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The ICT made sure last night that Messi & co. got all the undivided attention in India. GOAT for a reason.

WhatsApp just tried to become BBM. And the government said “not so fast.” A breakdown on the first move by the new global WhatsApp CEO. On June 29, Meta announced usernames for WhatsApp — pick a handle, and you no longer need to share your phone number to be reached. For a platform that has been your phone number since day one, that’s a genuinely big identity shift. Why it’s a smart move on paper: → Personal and professional lives have been blurring on WhatsApp for years — this finally gives people a way to separate them → It’s a monetization unlock: businesses and creators can now run WhatsApp as a channel without exposing a personal number, which makes Business API adoption stickier → It mirrors what Telegram and Signal have offered forever — WhatsApp was the outlier, not the innovator But India pumped the brakes within 48 hours. MeitY and DoT flagged a real fraud vector: someone could register with a foreign number, use an official’s photo, and impersonate them — untraceable in a way that was never possible when every account was tied to a verified +91 number. WhatsApp’s been told: don’t activate it here until you explain your safeguards. Three-day clock, formal notice, IT Act in the background. Bigger picture: Meta’s ad revenue growth is strong globally, but WhatsApp itself has always been the least-monetized of Meta’s apps. Ads alone were never going to be WhatsApp’s ceiling. Worth watching how WhatsApp threads this — because “privacy feature” and “impersonation risk” are the same coin, and Indian govt. just called it.

Zepto's DRHP dropped this week. 690 pages. I asked Claude to do a detailed breakdown for me. The headline metrics are genuinely impressive: → Orders/day: 3.6L (FY24) → 23.3L (Q4 FY26). 6x in 2 years. → Ad revenue: ₹5 Cr → ₹164 Cr. 2,400% growth. Near 100% margin. → Adj. EBITDA/order: ₹-136 (FY25) → ₹-59 (Q4 FY26). Trajectory is real. But here's the thing — The Profitability Trap: Why Zepto's Road to ₹4/Order Is Harder Than Zomato's Ever Was. Everyone is comparing Zepto to Zomato circa 2022. Same arc, same outcome, just 2-3 years behind. The data says otherwise. Zomato's road to profitability was structurally easier — and some of what looks like Zepto's progress is just arithmetic, not strategy. Full breakdown — per-order waterfall, lever-by-lever comparison vs Zomato, quarterly EBITDA trajectory — on my Substack this week. Link in comments. Am I too bearish? Would love the pushback.

Person 1 - I want to start up. I want to build the next unicorn. Person 2 - I want to join a global MNC and climb up to get into leadership. Kunal Shah accomplished both. Built Freecharge. Sold it. Built CRED . Now CEO of WhatsApp . A lot of new-age companies ask for people with previous startup experience — but becoming the global CEO of WhatsApp? That has never been on the cards. Until now. Old career paths are blurring. Careers of the future are not linear. Which one are you — Person 1 or Person 2? P.c. YourStory Media

Our CEA said last week that the era of software and MBA is over, and young India should turn to welding and carpentry instead. A few facts worth sharing. In 1960, South Korea had a lower per capita income than Ghana. It built its industrial base on shipyards and textiles — manual, trade-heavy work, by necessity. Three decades later, the same country was manufacturing the chips inside every device on earth. Samsung didn't get there by parking its engineers back at the dockyard. They rode the industrialisation wave. Switzerland, the country he cited as the gold standard for respect for trade, also has the highest number of patents per capita of any nation on earth. The country that reveres its plumbers also builds the world's most precise watches and some of its most advanced pharma. Trade respect, there isn't a substitute for a high-skill industry. It sits right next to it. India's own software story didn't start with talent already in place. TCS was punching cards in Bombay in 1968, decades before "IT" was a national identity, let alone an export engine. Nobody told that generation to learn carpentry instead and wait it out. We rode the information technology wave. This week, I watched a tyre alignment get done in fifteen minutes — sensors and lasers doing what used to take an afternoon of manual labour with shafts and pulleys. Technology has never once erased a skill. It has only moved it one rung up the ladder. Curious how others, especially those building in tech right now, are reading this one. How will 1.4 billion people ride the AI wave?

The Great Indian Golf Course Real Estate Con Drive through NCR and count the “Golf Course Road,” “Golf Links,” and “Golf Course Extension” addresses. Gurgaon alone has built an entire real estate identity around golf courses that almost nobody plays on. Here’s the uncomfortable math nobody talks about: a single 18-hole golf course eats up 100-150 acres of land. The number of registered, active golfers using these courses is a tiny fraction of what that land could serve. The golf course isn’t really infrastructure for a sport — it’s a premiumization device. Now imagine that same acreage as a multi-sport complex — football pitches, athletics tracks, swimming pools, badminton and table tennis halls, basketball courts. Same land, but instead of serving a few hundred members of one exclusive club, it could be feeding a talent pipeline across ten sports for thousands of kids who’ll never afford a golf membership. This is the deeper pattern in how Delhi-NCR builds for leisure: exclusivity dressed up as lifestyle, with almost nothing built for mass access. And then we collectively wonder why a country of 1.4 billion people barely registers at the Olympics or qualify for FIFA WC. You can’t build international sporting representation on a foundation of gated, single-purpose, vanity infrastructure. We didn’t lack talent in sports — we lacked accessible, affordable, well-maintained public facilities at scale. Golf courses tell you everything about who NCR’s urban planning was designed for, and who it left out. Time we built playgrounds, not premium postcodes ?

FIFA World Cup and AI are arguably the two most talked-about global stories this June. And India is largely missing from both conversations. Yesterday's Germany drubbed Curaçao 7-1. However, Curaçao made history as the smallest nation by population and area ever to not only play a World Cup, but also to score a goal at the biggest stage. Of their 26-man squad, 25 were born in the Netherlands — only one player was born on the island, and even he holds a Dutch passport. Practically the entire team built its football life in Dutch academies, discovering "home" only through the jersey. Japan's first-choice goalkeeper, Zion Suzuki, was born in New Jersey to a Ghanaian father and Japanese mother — eligible for three countries, he chose the one that raised him. And closer home: Ryan Williams, born and raised in Perth, once capped for Australia, traced his Indian roots to his Anglo-Indian mother from Mumbai, gave up his Australian passport, and scored 4 minutes into his India debut. The same shows up across sport — South Asian cricketers for associate nations, African-born runners under Gulf colours, African-origin footballers anchoring European squads. Business and tech talent move the same way. China's "haigui" — talent trained in US universities and companies — came home to build Alibaba, Baidu, and the hardware ecosystem now rivalling the US. AI may be India's version of this. We're behind on compute and frontier labs, but Indian talent is already deeply embedded in the AI ecosystems shaping this wave. The real question isn't whether we have the talent — it's whether it comes back to build the AI layer for India, the way it did for China's internet economy. Talent trains where the ecosystem is strongest, and builds where the opportunity is greatest. Increasingly, those aren't the same place — in sport or business. Curious how others are seeing this play out, especially in tech and AI.

The biggest FIFA World Cup starts today. 48 teams. 104 matches. And once again, India watches from the sidelines. A decade ago, I was part of the team building ISL at Disney Star and Disney+ Hotstar . The dream was simple but audacious — create a developmental ecosystem that could get India to a World Cup in 10 years. We had the brodcast muscle. Amazing marketing to make people rally behind Indian football. What we didn’t have — and still don’t — is the federation ruthlessness that Japan and South Korea showed in the 90s. The structural commitment that turns a dream into a pipeline. Today, Team India sits at FIFA rank 138. The ISL has been in its own controversies. And we’re all busy picking our favourite foreign teams for the next 39 days. And yet — I refuse to be entirely pessimistic about Indian football. Hockey is winning Olympic medals again. Cricket dominates globally. Neeraj Chopra gave us an Athletics gold. Badminton has produced world-beaters. The arc is real, even if it’s slow. Football just needs its moment of collective will. The 2026 World Cup features 9 Asian teams — a historic first. The door is widening. We just need to walk through it together. Which team are you following this World Cup?

India's innovation problem has a ₹142 lakh crore solution sitting in fixed deposits. In 2025, VC funding into Indian startups fell 17%. Late-stage deals collapsed 26%. I've been thinking hard about why — and it comes down to four structural problems nobody talks about loudly enough: 1. A sliding rupee that starts every dollar-funded deal at a disadvantage 2. A consumer ceiling that's getting harder to pitch past India 1 3. An ecosystem that builds for India, not for the world 4. $660 billion in FDs funding everyone's retirement — but not a single Indian startup That last point is the one that makes me think hard. US pension funds put 1–3% into venture. India has the capital. We just park it in fixed deposits. Read the full story - https://lnkd.in/giQPbAdA #India #Startups #VentureCapital #Innovation