Should you raise a toast to Varun Beverages? (Finshots)

• “This expansion became possible after the company signed an “extended” bottling agreement with PepsiCo earlier this year. Because earlier, VBL could manufacture only PepsiCo’s drinks exclusively. The new agreement extends their core partnership through 2049 and eliminates the exclusivity clause that previously bound Varun Beverages to manufacturing, bottling, and distributing PepsiCo’s products…”

The Business Of India’s Billion Dollar Temple Economy (This is Business)

86% of employers say AI is reshaping campus hiring, while MBA graduates pull further ahead (ET)

How Goodwill Actually Works (Business Insider)

Colgate hired ₹635 Cr. startup for D2C. (GrowthX)

• “CEO Prabha Narasimhan told analysts Colgate could not crack online sales for Palmolive. The solution: hand it to Bombay Shaving Company — a startup doing ₹635 Cr in revenue against Colgate India’s ₹5,984 Cr…”

Why Uber Is More Expensive ... For Some People (Business Insider)

Inside Rapido’s plan to upend Zomato and Swiggy’s hard-won food-delivery math (The Ken)

• “Even restaurant owners acknowledged that such a model may not work in the long run and indicated they’d be willing to pay a commission fee of around 5–10%. Many see Rapido’s zero-commission play as a mere means to get restaurants onto the platform. The company seems to be treating it as a kind of customer-acquisition cost, they said. Meanwhile, the stakes are only rising as the arena gets more crowded, with Flipkart debuting its food-delivery pilot in mid-August at an 8–11% commission model…”

How India Travels 2025 - Report (Booking.com)

• Video Summary - Instagram Replaced India’s ENTIRE Travel Industry (Breakdown)

Anthropic closes in on $7 billion Decart deal after beating Nvidia to the table (CTech)

• “Decart’s technology is designed to extract more performance from AI chips, potentially reducing the amount of computing power required to run AI models…”

Shower gels, liquid cleaners gain ground as Indians ditch bars and powders (ET)

Forget the “ideal candidate”: show interviewers who you really are (LSB)

The AI Future Is for Everyone (Mark Zuckerberg)

• Think why is the CEO saying this?

Lighthouse or Landgrab? How to Pick Your AI Sales Strategy (Joe Schmidt and Julian Marx)

• “Lighthouse strategy: win a few marquee customers, build social proof, and reassure the buyer who’s afraid of making the wrong call. But for a lot of AI companies that instinct is exactly backwards. Their buyers already understand the problem and aren’t afraid of getting it wrong. They just need the math to work, and every week spent chasing prestigious logos is a week a competitor spends selling in Ohio. Those companies would be better off pursuing the Landgrab strategy: win on math, move fast, and sign the largest number of customers possible, logo be damned…”

The Real Reason Zepto Cancelled it’s IPO? (Backstage with Millionaires)

• “Unlike Blinkit (Eternal) and Instamart (Swiggy), Zepto operates only in quick commerce. Its rivals have highly profitable food delivery businesses that generate cash and help subsidize their quick commerce operations, giving them a significant advantage…”

ITC’s ₹20,000 Cr. profit engine cracks. (GrowthX)

A look at the Milky Mist IPO (Finshots)

• “So perhaps it’s better to think of Milky Mist as a packaged food company built around dairy. And this strategy seems to have worked…”

Amazon Now’s early scale gives Blinkit reason to watch (The Arc)

How InMobi Quietly Became India’s FIRST Unicorn and Built a Global Empire (Breakdown)

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? (Stratechery)

The Real Reason Flipkart is entering ‘Food-Delivery’ Space (Backstage with Millionaires)

Why Is Everything Gambling Now? (Knowledge at Wharton)

The Manipal Health IPO Explained (Finshots)

• “Its facilities are at a healthy 64% occupancy, generating nearly ₹69,000 in revenue per occupied bed each day (This is the ARPOB or Average Revenue per Occupied Bed, which is arguably the most important financial metric for a hospital). It also boasts an average patient stay of just 2.8 days (ALOS or Average Length of Stay). A shorter stay is a clear sign of clinical efficiency because it frees up expensive beds sooner, allowing the hospital to treat more patients with the same infrastructure…”

Instant househelp startups burn $16-17 million in June as battle for customers intensifies (ET)

• “By net transaction value (NTV) — calculated as orders multiplied by the post-discount average order value (AOV) — Urban Company retained its lead with 45-46% market share, aided by its higher AOVs. Snabbit followed with 36-37%, while Pronto, with the lowest AOV, accounted for 16-17%, according to industry insiders…”

Value Grocery Commerce: The Bharat Unlock (Redseer)

You Have No Idea How Much You Still Use BlackBerry (WSJ)

• “BlackBerry QNX is a safe, real-time operating system used in over 250 million vehicles, medical devices, and robots.…”

A Script for Mark Zuckerberg (Stratechery)

• “LLMs themselves will transform advertising, not just by generating copy and images, but by predicting the ads and content that people want to see. Every single one of these improvements goes directly to our top line — and remember, because advertising enables us to offer our products for free, the capacity to increase our top line is unbounded by price elasticity…”

How India Shops Online 2026 (Bain & Company x Flipkart)

• Video Summary (Breakdown)

• 

The Reverse Information Paradox (Satya Nadella)

• “You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it!..”

How Pine Labs became a $5 Billion Payment Giant? (Backstage with Millionaires)

The SBI Funds Management IPO (Finshots)

• “Running a mutual fund is one of the most profitable operations in finance. There’s no inventory. No factories. No meaningful debt. You gather people’s money into schemes, charge a small annual fee, and let compounding do the heavy lifting. The magic is in the fixed costs. Whether SBI manages ₹1 lakh crore or ₹12 lakh crore, it pays roughly the same to fund managers, the same to research teams, and the same for compliance. So as the pile grows, those costs spread thinner and profits balloon…”

Netflix dabbles in shorter video content with its new set of publisher deals with Variety, others (Tech Crunch)

• “To court viewers drawn to short-form video, Netflix already added a TikTok-style feature called “Clips” that lets users scroll through short snippets from its library. But where Clips is designed to funnel viewers toward longer shows and movies, these new publisher deals go the other direction, bringing short-form content onto the platform in its own right…”

PlayStation says it will stop making physical games – and that should worry us all (Guardian)

• “Across the board, video game publishers and console manufacturers are seeing game sales dominated by digital – on PlayStation it seems that about 80% of games are bought via the online store (although surely that figure is complicated by the fact that many hundreds of titles are only available as digital downloads). Abandoning discs will cut manufacturing and distributing costs for games, and it will clear the route to a disc-free PS6 console, which would be cheaper to produce. Sony controls all digital sales through the PlayStation Store so it gets to set its own prices, too…”

Why The World Cup Is Nike’s Last Chance (Athletic Interest)

The Cult.fit IPO Explained (Finshots)

• “Ultimately, the Cult.fit IPO is a fundamental bet on a single thesis: can organised fitness in India mature into a highly profitable consumer tech platform, or will it always be weighed down by the heavy real-world economics of a traditional gym chain?…”

Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, as Xbox unit downsizes and plans to spin off four gaming studios (CNBC)

• “While much of Wall Street’s concerns about Microsoft are tied to the company’s position in AI and CEO Satya Nadella’s failure to lay out a coherent strategy for its approach to developing models, agents and other services, AI isn’t replacing laid-off workers…”

The Fall Of HubSpot (Logically Answered)

How Bending Spoons built a $23bn tech empire from struggling brands (FT)

• “The listing, one of the largest by a European group in recent years, piqued investors’ interest due to the company’s business model of buying struggling internet companies, often using debt, before gutting and fixing them to accelerate growth. The catch is that — unlike private equity — Bending Spoons does not then look to sell, but instead seeks to make returns from earnings alone…”

The Dream11 pivot nobody is talking about (Finshots)

• “You have the OG Dream11 handling fantasy sports, FanCode for sports merchandising and streaming, DreamSetGo for premium sports experiences, Dream Cricket, Dream Money, Dream Horizon, a philanthropic foundation, and perhaps the two most intriguing pieces of the puzzle: DreamStreet and Dream Sports AI…”

Meta pops 9% as company makes cloud push to sell excess AI compute power capacity (CNBC)

Why are ‘Used-Car Startups’ Failing in India? (Backstage with Millionaires)

• “India sells more used cars than new ones — 60 lakh vs 45 lakh in 2025 alone. The used car market is worth $40 billion and growing at nearly 15% a year, three times the size of India’s entire edtech industry… The core problem: these are low-margin retail businesses dressed up as high-margin tech companies. Buying, refurbishing, storing, and reselling a used car leaves razor-thin margins — often just 5-10% — because unorganised local dealers can always undercut them on price without the overhead of large teams, showrooms, and city-wide inventory…”

Why 98% of Indian Celebrity Brands Are Quietly Dying! (Breakdown)

• “The difference between a global billion-dollar brand and an Indian vanity project is the presence of an equal, non-celebrity operating co-founder..”

Reddit’s advertising business is getting bigger. It’s already booming. (Sherwood)

The AI factory: the rewiring of India’s tech industry (FT)

How many ‘bad’ schools make a good PE investment? (The Ken)

• “When K12 takes over a school’s management, it earns a per-student service fee, typically in the range of Rs 30,000–50,000. It takes an additional 30–40% cut on uniform sales. Even in sports, it prioritises team sports as they are easier to support across campuses and allow an additional revenue stream—students are charged up to Rs 20,000 per year for sports…”

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? (The Pragmatic Engineer)

• “Let’s check the four ingredients that Meta’s leadership has decided to introduce to their workplace: Tracking the keyboards and mouse clicks of all engineers, where legally possible, Reassign a good chunk of engineers to fulltime data labeling, Let staff know that 10% of them will be laid off, Have a culture where devs optimize for any and all metrics measured during PSC, Measure token usage as part of PSC…”

The iPhone’s Last Stand (Stratechery)

• “This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that Apple’s agentic shortcomings are a big deal, at least for now. Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don’t want to work or care about being productive. What they do want to do is watch short-form video, and an iPhone is simply much better at that than any other device ever will be; in that context, Siri being good enough is enough, and it appears that Apple crossed that bar…”

State of AI Report 2026 (Sensor Tower)

India Hair Growth Market Report 2026 (RedSeer)

How to build durable business moats that survive the AI-accelerated market (Breakdown)

The Zepto IPO explained (Finshots)

• “As order volumes increase, fixed costs such as rent, inventory, and delivery infrastructure get spread across more transactions, making each order more profitable than the last. This is exactly what investors are seeing in Zepto’s numbers today. For context, the company’s adjusted EBITDA loss (operating loss) per order improved from ₹136 to ₹79 in a single year. Cost per order declined from ₹185 to ₹151. And gross margins expanded from 12.8% to 18.6%.”

Significance > Success (Ted Lamade)

The Google Capital Company (Stratechery )

• “It’s hard to imagine a better option than Google. The company is not only investing in AI, but has optionality in terms of outcomes: its Services business benefits from the investment, it is in contention at the model layer with Gemini, and it can sell capacity to the frontier labs. Moreover, that capacity has a sustainable cost advantage because of TPUs, which means that in a world where compute becomes a commodity — as hard as that is to imagine right now — Google is the hyperscaler that is poised to make the most profit…”

Welcome to the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google price wars (Sherwood)

• “Unlike traditional software-as-a-service products, which boast low marginal costs, generative AI is astonishingly capital-intensive to operate. Every query and line of code demands a massive, continuous burn of specialized silicon and power. OpenAI and Anthropic are already losing billions of dollars annually just to keep the lights on and the servers humming…”

Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing (Stratechery)

• “Tim Cook built what is arguably Apple’s most important technology — its ability to build the world’s best personal computer products at astronomical scale — and did so in a way that leaves Apple more vulnerable than anyone to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China. China was certainly good for the bottom line, but was it good for Apple’s long-run sustainability? This same critique — of favoring a financially optimal strategy over long-term sustainability — may also one day be levied on the biggest question Cook leaves his successor: what impact will AI have on Apple?”

The SpaceX IPO and Data Centers in Space (Stratechery )

• “There are, needless to say, a massive number of assumptions baked into this argument, including assuming a huge number of engineering challenges are solved, Starship actually works, SpaceX gets sufficient supply of the right kinds of chips, compute demand is massively larger, agentic inference unbundles current architectures, and data center opponents are successful. The risk attached to all of these assumptions should discount the valuation you put on this business, which is to say I still think this IPO is nuts. At the same time, I’m glad it exists, for multiple reasons…”

Wiley acquires Emerald Publishing in £337m deal (Research Information)

• “Emerald represents an outstanding strategic fit for Wiley – a complementary portfolio, a compatible culture, and decades of specialised content that will meaningfully expand our scale and portfolio depth in both research publishing and research intelligence,” said Matthew Kissner, Wiley President and CEO. “This transaction reflects our conviction that research and AI are mutually reinforcing: our proprietary content and data fuels AI, and AI accelerates the pace of publishing. Emerald materially strengthens both – expanding our peer-reviewed content base and adding a high-margin, recurring revenue stream that we expect to drive meaningful shareholder value.”

How FIFA Sold the World Cup (Athletic Interest)

Why is Dunkin’ Donuts Leaving India? (Backstage with Millionaires)

• Think AAA framework - what didn’t work?

An Operating Model for the Age of AI (Bain)

The DaVinci Takeover: Why Millions Are Deleting Adobe (Logically Answered)

All Kwality Wall’s items to be milk-based next year, says CEO Peter ter Kulve (ET)

• “Magnum Ice Cream is transforming its Kwality Wall’s business in India. The company is moving from vegetable fat frozen desserts to dairy ice cream. This shift aims to meet Indian consumer demand for better quality and nutritious milk-based products. Magnum is also investing in factories, cold chain infrastructure, and adjusting prices…”

I’m the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Overblown. (NYT)

• “The television didn’t eliminate the demand for live entertainment, nor did the internet put real estate agents or fitness instructors out of business. Instead, these technologies highlighted and enhanced the value of those professions. Technological change and cultural change do not move in tandem. After all, even after decades of A.T.M.s, digital banking and bank consolidation, employment in commercial banking is at roughly the same level today as it was in the mid-1990s…”

How Paytm Finally Turned Profitable? (Backstage with Millionaires)

• “In FY26, Paytm posted a net profit of ₹552 crore — its first full-year profit since going public in 2021” - How a change in strategy worked wonders

The Inference Shift (Stratechery)

Fitness Bands Are Losing Screens—and Gaining Fans (WSJ)

The Insane Wealth of Como Football Club (Athletic Interest)

Amazon’s Durability (Stratechery)

• “Long-term vulnerability to AI — or, to put it more positively, long-term incentives to invest in AI — are very strongly correlated with the degree to which a company interacts with the physical world, and secondarily, the degree to which companies feel secure in their control of distribution: Apple and Amazon feel comfortable not having leading edge models, just access to them, because their business is rooted in the physical. Microsoft has invested heavily in data centers, but doesn’t own their own model, perhaps because they feel their control of distribution to enterprises will protect their core business (or because they had too much of a dependency on OpenAI). Google and Meta are investing at a similar scale to Amazon, and are also heavily invested in their own models. Both are Aggregators, which is to say they have to continually earn attention from consumers, given that competition is only a click away; having good AI is existential to them.”

AI eats the world (Benedict Evans)

Androids Are All Dying...Except Google? (Logically Answered)

China’s ‘Two Billion Feet’ Are Suddenly Running From Nike (WSJ)

How Shadowfax beat everyone in the Indian logistics Space? (Backstage with Millionaires)

D2C 3.0 Report (Inc42)

Consulting Is Still Worth Doing, Even Now (Karan Dhir)

• “The cleanest test of this: take any senior operator at any Indian unicorn whose career started in consulting. Ask them privately what those first few years gave them. Almost all of them will say some version of “the way I think about business problems was built there.” The consulting industry is overrated as a destination and underrated as a school. The school part is still real…”

Amazon employees reportedly pretending to be more AI-dependent than they really are (First Post)

• “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” —Goodhart’s Law

Dunkin’ is going public again — this time with an entire restaurant empire in tow (Sherwood)

State of Web 2026 (Sensor Tower)

Why are ‘Healthy Snacking Brands’ Failing in India? (Backstage with Millionaires)

Why GCCs stopped being a fallback and quietly became a better bet than MBB (Akarshan Sharma)

Elon Musk called Anthropic ‘evil’ 3 months ago. Now he’s taking $4 billion to become its data landlord (Fortune)

The state of global AI diffusion in 2026 (Microsoft)

The Wealth Report 2026 (Knight Frank)

From $12 Billion To Nothing: How Groupon Lost Everything (Logically Answered)

• “Groupon went from one of the fastest growing companies ever to basically irrelevant, and the story is way messier than most people remember. It started with a simple idea: group buying power to force better deals. That worked insanely well. Within two years, they had tens of millions of users, billions in projected revenue, and even turned down a $6 billion buyout from Google because they thought they were worth more. ..”

The Quiet Reordering of Indian Consulting (Karan Dhir)

The Rule of Three and Four (BCG)

• Is the AI market collapsing into 3 dominant players - OpenAI, Google, & Anthropic?

How India eats (Kearney)

• Video - India’s Food Industry is FORCED to Change (Breakdown)

Google Profit Jumps 81% as Cloud Business Booms (WSJ)

What happened to Evernote? (Logically Answered)

• “Evernote was supposed to be one of the biggest companies in tech. At its peak, it had over 225 million users, hundreds of millions in funding, and a bold goal to become a “100 year startup.” The idea was simple but powerful. A place to store your entire life…”

Tim Cook’s Apple (Trung Phan)

What smart people are saying about SpaceX’s $60 billion deal with Cursor (Business Insider)

Behind Meta’s Huge Layoffs Is a Relentless Shift Toward AI (WSJ)

• “The social-media company has been unusually aggressive, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, at pushing to incorporate AI into its employees’ workflows and using it to streamline and accelerate its operations…”

Why Amazon Is Buying Starlink Rival Globalstar in $11 Billion Deal (WSJ)

Winning Codes for Retail 2035: Capturing the INR 200 Trillion Prize (BCG)

Why Danone paid €1 billion for a meal shake brand. (The Food Stack)

Amazon’s next battle isn’t for customers (Finshots)

We Are City 2026 (Unboxing Bengaluru)

• Video Summary (Breakdown)

• “A report that ranks India’s top 8 cities across economy, jobs, startups, liveability, and more. Data-driven guide to India’s urban future.”