Archer

the team really stepped up the air-to-air shots this quarter, with a bit of help from mother nature and some beautiful sunrises over our Salinas, CA test facility (east of eden iykyk). great work by our in-house film crew: Adam Wilder Thomas C. Miller Billy H. Jake Halperin Brian Gump Raj Helweg & more

I drive one of the most software-defined cars on the road. It proudly remembers where I like the seat. My phone, in the same cabin, knows where I'm going, why, who I'm meeting, how I slept, and what I'm about to walk into. That gap is absurd. It's also the next big shift in cabin experience. After six years at Lucid Motors running connected vehicle systems and the data platform behind them, I watched the industry try to solve personalization by making the vehicle smarter. Better infotainment. More natural voice. A familiar Android interface. All real progress, none of it the right shape. The car is not the personalization layer. The car is the safety layer. The personalization belongs somewhere else, and the something else is already in my pocket. The next CarPlay isn't a grid of apps on a dashboard. It's my personal AI agent walking into the vehicle with me, knowing what kind of drive this is, and shaping the cabin around it. Wrote up the full argument, why personalization doesn't belong in the vehicle at all, who the realistic agent contenders are, and what the request-and-decide split between agent and vehicle looks like in practice.

Venture Capital can feel like a "black box." For the last few months, I’ve been dismantling it piece by piece. 🛠️ Nov 19 2025: I was approached by the prolific angel investor Sunmeet Jolly to join his fund as a LP. Through his generous knowledge sharing I get to know of Decile Group and Venture Institute . Dec 17 2025: Accepted into Venture Institute Cohort 6. 🎉 (One of 450 out of ~3,000 applicants). Jan 22 2026: The program began. What I expected to be a cakewalk turned into a full-blown "college days" grind. Late-night homework, deep strategy sessions, and putting pencil to paper on complex, nebulous ideas. The biggest shifts in my perspective: The Math: How the Power Law is indispensable to VC fund outcomes . The Hustle: Realizing that attracting LPs requires the same relentless rigor as enterprise sales and the diamonds amongst the startups aren't "discovered". The Edge: Why a thesis isn't just a document—it's an emerging manager’s North Star and the only true competitive advantage as an emerging manager. The Mechanics: Understanding how liquidation preferences, pro-rata rights and other aspects of a term sheet are the real levers behind a fund's ultimate outcome. Apr 20 2026: I, along with 200 others, have officially survived (and thrived) on the other side. 🎓 I would like to express my immense gratitude to Adeo Ressi , Mike S. and Myrto Lalacos for inspiring me and countless others to see VC as an approachable path to a future you feel aligned to. To my incredible batchmates—thank you for making this journey so fulfilling: Na Li, PhD , Stefan Brunner ✨Vidhya Govindan✨ Brijesh Dutta Dmytro Goliy Federico Jarach Aakriti Beri Daljit K. B. Eunyun Park Andrew Lee Sudha Reddy Naveen Jason Dr Mehul Patel Monique Barbanson Tathagato Roy, PhD Faye Safari Onwards 🚀 I have always been the first in my family to walk paths no one has taken before. This is just the beginning. Let's go!

Welcome back to Think Thursday (Wednesday) 🤔 This is it. The series finale, why make you all wait? Over three weeks we've unpacked capability gaps quietly holding operations back: Part 1: The Middle Management Gap Part 2: The Soft Skills Gap Part 3: The Cross-Functional Fluency Gap There's one more. The one that shows up every time an organization tries to evolve. The Change Management Gap Every organization is transforming right now. New technology. New processes. New structures. Companies are great at planning change. They're terrible at leading people through it. The big announcement comes down. Slides shared. Emails sent. Town halls held. Then...nothing. No one explains the WHY. No one equips managers to lead through it. No one addresses the fear or resistance. No one follows up after week one. Six months later everyone wonders why it failed. Change doesn't fail because of bad strategy. It fails at the human level. ❌ 70% of change initiatives fail ❌ Most failures link to people resistance not technical issues ❌ Employees who don't understand WHY are 5x more likely to disengage ❌ Unequipped managers become the biggest blockers Biggest change management mistakes: ❌ Treating change as an event not a journey ❌ Communicating once and assuming buy-in ❌ Ignoring middle layer managers who translate change into daily action ❌ Moving too fast without bringing people along ❌ Focusing on systems, forgetting people ❌ No feedback loops, change done TO people not WITH them ❌ Declaring victory before change is embedded What actually works: ✅ Start with WHY and keep repeating it. People don't resist change. They resist change they don't understand. ✅ Equip managers first. They're your most important change agents. If they don't buy in, nobody will. ✅ Communicate 10x more than you think. One town hall isn't a strategy. Repeat the message. Create space for questions. Listen. ✅ Acknowledge the emotional side. People worry about their roles, routines, relevance. Address it with honesty and empathy. ✅ Build feedback loops. People need to feel heard. The best ideas come from those closest to the work. ✅ Celebrate small wins. Recognize progress. Build momentum through proof it's working. ✅ Follow through relentlessly. Don't launch and leave. The real work starts after the announcement. Change management is where all four gaps collide. You can't lead change without strong middle managers (Part 1). You can't navigate resistance without soft skills (Part 2). You can't align teams without cross-functional fluency (Part 3). And none of it works without leading people through change (Part 4). These four gaps aren't separate problems. They're interconnected. Close them together and you build an organization that doesn't just plan, it delivers it. Thank you for following this series. If even one idea made you think differently about how we develop people and lead operations, it was worth it.