Platform Engineering, Cybersecurity, AI, Multi Cloud & Mobile, Web Architect, Tech Entrepreneur, Philosopher, Yogi & Expl0r3r
Bangalore
Joined March 2009
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Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Peter Thiel's resolution to his younger self was brutally simple:
"Always value substance over status. Substance over prestige."
Easy to nod at. Hard to actually do — because the pressure runs the other way.
The credential, the brand-name employer, the prestigious fund: these are legible signals. Substance is murky. So most ambitious people default to optimizing for what others can quickly recognize, rather than what actually compounds.
Thiel's point has a mechanism behind it: prestige is consensus opinion. When you pursue it, you're outsourcing your judgment to the crowd — and by definition, the crowd is evaluating you on the same metrics everyone else uses. You're competing in the most crowded lane possible.
The historical pattern backs this up. Gates dropped out of Harvard. Jobs left Reed College. Bezos quit a prestigious hedge fund career to sell books out of a garage. None of those decisions looked impressive at the time. All of them were bets on substance over status signals.
The asymmetric opportunities are almost always in the places that don't look good on a resume yet.
Prestige is backward-looking — it rewards what the consensus already values. Substance-first thinking is how you get to the opportunity before the consensus catches up.
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
The biggest cheat code for your brain is telling yourself everything will always work out in your favor.
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Ben Horowitz's message to early-stage founders on betting on yourself, the doubts that do the most damage, and why fear means you're doing it right:
"Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question that bet and you question that belief, but that gets you nothing."
"The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them."
"I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it."
"It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Peter Thiel has a blunt test for whether a startup team is thinking clearly.
Watch how they talk about their own outcomes.
His observation: when founders start framing results as luck — "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, so let's just invest a little and see" — that's not prudent risk management. That's a diagnostic failure.
The mechanism is specific. Luck-framing doesn't emerge from humility. It emerges from not having done the analytical work to understand *why* your business will win. If you've truly mapped the competitive dynamics, the customer psychology, the timing — you don't describe the outcome as a coin flip. You describe what needs to be true and why.
The portfolio mindset ("let's see what happens") is what you default to when you don't have conviction built on evidence.
Thiel's sharpest version of this: the founders of Google, Amazon, and Apple in their early days weren't operating on hope. They had specific theories about why they would win that others couldn't see yet. Bezos mapped out why e-commerce would scale through selection and logistics before the market existed. That's not luck-denial — that's rigorous foresight presented as conviction.
When a founding team tells you "we'll figure it out," the question isn't whether they're optimistic. It's whether they can articulate the actual mechanism of their advantage.
If they can't, the luck framing isn't a personality trait. It's a capability gap.
Blaming luck is what you do when you've stopped thinking.
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Ben Horowitz on treating your story as your strategy, and why founders often skip writing it even though it's one of the most important parts of the job:
"The story of the company is also the strategy of the company... In your mind, you're kind of adjusting that strategy a little bit at a time every day. But then a quarter later, it's actually pretty different than what you started with."
"So it's really important that you keep upgrading your story. The articulation of your story. I would definitely recommend it be in written form."
"Something that you can share with everybody in the company, and everybody you're recruiting, everybody you're trying to raise money from, all your constituents, every customer."
"The problem that I think founders have is it doesn't feel like work. Like, 'What are you doing today?' 'I'm working on my story.' That doesn't sound like work."
"Because it doesn't feel like work, people don't do it, but it's probably one of the most important parts of the job."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @Tocelot
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
The Indian startup ecosystem is on steroids.
And what excites me most is that this isn’t just about software. It’s about deeptech. Manufacturing technology. Hardcore hardware. Cutting-edge chemical processes.
A new generation of Indian entrepreneurs is building the capabilities that could allow us to leapfrog entire stages of technological development.
These videos, courtesy @ashleevance & @RuntimeBRT, offer just a glimpse of what’s being cooked up in labs, workshops & factories across India.
And right on cue, Rajan Anandan, former head of Google India, & Saurabh Srivastava, one of India’s pioneering entrepreneurs & institution builders, have released a book calling India a ‘Lift-Off Nation.’
An apt description.
Because I believe the world is about to witness a tidal wave of technological innovation emerging from India.
And it’s being powered by young entrepreneurs who are daring to build things we once assumed could only be built elsewhere.
My salute to them.
#MondayMotivation
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
“In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn't bother you at all.”
— Bill Ackman
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
80,000 impressions with a single post? I was quite surprised to notice it this morning. 🤯
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Maybe if physics had always been this easy to visualize and learn, we might have had more physicists than ever.
AI is making learning so much easier to understand and actually fun.
This is an electromagnetic field visualization built using Claude Opus 5.5.
I do not think I have ever understood this subject better than I did by simply seeing it visualized like this 😅
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
Elon’s advice to 20-year-olds on surviving the AI era:
Get as broad-based an education as possible: arts, sciences, engineering, and wide general knowledge.
Why?
AI and robots will fulfill almost any request immediately.The edge won’t be doing the work. It will be knowing what to ask for. The broader your knowledge, the better your questions.
(source: CGTN)
Suresh Kumar R retweeted
if you missed the slightly insane AI safety schizopoast, I put it into a song for you and you should turn the sound on right now because we're so fucking back
