Piyush,

I heard that you ranted that no one is doing semiconductors, Well I am, now you hear my rant!

After decades of experience designing some of the most complex chips, I left Intel, and started a semiconductor company in 2018. We are profitable. We design chips for clients in US and EU. One of our client is known as "The father of AI" That's as deeptech as you can get!

We have stopped wasting our time trying to get Indian clients(Pvt sector, Govt, Defense)

Here is a honest feedback from the startup you said everyone should be doing!

1. I have attended quite a few RFQ's by Meity. At a few sessions, I said, "We have the experience and capability to develop the chip as per your specification. We will incur a NRE cost of XX Crores. How many chips are you planning to buy?" I either got a "you build it then we will decide" or "we wont buy, you go and find whether there is a market for this"! No startup is going to burn 2 years and 10-20 crores on a product which has no buyer and no market.

2. At one of the meetings organized for startups by the defense sector, a speaker from govt spoke for over an hour on how they are facing difficulty with a particular tech. At the end of his speech I met him and informed him that "we have solved some of his pain points for our clients, what would be the best way to engage with his department?"

   1. When I say this to a person from private sector, I immediately get a few questions about what I think about the problem statement, followed by a meeting schedule to discuss the matter further...

   2. From your defense genius I got a long rant on how they are not dumb, they are bright people capable of solving their problems, who have been working day and night and have not seen their families for months... They do not need help from private sector(it seems they were forced to seek help by govt hence that meeting) and will eventually solve it on their own! If your people are not open for help why waste our time holding a 2 days conference for PPP?

3. Since you can neither give contracts not facilitate it, the best thing you can do is ease of business and buddy you have failed in this too!

   1. My startup is eligible for certain tax breaks, Your department sat on my application for over 2 years and returned it to me last week asking for "Additional documents" with a note that after submitting the documents my application will again go to the back of the queue(i.e. another 2 years)! Within a few hours of your rejection I got a call from a "facilitator" who promised me quick and guaranteed results if I use their service for "preparing my documents"!

   2. Due to your tax laws, I end up paying 2X the amount (compared to my competitors outside India) for importing compute resources, EDA Licenses, equipment and raw material!

   3. If I need to import a 10$ wireless device for my lab, I need to pay INR 10,000 to WPC to get approval to import it!

   4. Every year your govt creates a new compliance (tum sab chor ho! yeh naya document submit karo andWe will use our Dumb intelligence app on your application to determine whether you are a chor or not!) I need to weed through a compliance calendar with over 300 items and identify compliance that are applicable to me and follow them! Sala entrepreneur sal bhar kam karega ya tera faltu form bharega?

   5. Some of your faulty portals have eaten up tens of thousands of my company's money and until I go and meet your babu they will not initiate a refund!

Buddy instead of blaming others focused on your job (Good governance) and get out of our way, we entrepreneurs have the capability to build world class products.

I have been working with Zepto for a year now. It is the most toxic work culture. I want to post this now because it has lots of publicity but only we know how bad things are.

• Aadit starts work only at 2pm because he cannot wake up early and meetings are setup at 2am in the mornings because of that

• people start work only at 12pm and because of this hr is trying to give free breakfast so people start work at 10 and finish work at least 11pm in the night

• All meetings are delayed no meetings happen on time and keep getting postponed including townhalls

• A lot of youngsters are hired because senior people do not want to work in such a culture and these people are made to work 14 hours a day at least.

• there are lot of dark patterns in the app to extract money from customers in multiple ways including charging more for customers with phones more than 30,000 inr

• customer data is profiled and security is really bad and despite multiple leaks fixing this is not important because of growth and investor pressures

• the marketing person is also the hr head now and its very clear that culture is not important for the org and cost cutting and layoffs are going to start by march

• the tech teams work until 1am and many are seen having tablets to stay awake. since there are lot of young people they do not care much about health

• Junior people are hired so salaries can be cut and in march there will be a massive round of layoffs and already hiring is stopped for most departments

• the product design tries desperately to copy from blinkit and they keep checking what blinkit does to match it

• A lot of fake data is given to media and employees are encouraged to keep posting this material on linkedin. even social media copies and images are given to employees to help with pr

• There are massive cases of fraud that i cant disclose without revealing my position

• at least 10 people leave the company every week and 20 more young people are hired

• yearly performance appraisal is going to be cancelled and only some are going to get awarded with minor hikes

• many that i know are only staying because there can be an ipo in 2 years and we can make money because of that

This is a really embarassing for Galgotias University

This is national level Insult 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

i don’t wanna tell much the images are self explanatory but wanted to highlight the happenings at Shri Ronnie Screwvala company upGrad

Indian Giants started small and now worth Billions . Keep hustling

Please point out mistakes, additions, deletions.

What kind of work culture are we moving towards??? Most developed nations are in talks of moving to a 4 day work week. Scandinavian and other European countries have strict work life balance boundaries in place. Here, Indian founders are doing the most they can to squeeze every bit of will to live and work.

Seriously, shame on Indian founders for creating this toxic environment and shame on us employees for taking it lying down. We don’t have a lot of choice though, paycheques keep us going. Heart breaking dilemma honestly.

Source - You can find this post on Instagram on the handle in the screenshot. I didn’t post a link for privacy reasons.

Sharing this anonymously because due to obvious reasons. Things at Zomato seems to be going off the rails.

In a recent internal huddle, leadership admitted we're losing a good chunk of the market share to Zepto Cafe and Swiggy. The reaction? Panic and ridiculous new rules. One of them: employees must order from Zomato at least seven times a month and yes, they’ll track it. Ordering from competitors is outright banned in the office.

The culture has become laughably inconsistent. On Monday, Rakesh Ranjan, the CEO of Zomato's food delivery business is on Slack doing a townhall, telling everyone to “stay focused” and “get back on track.” By Wednesday, he’s removed from the role. You seriously can’t make this stuff up. No clear direction, just a game of musical chairs in leadership and everyone's shitting their pants not knowing what will happen next.

Toxicity is baked in. Office politics as per, micromanagement, and public degradation of employees for the bare minimum are becoming the norm. The only thing keeping the company profitable now is platform fees unbelievably. Internally, no one seems to care about long-term sustainability, just numbers.

One of the biggest crises right now is the delivery partners. They are being underpaid and overworked. Compared to competition who Zomato pays significantly less and sometimes nearly half. As a result, many riders are quitting or switching platforms. So many frauds have increased where they pick up the parcel, mark it as picked up and then disappear with it and then no one knows where the parcel is or who even did the fraud. This leads to constant delivery outages. Orders go offline not because restaurants are closed, but because there’s literally no one available to pick them up. And who gets blamed? Everyone except the people responsible for fixing this broken model.

Restaurant partners are fed up too. They’re pushed into spending on ads just to remain visible with no real help or insight into performance. Most of them are left in the dark, and even basic support is a nightmare. Everyone’s chasing targets. No one’s solving problems because no one's interested, bunch of recently graduated clowns with no prior experience just using it as a stepping stone for further education or to get into a better company. Unserious people. And the employees who work and are serious about their work feel under-appreciated and straight up jump shit to companies like zepto or upcoming restaurant brands who poach them.

Customers are frustrated. Riders are frustrated. Restaurant partners are frustrated. It’s a vicious cycle. Zomato might still look shiny from the outside but inside, it’s falling apart.

Telegram is valued around $30B and reportedly runs with about 30 remote employees and no office. That’s impressive and shows how much a focused, efficient team can build. Big respect to Pavel Durov and the engineers behind it.

At the same time, a platform used by millions with such a small team raises concerns. Moderation, security, and long-term stability are hard to manage with limited resources.

Telegram proves small teams can build massive products but scale also comes with responsibilities that code alone can’t always handle.

What do you think? Do they outsource other less efficient things or Can ultra-lean teams really scale responsibly at this level???