has evolved for flexibility-first teams. We dig into membership economics, industry dynamics and what’s changed after becoming part of Anarock.

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Today’s episode moves between AI search, content moats, and early-stage founder thinking — from SpaceX’s scale to how brands and builders adapt in an AI-first internet.

🗞️ Things We Saw on the Internet

• SpaceX completes a tender offer at ~$800B valuation — now the most valuable private company in the world. Employees sold shares; SpaceX raised no capital. Possible IPO in 2026.

🎙️ Guest Segments

1/ Anirudh Singla — Founder & CEO, Pepper

From Peppercontent to Pepper SEO + GEO, Pepper Creative, Pepper AI — what changed, why SEO is being rewritten for AI answers, how Atlas works, and what the real moat is when content becomes infinite. We discuss AI slop, where humans must stay in the loop, what an AI-native marketing org looks like in 2025, and the one human skill that compounds for marketers.

Prateek Mehta — General Partner, South Park Commons IndiaInside SPC’s Minus One philosophy — how residencies, fellowships, and funding fit together; why great founders never leave Minus One; what India’s frontier mix looks like today; and how SPC maintains a 98% survival rate across 150+ companies. We close with “time-traveller founders” and one Minus One habit anyone can start this week.

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