Yathārtha
The grand restart.
Yathārtha is a Sanskrit word that translates to “reality as it truly is”. The word reflects a commitment to seeing things clearly, without distortion. In many ways, this is the core of first principles thinking: stripping away biased narratives and surface-level assumptions to get to the ground truth.
After a year of operating at the edge of early-stage investing and go-to-market inside a fast-moving AI company, I am restarting this publication under a new name — one that better reflects the lens I have been sharpening through lived experiences.
On one side, I work on GTM and product at Rafay, a Kubernetes and GPU orchestration platform that powers some of the most demanding AI deployments across sovereign clouds and enterprise environments. On the other hand, I invest at Defined Capital, where we back founders across the AI stack.
This means I am constantly flipping between:
Selling into the AI infrastructure ecosystem
Evaluating early-stage AI startups
Contemplating the progress of AI and yearning to know where does it take us next
Trying to understand where narratives start to drift from technical and even commercial reality
The back-and-forth between story and system, pitch and platform, has surfaced patterns and questions that, I want to explore deeply. Writing is how I process that. This is me thinking in public.
Why “Yathārtha”?
There is a growing gap between hype and reality.
The hottest AI funding round that gets the headlines often looks very different when pressure-tested against real-world needs.
Moats fade quickly in the face of new open-source releases or the latest model drop. This publication is my way of filtering through the noise by breaking things down to ground reality. It is about:
How AI investors are shaping their definitions of conviction
What founders consistently get wrong when building for an AI-native world
How AI is becoming a forcing function for product development, go-to-market strategy, and even capital deployment
The Frontier
I have been lucky to sit close to the AI frontier for the past year. Three patterns have started to stand out.
Founders build in the shadow of funding narratives.
Investors hunt for platform stories that are easy to sell internally.
Enterprise buyers just want something that works today, is easy to integrate, and comes with real support.
The disconnect between the three realms is real and concerning. Yathārtha is where I make sense of that tension.
What to Expect
I am starting to commit to a steady rhythm of writing.
Expect:
Field notes from selling into the growing world of AI infrastructure
Frameworks for developing early-stage conviction before there is a signal
Stories of working with technical founders to bring ideas into real products
Observations from the messy edges of AI, infra, GTM, and everything that connects them
It is a no-brainer to finally realise that thinking in public sharpens the way I see and act.
If you are building, investing, or just trying to stay ahead as AI moves faster than the ground beneath you, maybe these notes will give you something solid to hold onto.