Let me walk you through it, because it’s mildly unhinged when you say it out loud. Maps chose my restaurant, ranked by stars, filtered by price, sorted by how far I’d walk before I lost interest. My phone yanked an address out of a screenshot so my thumbs wouldn’t have to. My watch threw me a little party for hitting 10,000 steps, then two mornings later informed me, with great confidence, that I’d slept badly, which is why I was a menace before coffee. And an app I have genuinely no memory of downloading knew the altitude of a hill I’d walked up. The altitude. Of a hill. For fun, apparently.

None of it felt like anything in the moment. That’s the part that got me. It was only looking back across the week that I thought, hang on, is all of this helping me? Or is it doing something else I haven’t clocked yet?

Here’s what I landed on. Tell me if you feel it too. Look at that list again, because every single one of those things is doing the exact same job. It’s measuring me. Taking something I used to just feel, a meal, a night’s sleep, a walk, and turning it into a number. A score. A percentage. A little green ring. We say “technology” like it’s a thousand different things, but the tech running our daily lives right now mostly does one thing. It counts. It takes what you used to just live, and it grades it.

And once I saw that, “is it good or bad” stopped being the question. Because the measuring isn’t the problem. A filter that takes 5,000 strangers’ honest opinions and tells me “this place is great and you can afford it” is a gift, full stop. I’d have spent an hour deciding and picked worse anyway.

But my watch quietly noting down everywhere I go, every route, every coordinate, the full map of my Tuesday? That one hits different. Not because it’s measuring, same act, but because I’m no longer sure the number’s for me.

And that, I think, is the whole line. It’s not helpful tech versus creepy tech. It’s whether the measurement is working for you, or on you.

When strangers rate a restaurant, that data is yours. You’re the customer, and the whole thing exists to make your night better. When your location history sits on a server somewhere, feeding an advertiser, an insurer, an app engineered to keep you scrolling eleven more minutes, the same data is quietly working on you. You stopped being the customer. You became the thing being optimised.

Help is when you’re holding the tape measure. Harm is when someone’s holding it against you, and you can’t quite see who.

Today the children of those farmers and factory workers are at Amazon, are chartered accountants in Germany, are living lives that began generations ago with one man and a stubborn belief about sugar. Drive through Ugar Khurd now and you will see farmers with Skodas, large homes, thriving farms, in a village whose name means small. None of it started in a boardroom. It came from the soil of India and the farmers who dared to dream alongside my Panjoba. So here is to the entrepreneurs we never write about, the ones who changed real lives on the periphery.

And, here’s to family.

I did not think about it as a decision. That is exactly the point.

Somewhere in the last two years, the default changed. The question stopped being “which site has it cheapest” and became “which app has it fastest.” For an entire category of everyday purchases, groceries, chargers, a forgotten ingredient, a last-minute gift, quick commerce has not competed with e-commerce. It has quietly replaced it.

The numbers are staggering. By 2024, quick commerce accounted for two-thirds of all e-grocery orders in India and roughly 10% of all e-retail spend, on $6-$7 billion in GMV. The market is projected to more than triple to around $40 billion by 2030. Blinkit alone now processes close to a million orders a day and commands roughly half the market. This is, by some accounts, the fastest-growing industry segment India has ever produced.

So the consumer shift is real and probably irreversible. But here is where it gets interesting, and where my actual question lives.

If everyone is delivering the same charger in 15 minutes, what are they actually competing on?

The answer is uncomfortable.

They are competing on who can afford to lose money the longest.

Quick commerce runs on dark stores, small warehouses scattered across a city, each one stocked, staffed, and operated at a cost.

Fast delivery is not magic.

It is expensive infrastructure subsidised by investor capital, offered to you below true cost in the hope that you never go back to waiting three days.

Every 14-minute delivery is, to some degree, a bet someone else is paying for.

Moving on to, who’s holding the chips now? (Literally, and figuratively).

Blinkit is owned by Eternal, formerly Zomato. It has reached profitability and has a public market currency to keep funding expansion. Instamart sits inside Swiggy, also public, also funded. Then there is the heavy artillery arriving late but well-armed: Flipkart Minutes, backed by Walmart, and Amazon Now, backed by Amazon. Neither Walmart nor Amazon needs this business to be profitable next quarter. They can absorb years of burn as a line item, funded by businesses making money elsewhere.

And then there is Zepto. The first mover. The startup sensation that went from zero to over a billion dollars in annualised sales in 29 months. Genuinely impressive. But Zepto does not have a Walmart behind it. It does not have a profitable food delivery business funding the grocery burn. It has venture capital, which is patient until it is not, and a valuation that needs to keep being justified by the next round.

That is the real race. Not speed. Survival.

Which brings me to the question I cannot stop turning over. If quick commerce is winning, and the companies running it went public to access permanent capital, why do they keep needing more? Eternal raised a large QIP not long after the structure settled. A company that has IPO’d, that owns a profitable Blinkit, still reaching back into the market for a fresh infusion of cash. Why?

Because the war is not won. It is barely begun.

The minimum order values keep dropping. The discounts keep coming. Morgan Stanley flagged the obvious risk: even the market leader could get pulled into a dogfight of lower order values and higher discounts, because the moment one player blinks, they all have to match.

This is the part the convenience hides. You are enjoying a service priced below what it costs to deliver, in a market where four of the five largest players are some combination of public, deep-pocketed, or foreign-owned, and the one beloved pioneer is the most exposed of all.

So has quick commerce replaced e-commerce? For the everyday stuff, yes. The behavior has changed and it is not changing back.

But the more honest question is not whether quick commerce won.

It is who will still be standing when the capital stops being free.

The charger arrived in 14 minutes. Somebody, somewhere, is still paying for those other 14 minutes I didn’t wait.

I just don’t think it’s me. 🤷‍♀️

We don't. We bet on people.

I've sat through hundreds of founder meetings at this point. And the longer I do this, the more convinced I am that what separates the founders who get funded from the ones who don't has almost nothing to do with the deck.

So what does it actually come down to?

1. Has this person lived the problem? Not read about it. Not heard about it from a friend at a dinner party. Actually lived it.

You can tell within minutes. Sometimes within the first answer. The founder who's felt the pain personally doesn't recite the TAM at you. They tell you about the Tuesday afternoon the problem cost them something real. You can't fake that. And every investor I know is quietly pattern-matching for it, whether we admit it or not.

2. Industry depth. The founder who walks in with an unfair advantage because they've already put in the reps.

But here's what I've noticed. Depth alone doesn't get you there. I've met founders who spent fifteen years inside an industry, knew every operational detail, and still couldn't see the structural shift coming straight at them.

Why? Because they were so deep inside the system, they'd stopped questioning it. The founders I find myself leaning in for are the ones who have the experience, but still ask, why is it even done this way?

3. This one might surprise you. The best founders are, for lack of a better word, entitled.

Not arrogant. Entitled. They bother their investors. They message you about a hiring dilemma at 9pm. They ask for the intro, the advice, the favour. And it works. Founders who actually use their investors grow faster than the ones who treat them like a glorified piggy bank.

Here's where India is different though. The founder-investor dynamic carries a real cultural weight here. So many founders, especially first-generation ones, treat investors with a formality that almost feels like distance. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. The founders who break that pattern? Still the exception. And honestly, they're the ones I remember. Not because they took more from me, but because they treated the relationship as a partnership rather than a transaction that ended at the wire transfer.

4. Visibility. You know the argument.

Anybody can build anything now, so the founder who gets it in front of the most people fastest wins. Get over the cringe.

Post.

Sure, visibility matters. But I've watched founders confuse visibility with progress. Is the founder posting daily while the product stalls actually winning? Build the proof first, then amplify it. Because if what sits underneath the visibility is thin, all that reach just helps more people find out faster.

But step back and look at that list for a second.

Nothing on it is about the idea. Not the market size. Not the technology. Not the deck.

That's the part that took me the longest to accept. Ideas pivot. Markets shift. Products get rebuilt. The founder is the only constant in the entire equation.

So the real diligence question was never "will this work?"

It's "who is this person when it doesn't?"

According to Carta’s Q2 2025 data, startups now need around $3M ARR to be considered ready for a Series A. The median time from seed to Series A has stretched beyond two years. That is not a blip. That is a structural recalibration of what institutional capital requires before it moves.

I have watched this play out from the investor side. The companies that raised Series A rounds in 2021 and 2022 on thin metrics are now the ones stalling between A and B. More than 1,000 startups are getting orphaned each year, stranded between seed and Series A with nowhere to go. Investors watched this happen in slow motion for two years. The result is a market that has repriced risk, not because investors got more cautious, but because the evidence finally caught up with the optimism.

This is not the market being broken. This is the market being corrected.

I have watched both mistakes play out up close.

A SaaS founder I worked with wanted to incorporate AI into his product. Not because it was ready. Because the wave was moving and the FOMO was real. The product was still in development when he launched. He knew, after the fact, what it cost him. And it cost him significantly. The market did not care about his timeline or his intentions. It only cared about what he actually delivered.

A logistics founder I worked with acquired a company whose real strength was operational efficiency, genuinely differentiated from anything else in the market. The smart move would have been to let it exist separately, study how it operated, and absorb those lessons gradually. Instead, the acquiring company folded it in entirely. In doing so, it diluted the very efficiencies that made the acquisition worth making in the first place. What should have been a value-add became closer to a write off.

Two different founders. Two different sectors. The same underlying error: letting external pressure, whether AI FOMO or competitive anxiety, override the fundamentals that actually matter.

Here is what the bar actually looks like right now. Investors have raised Series A requirements to $2.5M or more in ARR, with growth rates above 100% year on year and unit economics of at least 3.5:1 LTV to CAC. NRR below 100% is a hard stop. Fix retention first or there is no conversation. Companies with 120% or more NRR can raise at 25 to 50% higher valuations than companies with 95% NRR at equivalent ARR levels. The retention curve is now the single most scrutinised data point in any Series A process.

The AI exception is real but narrow.

If you are building an AI-native company with genuine traction, the bar is different. AI-native startups capture outsized investor attention and higher valuations. But for software companies in non-AI categories, expect more questions, more diligence, and more time from first meeting to term sheet than feels reasonable. Plan for it anyway.

The founders who are succeeding right now have done two things well.

1. Building proof before they hit the market. Not projections. Not pipeline. Actual retention data, actual cohort curves, actual evidence that customers are staying and expanding. The median Series A round in Q1 2025 involved 17.9% dilution, down from 20.9% a year earlier. Founders who demonstrate capital efficiency are keeping more of their companies while raising the same amounts. Efficiency is now a feature, not a constraint.

2. Building relationships six to twelve months before they plan to raise. Warm relationships with target Series A investors six to twelve months before fundraising result in faster processes, better terms, and often 10 to 20% higher valuations than cold outreach.

There is a version of this that founders interpret as the system being unfair. I understand that instinct.

The goalposts moved.

The companies that raised before you did so on easier terms.

That is true and it is genuinely frustrating.

But here is the harder truth: a

• Many founders raise Series A at $1M ARR when waiting for $2M ARR would double their valuation. Raising too early is not just harder now. It is actively expensive.

• Every point of dilution you take at the wrong moment compounds through every subsequent round. The founders who wait, build proof, and arrive at the Series A conversation with retention data and warm relationships are not just more likely to close. They are closing on significantly better terms.

The market is not broken. It is asking a simple question: does this business actually work?

The founders who can answer that question with data, not narrative, and, are the ones raising right now.

FYI: This piece is a departure from my usual writing. No data, no statistics, no market trends. Just a question I have been sitting with for a long time.

I know men who are brilliant.

Lawyers, founders, investors, people who can hold a conversation on anything from geopolitics to Godard.

Men who, on paper, are everything.

And yet somehow, in the context of a relationship, the same man who can argue a courtroom or build a company cannot find it in himself to call. Cannot prioritise. Cannot show up in the small, unglamorous, entirely unsexy ways that partnership actually requires. He is not a bad person. He just never decided to try.

That gap, between who a man is in the world and who he is willing to be for you, is what I cannot stop thinking about.

I am in my early thirties. I have built a career spanning 10 years that I am proud of. I am on my way to my next adventure, business school in the fall. I work incredibly hard to be there for my family, friends, and even strangers, in moments that may not be the most convenient for me. I have not done all the work I would have hoped to by this age, but I am trying to do more and be more every single day.

And I know I am not alone in wondering: if both men and women are doing the work, why aren’t they able to find the partners they crave in this increasingly isolated world?

This is not an attack.

I want to be precise about that.

I am not interested in the piece that tears men down or declares them irredeemably lacking.

That piece is boring, it is everywhere, and it does not actually move anything forward.

What I am genuinely, honestly, confounded by is something quieter and harder to name. Two people, both doing the work, both wanting the same thing, but why are they still somehow missing each other?

Women of my generation were raised, explicitly or implicitly, to become more. More capable, more independent, more self-aware.

And from what I can see, many men of this generation are trying too.

Building careers, showing up for their families, asking harder questions of themselves than the generations before them did.

So why, when two people who have both done that work find each other, does the partnership still so often fail to materialise?

A conversation with my book club put it plainly. It talked about the casual concessions that women intentionally make, asking for less, making themselves smaller, and actively choosing to ask less of the men they are dating.

Why are women themselves propogating the concept of the chill girlie?

The girl who is okay trading a Friday comedy show for a quick dinner. Archiving the restaurant list because her man prefers a quick jiggle down. Letting a quick trip to Paris, that you had found a great deal on, become a footnote because something sports related that was crucial to his existence was taking place, and you didn’t want to be the ‘difficult one’. Women and men are almost always too busy to build memories in a world that keeps us constantly overwhelmed.

But why give up a single opportunity to give ourselves those experiences and build those memories in the rare moments we get a chance?

Let me clarify: the rare moments we get a chance as partners.

I have watched this happen to people I love. I have felt the edges of it myself.

The Before Sunset monologue it reminded me of is the one where a man talks about leaving an imprint on a woman’s soul, this romantic idea of impact and connection, without ever quite reckoning with what he leaves behind when he goes. An imprint is not a partnership. It is a trace. And a lot of men and women in their twenties and thirties are quietly covered in traces left by someone who mistook intensity for investment.

What I am looking for, what I think a lot of people my age are looking for, is something less cinematic and more structural. A partner. Someone who is also doing the work. Who has also asked themselves the harder questions about who they are and what they want and what they are willing to build. Someone for whom a relationship is not a place to receive care but a place to exchange it.

Is that a high bar? In theory, no. In practice, why does it turn out to be so rare?

I do not think the problem is bad people. I think it is two people who have each done the work independently, in parallel, without ever quite learning how to do it together. Growing alongside someone is a different skill from growing alone. And nobody really teaches you that part.

So I sit with the question I cannot fully answer.

It honestly confounds me.

For women, where are the man we need?

For men, where are the women they need?

I did not book it.

But plenty of people did. And that, more than the price tag, is what got me thinking.

The global wellness market is valued at $2 trillion, growing at roughly 10% annually, more than double the rate of the broader health and beauty category. In India, the numbers are moving in the same direction, faster. Pilates studios are opening on every corner of every affluent neighbourhood. A group session runs upwards of ₹2,500. A one-on-one is closer to ₹5,000. To be fair, there is a real difference between the two. A one-on-one allows the instructor to assess your posture, understand your history, and customise your programme. A group session cannot. But most people booking these pilates sessions are not asking that question. They are booking because everyone else is booking.

Then there is Dhun, Mira Kapoor’s wellness sanctuary in Mumbai. A seven day programme is priced at ₹1.75 lakh. To her credit, Mira Kapoor takes an active operational role and the brand has raised $4 million from credible institutional investors. This is not a celebrity vanity project. But it is, by design, aimed at 0.05% or less of India’s population. Wellness at that price point is not a health product. It is a luxury consumption category with a health narrative attached.

Now, zoom out to the West.

A Goop article I recently came across opened with a scene from an IV therapy lounge in Santa Monica, where two ultra-fit millennials flirted for twenty minutes while their bloodstreams absorbed vitamin B12 and magnesium. They exchanged numbers. They vowed to meet for a cold plunge. The article described it, earnestly, as a ‘meet-cute for the wellness generation’.

This is the world the wellness industry has built. Private social wellness clubs are now promoting IRL connection alongside state-of-the-art wellness activations. Matchas are the new martinis. Memberships at these clubs range from $280 a month at the entry level to $6,500 annually plus a $2,500 initiation fee at the higher end, for services including IV therapy movie nights, hyperbaric chambers, and what one club calls the Ammortal Chamber. The same Goop newsletter also contained a vagina scented candle. It sold out.

That is the wellness industry in one sentence. Genuinely interesting ideas, credible thinkers, and a cervical crystal, all on the same platform, all carrying the same implicit endorsement.

What began as a genuine movement toward better health has become increasingly polluted by social media influencers and celebrity endorsements peddling unproven remedies. Celebrity influence is now the dominant force behind most wellness trends, often outweighing scientific credibility. Bryan Johnson’s extreme longevity routine birthed a $2.7 billion market of unproven budget alternatives. A man’s personal obsession with not dying became an industry overnight, not because the science was validated, but because the anxiety it spoke to was real and the aspiration it sold was compelling.

There are real things here.

Sleep matters. Movement matters. Stress management matters. Some of the ancient practices being repackaged and repriced, breathwork, yoga, Ayurveda, have genuine evidence behind them when practiced correctly.

The problem is not that people are paying attention to their health. The problem is that the industry has figured out that anxiety is extraordinarily monetisable, and that a generation of people who feel vaguely unwell are willing to pay almost anything for something that promises to fix it, without asking too many questions about whether it actually will.

Nobody is asking those questions.

Is my sound bath instructor certified?

Does this pilates group session actually address my specific mobility issues, or does it just make me feel like I am doing something?

Is the ₹10,000 I am about to spend on a single session going to produce a different outcome than a ₹500 session with a certified physiotherapist?

The wellness industry has industrialised the avoidance of those questions. It has replaced them with aesthetics, influencer endorsements, and the vague but powerful feeling that if you are doing this, you are someone who takes care of themselves.

The honest question worth sitting with is whether any of this is actually making us well. Not calmer for an afternoon. Not more aesthetically aligned with what a healthy person looks like on Instagram. Actually, measurably, clinically better.

For most of what is being sold at these price points, the answer is probably not. And the fact that we are not asking that question, has me asking the uncomfortable question of how well we actually are?

India’s Chief Justice called the unemployed youth of India entering certain professions “like cockroaches” during a court hearing. While he did clarify later, Gen-Z didn’t seem to care. Within days, the Cockroach Janta Party had 40,000 members, a five point manifesto, and a banned X handle that came back with the caption: “You thought you could get rid of us? Lol.” Essentially, for lack of a better term, flipping the Indian Chief Justice off.

Why would he say that? Is it warranted? Not really. The Gen-Z population of today, who are currently entering the workforce, followed all the rules. India added roughly 5 million graduates annually between 2004 and 2023. Yet, nearly 40% of those Indian graduates under 25 are unemployed. Why was India able to absorb only 2.8 million of those graduates into employment? The gap between those two numbers is far from a rounding error. The question is, why in a developing, growing economy like India are 11 million educated, ambitious people waiting in the wings?

I wrote earlier this year about India’s manufacturing share of GDP falling to a record low 12.5% while the working-age population grew steadily. The Cockroach Janta Party is what that looks like on the ground. It’s not just a meme, it’s the frustration of a generation of Indians aggregated. It is literally the demographic dividend curdling in real time.

The term adopted by economists for this was called the queuing phenomenon. It entailed educated workers waiting for jobs from the formal sector that would match their qualifications, and unwilling to be absorbed into a more informal economy that does not require a degree. Today, the formal sector is creating far fewer jobs than the number of graduates seeking them. What happens in such a scenario? We see the queue grow longer and longer every year. This queueing phenomenon has resulted in more than 80% of jobs in India remaining informal. Where does this leave the graduate who spent four years and significant family capital on a degree? Especially when that degree is being disregarded. Is their refusal to be absorbed into the informal sector logical? Is the system that produced this phenomenon fair? In my opinion, it isn’t.

We may not say it out loud, but India’s consumption story is weakening. A consumption story that rested on the assumption of a young, growing, educated population that would sustain domestic demand, does not seem to be the India story any longer. This assumption would only hold true if they had the income to fuel that demand.

But we are seeing a contrarian picture playing out. Wage growth for graduates has slowed even as the number of graduates has surged, resulting in a class of qualified but jobless young Indians. How is it possible for a generation of young Indians without formal employment, therefore without the ability to build savings, to even imagine buying homes, or drive the consumption cycle that India’s bull case depends on?

The creation of a satirical political party that posts cockroach memes seems like an unfortunate inevitability at this point.

The Cockroach Janta Party, while calling itself satirical, seems more like a pressure gauge. Which has me asking the question, that if India has the demographics, and honestly everything required on paper, why are they unable to make this dividend pay out?

What’s missing, and what I had highlighted in my earlier article, is building out at sufficient scale or speed, a manufacturing base. A base that would result in increasing formal employment and skilling infrastructure, driving the engine that would convert college graduates into workers the economy needs.

Not, cockroaches.

Let’s be honest, the Chief Justice simply highlighted a gap between what the youth of India was promised and what the economy delivered.

And, until that gap closes, we’re stuck with memes.

The story begins in 2004.

H&M had enjoyed stellar success through the 1990s, but their competitors had caught up and the brand needed something to re-establish its position.

So, they in turn “collaborated”.

It started with designer collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld. The collection sold out within minutes, caused queues around the block, and crashed H&M’s website.

It proved that luxury credibility and mass-market distribution are not opposites.

Combined, they create something more powerful than either alone.

Industry analysts gave it a name.

Masstige.

Luxury aspiration at accessible prices.

The Lagerfeld collection was priced at approximately 15% of standard designer retail. The consumer was not buying a simple shirt. They were buying Karl Lagerfeld at a fraction of what Karl Lagerfeld costs. The psychological calculus is entirely different.

What followed was two decades of collaborations: Stella McCartney in 2005, Versace in 2011, Balmain in 2015, Moschino in 2018, Mugler in 2023. Each one a cultural moment as much as a retail event. Overnight lines, viral sell-outs, resale market frenzy, and press coverage no advertising budget could replicate.

Here is the part most consumers never fully register. The collections are intentionally limited in volume.

H&M does not optimise for direct revenue from the capsule. Instead, the collaboration acts as a high-profile marketing campaign that lifts perception of the core brand, drives store traffic, and encourages purchases of regular H&M merchandise alongside the collab.

A simple Stella McCartney x H&M bracelet that costs an absurd ₹4,999 sells out in minutes, but is not primarily a revenue line.

It is a brand signal that changes how you perceive everything else in the store.

Academic research on these collaborations found that attracting media attention rather than direct profits is the key measure of success. The collaboration is the most efficient marketing spend in retail: press coverage, social media virality, and brand elevation bundled into a product that also generates direct revenue.

The consumer psychology is not complicated but it is underappreciated.

Younger buyers do not evaluate a collaboration piece on craftsmanship. They evaluate it as an entry point into a designer world that would otherwise be inaccessible.

To them, a ₹4,999 bracelet from Stella McCartney x H&M is not expensive. It is extraordinary value relative to Stella McCartney. That reframing changes everything about the purchase decision.

Twenty years of this strategy have re-defined something at a structural level for H&M. The collaborations have repositioned what H&M is allowed to be in the consumer’s mind. No longer purely a budget retailer. Something more aspirational. Something that Stella McCartney, Karl Lagerfeld, Balmain, and Versace all chose to associate with.

That association has a “price”. And, it’s allowed H&M to quietly collect its rewards for the past two decades.

Not a phase.

A philosophy.

The smart move was always to stay flexible, hedge your bets, and never close a door you might want to walk through later.

I have watched this up close, in colleagues, in peers, in myself. And the more I have watched it, the more I have come to believe that most of what passes for optionality is not strategy at all. It is fear with better branding.

Here is the distinction that actually matters.

In finance, an option has genuine value. You pay a premium for the right, but not the obligation, to act. The premium is the cost.

The value comes from what you do when the moment arrives.

An option you never exercise is just a cost. Optionality is not insurance. It is an allocation decision with compounding consequences. Every open door is quietly billing you, in attention, in energy, in the compound interest of delayed commitment.

Dan Ariely's research on decision-making found that people are willing to invest significant effort and money simply to keep options open, even when those options are delivering no value and the act of preserving them is actively costly.

We do not keep doors open because we have a plan to walk through them.

We keep them open because closing them feels like loss.

The psychological term is loss aversion. The career term is hedging. The honest term is avoidance.

The person with all doors open is the person standing in the hallway. They are in no room.

They are doing nothing. They are just surrounded by doors.

The people I have seen build something real, in capital markets, in startups, in anything that compounds over time, share one characteristic that is underrated to the point of invisibility. They committed early, before it was obvious, before the consensus formed, before the option was universally recognised as valuable. That is not the same as being reckless. It is the opposite. It takes more conviction to close a door deliberately than to leave it open indefinitely.

Nassim Taleb argues that in an unpredictable world, maximising optionality is rational. If you cannot predict outcomes, position yourself to have choices. That argument has real merit in specific contexts, early career, early stage investing, genuine uncertainty with asymmetric upside. But it has been borrowed wholesale by people who are not in those contexts and applied as a permanent operating principle. The result is a generation of highly educated, deeply capable people who have optimised so hard for flexibility that they have never actually done anything with it.

Every option you keep open is silently billing you. Most people call it flexibility. The honest name for it is fear dressed up in strategic language.

The moments that have mattered most, in my own experience and in watching others, were not the moments of ‘maximum optionality’. They were the moments of deliberate closure. Choosing this and not that. Committing to a direction before the outcome was guaranteed. Accepting that closing one door was not a loss but a bet, and that a bet placed with conviction compound differently than a portfolio of open possibilities that never gets called.

There is a version of optionality that is genuinely strategic.

It is time-bound, it is attached to a specific decision horizon, and it exists in service of a commitment you are building toward. That version is rare. Most of what I see is not that. Most of what I see, and have done myself, is using the language of strategy to avoid the discomfort of choice.

The uncomfortable question is not which option to keep open.

It is why you have not closed the ones you already know the answer to.

Commitment is not the enemy of optionality.

It is what optionality is supposed to be for.

India is taking its vitamins. Loudly, enthusiastically, and in increasing quantities.

The Indian nutraceuticals market was worth $32 billion in 2024 and is projected to nearly double to $75 billion by 2033, growing at 10% annually. Walk into any pharmacy, open any Instagram feed, scroll through any D2C health brand, and the story feels obvious: Indians are getting serious about preventive health, and an entire industry has materialised to meet that demand.

The story is real. It is also, in significant parts, a marketing exercise dressed up in scientific language. Knowing which part is which is worth your time, both as a consumer and as anyone paying attention to where capital is flowing in Indian consumer markets.

Start with: why is the demand genuine?

India now accounts for more than a quarter of the world's 828 million diabetes sufferers, making it the most affected country globally.

Non-communicable diseases, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, now account for the majority of deaths in India. A generation of urban Indians is watching their parents manage chronic conditions and concluding, reasonably, that they would prefer not to.

COVID accelerated this instinct dramatically.

The shift from reactive treatment to preventive supplementation is not a fad. It is a rational response to an epidemiological reality.

Layer on top of that India's deep cultural comfort with the idea that food and plant-based ingredients have therapeutic properties. Ayurveda has been saying this for centuries. The modern nutraceutical industry has essentially repackaged it with better branding and a D2C distribution model. Ashwagandha, turmeric, triphala: these are not new ideas. They are ancient ones with new packaging and a higher price point.

So far, so real.

Here is where it gets complicated.

The obvious question to ask about any supplement is: where is the clinical evidence?

In pharmaceuticals, the gold standard is the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Neither the participant nor the researcher knows who is receiving the active ingredient and who is receiving a placebo. This design eliminates the placebo effect, minimises bias, and produces results you can actually trust.

Most nutraceuticals on the Indian market have not been through anything resembling this process. Clinical trials are not mandatory for nutraceuticals to enter the Indian market.

A product can make claims, find shelf space in pharmacies, and be recommended by practitioners without the evidence requirements that a drug would require. For a long time, word of mouth testimonials and traditional use were sufficient for physicians to prescribe nutraceuticals using herbal extracts without documented proof of efficacy, resulting in a chronic lack of funding for evidence-based clinical trials in India.

Between 2019 and 2024, only 111 nutraceutical clinical studies were registered across the entire country. For a market worth $32 billion, that is a remarkably thin evidence base.

There is a fair counter-argument worth taking seriously. The randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial, the gold standard for pharmaceuticals, may not be the most appropriate design for nutraceuticals.

The effects of supplements are often subtle, cumulative, and vary significantly between individuals in ways that large group trials are not designed to capture well. Some researchers argue that personalised study designs are actually better suited to evaluating nutritional interventions than the blunt instrument of a population-level RCT.

That is a legitimate scientific debate. But it is also, conveniently, the argument that an industry without clinical trials uses to explain why it does not have clinical trials.

The absence of evidence and the inadequacy of the evidence-gathering method are two different problems, and the industry conflates them regularly.

The regulatory architecture has made this easier to get away with than it should be.

Nutraceuticals in India currently sit in an uncertain space between food and medicine, regulated by FSSAI as food products, even when they are routinely prescribed by doctors across cardiology, orthopaedics, and gynaecology as adjunct therapeutic interventions. Many manufacturers have made exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims about their products.

FSSAI has been cracking down. but the framework itself remains porous. A study of 36 protein supplements marketed and sold in India found that 69.4% did not meet their own label claims. Nearly seven in ten products tested were not delivering what they promised.

A 2024 inter-ministerial committee recommended that nutraceuticals making disease risk reduction claims be brought under the drug regulator CDSCO, with stricter manufacturing standards.

The industry has resisted.

The debate is unresolved. The gaps remain.

So how do you tell the signal from the noise?

Three rough filters that actually work:

1. Ingredient versus claim.

Ashwagandha has a reasonable evidence base for stress reduction and cortisol modulation, backed by several well-designed trials. The claim that a product containing ashwagandha will transform your sleep, rebuild your hormonal balance, and improve your skin in thirty days is marketing. Get comfortable separating the two.

2. The second is form and dosage.

A supplement containing 300mg of ashwagandha extract is a meaningful dose backed by the trials that exist. One containing 50mg buried in a proprietary blend of twelve other ingredients is largely decorative. Read the label with the same scepticism you would apply to a financial product with complex terms.

3. The third is the nature of the recommendation.

A doctor prescribing a specific supplement for a specific deficiency you have actually tested for is a different situation from an influencer with a discount code. Both exist in the same market. They are not the same thing.

The investment thesis here is real but requires the same distinction. Companies building science-backed products with transparent formulations and genuine clinical evidence are building something durable. Brands winning on packaging and influencer spend in a regulatory environment that does not yet require proof are building something more fragile. When regulation tightens, and the direction is clearly toward tightening, the latter category faces a reckoning.

India's nutraceuticals market is not a bubble.

The underlying demand is structural, driven by demographics, disease burden, and a genuine cultural shift toward prevention. But not everything growing at 10% annually in a loosely regulated market is worth the premium it is charging.

Your ashwagandha probably works. Read the label on everything else.