489. Investing in the Gen AI Extraction Layer, Value Accrual in New Tech Waves, and India's Digital Currency & Identity Economy (Hemant Mohapatra)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Hey, man. Moha Patra joins us today from Bangalore, India. He's a partner at Lightspeed India. Before Lightspeed, he invested in software and infrastructure at a sixteen z. Earlier what and earlier was a PM and engineer at Google and AMD. Haymonth has invested in companies including Supabase, Pixel dot Space, Sarvin dot AI, Airbound, and Pintu amongst others. In addition to investing, he's an award winning poet whose work has been featured in major anthologies. Hey, Manth. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Nick. Very, very, very It's a pleasure to have you. I've, been following you for some time and and watching your content, so it's really fun to have you here today. But can you tell us your quick sorta two minute backstory and path to becoming an investor at Lightspeed? Yeah. I mean, look, maybe just really sort of a big pullback. Grew up in India. I've been to The US in o three, right after 09/11, and it was an interesting time to be in The US. Spent about fifteen years there. Like most Indians, before we really figured out what we wanna do with our lives, we wanna be an engineer. So that's what I tried to do. I worked for AMD as an engineer. I should have kept my stock, frankly. Wouldn't I have required to work anymore, but sold my stock at the bottom. Moved out of The US to go to The UK for an MBA, came back to The US and joined Google. And then I was doing a bunch of this interesting, you know, early stage work for startups in the in the at Google and Google Cloud because, you know, our charter was to basically grow the business by doing anything and everything. So I did pretty much everything except writing code. I did write some code, which never really got productionized. But, you know, we did some small m and a deals that did not hit the corp dev team. We did some small investments. We did a lot of product launches and BD work and all that partnerships. And then I ended up sort of spending a bunch of time with early stage startups and began really liking it, did a few of my personal investments. And …