Lightspeed India

A pair of earbuds is a few grams of plastic, metal and electronics, made across several factories before it reaches a pocket. Solar panels, circuit boards and wind turbines are built the same way.

For years, buyers had to juggle those factories themselves, while the one with exactly the right machine often never heard about the order. ZETWERK (@zetwerk) set out to close that gap.

We first partnered with Amrit Acharya (@acharyaamrit) and Srinath Ramakkrushnan (@srinathramki) in 2019. Since then, that idea has grown into a network of nearly 7,000 suppliers, serving customers in 29 countries across energy, precision products and capital goods. Along the way, Zetwerk has brought work to builders from workshops in India to factory floors in Germany. Amrit and Srinath were joined by Vishal Chaudhary, Ankit Fatehpuria and Rahul Sharma in their journey.

Today, Zetwerk’s name goes up on the NSE and BSE. Behind that name are thousands of people who built it, one part at a time.

Congratulations Amrit, Srinath and the entire Zetwerk team. This film is for all of you, and everyone who builds with you.

@bsomaia

Every founder building on a frontier model gets asked the same question: what happens when the lab builds your product?

Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) has spent his career watching big tech companies try to build everything. Microsoft built Expedia, Bing and Office. Mobile operators thought they could build every app on the phone. His rule is that a big company wins when it can turn a new business into the thing it already does well. “Every time they try to do something that sat outside of that, then they fail miserably.”

The hard part, he tells @MohapatraHemant, was never writing the code. It is spotting a problem customers don’t know they have, and getting a whole industry to change how it works.

Some of the hardest problems in material science have been open for decades.

@advaith_sridhar, @Akash__Ramdas, and the Discovered Materials team asked leading material sciences professors to name the toughest ones, and they’ve now put $1M behind solving them.

The five Grand Challenges: a theory of why cuprates superconduct, a framework for how semiconductor interfaces form, a better approximation at the heart of DFT, an explanation for how light can tune materials, and a model of heat transport across solid surfaces. Each one has been studied extensively, can be verified, and is still unsolved.

Advaith breaks down all five Grand Challenges in the thread below, and what a breakthrough in each could unlock 👇

@MohapatraHemant @AbhiramTarimala

Airbound’s (@Airbound_Aero) next aircraft is built to carry five kilos of cargo on a three kilo airframe, against the industry convention of four to five kilos of aircraft for every kilo it lifts.

Naman Pushp (@TheRealNamzoo), founder of our portfolio company Airbound, joined Ashlee Vance (@ashleevance) on his podcast Core Memory (@corememory), after Ashlee visited Airbound’s factory near Bengaluru. Naman started building aircraft in his bedroom at 15 with a $500 grant, and turned down an admission to Carnegie Mellon University to build.

He also made the case for India as a place to build hardware moonshots. “I see US as like the innovation hub and China as the manufacturing hub. And like India can be that melding of the two.” The two discussed carbon fiber manufacturing at scale, the move from deliveries to carrying people, and the young founders taking on hard tech in India.

Watch the full conversation here: tinyurl.com/LighterThanIts…

In 1998, about one in forty people on Earth used the internet. Jeff Bezos was selling books, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students, and Mark Zuckerberg was in junior high. Everyone knew people would shop online. Nobody knew a bookseller would end up selling everything, and nobody had any conception of Facebook.

Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) thinks that’s where we are with AI, and that most of what people will need from it hasn’t been built yet. So when people tell him he’s an analyst and should make a call, his call is that there are 20 possibilities, and “it will be something that we’re not thinking about.”

In the first episode of Masters, @MohapatraHemant of Lightspeed sits down with Benedict to work out what earlier platform shifts can tell us about where AI goes next. They talk about:

07:47 Using ChatGPT every few days isn’t the AI revolution
18:36 Will one AI lab eat the whole stack? Benedict isn’t buying it
20:50 Writing the software was never the hard part
22:10 Why “McKinsey is toast” is wrong
40:02 “Can’t you feel the AGI?” and why P(doom) numbers are made up

Full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

Masters, by Lightspeed.