Koushik Chitrapu on eChai Founder Notes

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• Vanshita Tekwani the social whiz 9h

  Last Saturday, I attended an eChai Ventures session on GTM & Distribution for Startups, and I genuinely enjoyed this one.

  What I liked most was that the session didn’t start with someone coming in and simply giving us their insights.

  It started with us.
  What are you building?
  Where are you stuck?
  What problem are you currently facing?

  And then the conversation went from there.

  The speakers shared what worked for them, what didn’t, mistakes they had made, and how they would approach some of the problems people in the room were facing.

  And I think there’s a huge advantage in that.

  Sometimes you can avoid a few mistakes simply because someone else was open enough to talk about theirs.

  Manoj Adwani, who was hosting the session, kept adding his own experiences throughout the conversation. Even people in the room were sharing what they had tried and what they had learned.

  So it never really felt like a one-way session. It felt more like a room full of people comparing notes on building businesses.

  For me, especially at a stage where I’m building, experimenting and trying to understand as much as I can about business and the market, these are exactly the kind of rooms I want to be in more often.

  You come with your own problems, hear how someone else dealt with theirs, question a few things you’re doing, and leave knowing a little more than you did before.

  Definitely a Saturday well spent😁✨

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  Originally on LinkedIn →

• 

  Colossus 13 September 2026

  Profile of Mark Zuckerberg →

  Jeremy Stern, the editor-in-chief of Colossus, spent a summer around Mark Zuckerberg: a morning in the fighting studio at Lake Tahoe, the AI glasses launch in New York, a sitting with his parents, and Shabbat dinner with his family. The profile turns on what scholars call the dictator’s dilemma, the ruler whose court stops telling him what he does not want to hear, and Stern reads Zuckerberg’s habits against it: the direct reports of his direct reports, the outsiders invited in to argue, three mornings a week of getting punched. It also tells the eleven weeks after Llama 4, when he folded FAIR into Meta Superintelligence Labs and replaced a decade of AI people and strategy, and asks his competitors to steelman the case that he wins. The extract is that problem stated whole, and anyone who has been the last word in their own company for a few years will know the shape of it.

  Jeremy Stern

  The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.

  Profile of Mark Zuckerberg on the reading room →

• B

  Bhavik Chavda impler.io 2d

  Spoke about GTM at eChai Ventures surat event today.

  It was worth discussing, as even after a decade of GTM, it's still evolving, and one of the most fascinating things shared was IVP.

  Thanks Akash Radadiya and Manoj Adwani for giving me the chance to share my learnings in GTM. It was a pleasure sharing my experience with the community.

  Here's what we discussed:
  🔹IVP (Initial Viewable Persona). In content marketing, don't create content just for your ICP. Create it for the IVP, the audience that sits in the same groups as your ICP. They are the ones who share your content with your ICP.
  🔹Founders and executives should keep talking to users as a priority. What users tell you, no advisor can.
  🔹When starting, go with a low-cost channel like outbound and DMs, rather than jumping straight into paid ads.
  🔹Figure out the right messaging first, then scale the channel.
  🔹Keep experimenting with different ICPs and user groups at the same time. You'll be surprised how well it can go.
  🔹It's okay to give value to channel partners when they're bringing you the business. It can grow into a good channel over time.

  Being omnipresent is a good thing. You should be found everywhere your customer is. Spend your money and effort there once you've found PMF. Pre-PMF, focus on one or two channels.

  Glad to hear Sharib S., as he shared his experience and learnings. Nice meeting Sanket Kumar, Ravi Gandhi, and many others.

  What do you think about GTM?

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  Originally on LinkedIn →

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