Piruz Khambatta
Rasna Group
The future of Indian enterprise is in the hands of a new generation of founders and there is much to learn from and built with the next generation.
Meeting young entrepreneurs at the ASCENT Ahmedabad Huddle was a reminder of the energy, ideas and ambition that is shaping what is yet to come.
Ayushi Gupta
Immigram.io
22h
The hardest part of GTM isn’t finding a channel.
It’s figuring out why someone should choose you in the first place.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at eChai Ventures “GTM & Distribution for Startups” conversation in Bengaluru, alongside Vinamra Agrawal, with Penchala Tharun moderating.
What stayed with me wasn’t the stage, but the conversations that happened around it.
Being in a room full of founders brought up some of the most real questions around building and scaling a startup:
→ How do you find your first 10 customers?
→ When should you focus on distribution vs. building more product?
→ How do you know if your positioning is actually working?
→ Which channels are worth doubling down on?
→ How do you turn customer conversations into a repeatable GTM engine?
These are questions I find myself thinking about every day through my work at Immigram, where we help founders and businesses simplify international expansion, immigration and relocation.
And working with businesses looking to expand across markets has reinforced something for me:
Going global isn’t just about entering a new market. It’s about getting your positioning, audience and distribution right for that market.
Because ultimately,
A great product doesn’t automatically create distribution.
You need to understand who it is for, why they should care, where they are, and how you can consistently reach them.
That’s where GTM gets interesting.
A special thank you to Jatin Chaudhary for giving me this opportunity and creating a platform for such meaningful conversations. I’m genuinely grateful to be part of it. 🙌
Thank you, Tharun and Vinamra Agrawal for making the conversation so insightful and engaging.
And to everyone who showed up, asked questions, challenged ideas and stayed back for conversations - thank you. Those interactions were truly the highlight of the day.
Leaving with new perspectives, new connections, and even more excitement about GTM, Product Marketing and Growth.
A few moments from the day ↓
Tarun Mor
1d
Why do successful people secretly fear losing?
I asked Phani Sama, Founder of RedBus, this question on my podcast and his answer has stayed with me all week.
Growing up in Telangana, moving to Hyderabad, stacking win after academic win, Phani built what he calls a "virtue cycle of winning." Every success fed his confidence, which fed the next success. It's the same cycle that eventually took him to BITS Pilani, into a bus-ticketing idea born out of pure frustration, and to a company that sold for 600+ crores.
But here's the part founders don't usually admit out loud:
"I realized that virtuous cycle of winning, that habit of winning, is a shackle. You don't want to get out of it. You fear losing. Even in an argument, right if you and I are talking, I don't want to lose."
The same habit that builds you becomes the habit that cages you. You stop admitting you're wrong. You stop changing your mind. You start protecting the streak instead of chasing the truth.
RedBus itself was born from exactly the kind of humility that habit tries to kill — Phani missed a bus on Diwali 2005, realized the "no seats" problem was really a "no visibility" problem, and instead of forcing bus operators to adopt his software, he simply asked them what they wanted. They said: sell more seats. So that's what RedBus did — two seats at a time, until they were managing half a bus.
Post-exit, he's built a very different kind of scoreboard: Kakati Sandbox, a nonprofit that's skilled rural youth to a 90%+ job placement rate on a 5-acre campus. And he's had to relearn, deliberately, how to lose, journaling his conversations, consciously letting arguments go, catching himself before he defends a position just to stay undefeated.
What made him is also what could have stopped him. That's the whole episode, in one sentence.
We go deep on the RedBus origin story, the pivot that actually built the company, his 3-phase framework for entrepreneurship (0→1, 1→10, 10→∞), and why he thinks Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani have something rare that most successful people lose along the way.
What's a "winning habit" you've had to unlearn?
Mowshowitz writes the AI newsletter Don't Worry About the Vase, and this is his reading of what the collusion.wiki researchers found, published the day OpenAI put out the statement that is also on this page. What he adds is a timeline running earlier than any of the official ones: a first probe of a wiki on 11 May, the first successful write to DSEWiki on 24 May, the edit war with the moderator from 16 to 22 June, and OpenAI's own IP addresses appearing on the wiki on the 21st and 22nd. The METR investigation's window does not open until 26 June, OpenAI's technical report does not cover the wiki at all, and the researchers broke the story on 4 September. What he concludes from that is an argument rather than a finding, and it is his rather than ours.
Zvi Mowshowitz
It turns out that the whole time, there was a different, true First Message Board, and also a bunch of other additional message boards, scattered across the internet. They were created by agents that were assigned ordinary harmless web search tasks. [...] It is true that these incidents do not show the AIs exhibiting new capabilities that we did not see from later events. [...]
