‘Building’ is the most powerful thing a human can do. | Simplicity, Trust & Vision | COO. Classica Packaging | X is my Mind Palace.
India
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Porter took a different path. It lost money for years scaling intra-city logistics but avoided heavy consumer subsidies. Started with enterprise contracts to build reliable truck supply, then flipped on on-demand for MSMEs. Focused on utilization and density rather than cashbacks.
Raised ~$330M total, hit $1.2B valuation, turned profitable in FY25 (₹55 Cr) and ₹229 Cr in FY26 on ₹6,650 Cr revenue. Discipline over pure burn.
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JK retweeted
My secret sauce for anyone building, growing, or scaling anything:
Get physically fit.
People talk about courses, podcasts, AI tools, skills, books, mentors, and playbooks.
Very few people talk about what happens when you sleep well, train consistently, eat properly, and feel good in your body.
I started running every day 5 years ago, and at some point it became addictive.
Your brain just lights up differently.
You begin to think differently about discipline, about work, about people, and about what you are actually capable of doing.
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Soon as @spacex makes autonomous rockets theyd be buying rockets left and right.
Anything consistent get boring after a time.
Okay yeah I refuse to believe money can’t buy you happiness when this is just a regular afternoon for millionaires and billionaires.
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I wonder if anyone posted the same for Porter in India @grok
Every large consumer category in India over the last 15 years has been built the same way, by losing a lot of money on purpose until the habit forms.
Policybazaar was criticised for years for spending close to a rupee to acquire every rupee of premium. Today it is a ₹49,000 crore company. Paytm burned heavily on cashbacks to get Indians to use a digital wallet at all, and it is now worth about ₹1.08 lakh crore. Zomato and Swiggy spent enormous amounts building food delivery when everyone said the per-order math didn't work, and together they are worth close to ₹4 lakh crore. Meesho subsidised its way to first-time online shoppers in small towns and is now valued at around ₹1 lakh crore.
Blinkit and Zepto are the most recent version of this. They found very strong product-market fit early in a large market, and through that whole phase people around us, users and even more so non-users, kept saying it made no sense to lose that much money on every order. Most of that criticism came from people looking at the unit economics of a business that hadn't reached its scale yet, or from people who didn't see the market power that scale eventually brings.
Every category built around a genuinely different experience needs a large amount of capital to create the habit and the market. If the capital doesn't come, on-demand home help will still exist, but as a much smaller business with much higher prices. If the capital does come and the category scales, density starts doing the work and the economics eventually look very attractive.
In these businesses the losses are close to being the strategy itself. The leader sees a lot of value in raising more capital and burning at scale, because that spend does two jobs at once. It creates a much larger market than would otherwise exist, and it keeps out new entrants who want to take a shot, since they can't raise anywhere near that much capital unless they bring something dramatically different.
The burn grows the pie, and whoever is still standing at the end gets to keep most of it.
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It’s the only way the client judges you in UP.
if you own even a 30L+ car your client will envy you and stop buying from you immediately.
A friend owns a BMW M4 Competition in Mumbai, and he told me he can take that car to client meetings because clients shouldn’t know he owns an expensive car; otherwise, they don’t pay on time, thinking you already have enough money. This in Mumbai. I thought this was some Ajmer-like town thing only.
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Der aye durust aye!
Amazon lost more than $25 billion on its devices business between 2017 and 2021. Apple just showed up nine years late to the party with the lesson fully absorbed.
Let's rewind back to 2017, when Echo Show shipped. A year later, Nest Hub shipped. Both decided to run the Gillette playbook. They sold the screen at near cost and hoped to make the money back when people shopped and subscribed through it.
There was just one problem. The shopping never came.
The Wall Street Journal got Amazon's internal documents, where one former Amazon exec summed up the decade of investment as "we worried we've hired 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer."
When the hardware doesn't pay for itself, the screen has to. That's why Echo started showing ads. And of course, that turned people off.
Apple has learned from Amazon's mistakes. The HomeView has built-in real hardware margin at $299. There's no App Store at all. The device pays for itself at the register, which is why it can spend its life just showing you photos and recognizing which of six family members just walked up with its A18 chip.
It's a beautiful illustration of their difference in strategies. Amazon thought, let's put 100 million speakers into homes, then retrofit intelligence onto it and use it to sell. Apple said, nah, let's be a late mover into the category. See what works, see what people want, and build that.
For nine years, the take was that Apple missed the smart home. I say, nah. They let Amazon pay the $25 billion tuition and showed up today with the answer key.
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Motivational post!
Be hungry like Samsung.
Samsung has just recorded a quarterly operating profit of USD 80 billion or almost Rs 8 lakh crore! Its annual profit may exceed the combined profits of all listed companies in India.
Its story is very amazing. Unlike the US tech companies which were founded as tech companies, Samsung was founded as a trading company which moved into textiles and food processing. Much later, it moved to consumer electronics like ACs and mobile phones. And from there into cutting-edge memory chips. What an evolution.
Companies like Samsung generate lakhs of jobs in Korea and other countries, including India. And women are a big part of the workforce.
Samsung, which is owner-driven, has shown how companies must remain hungry and dynamic to do more even when they have achieved considerable success.
Keep growing and innovating. Nothing is impossible.
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