The Desk
12 stories by The Desk
The Ten-Minute Revolution — how Tony Loeb simplified an entire industry's future.
From a childhood shaped by empathy to a career built on clarity and rigor, Tony Loeb, co-founder of 10minutes.news, has engineered a media engine that distills complexity into intelligence — and quietly rewired how 220,000 hospitality professionals start their week.
The man who built a $6 billion company from a village.
Sridhar Vembu walked out of Princeton, walked away from Silicon Valley, and walked home. Then he built one of India's most valuable software companies — without raising a single rupee of outside funding.
He Was Four Weeks From Law School. He Chose Engineering Instead.
Nizar taught himself to code, skipped law school, and spent nine months building AI infrastructure nobody else had made available. That infrastructure became Keiki — a platform that lets any company launch an AI agent on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Slack in minutes.
From a High-Mileage Tahoe to a Franchise System: The Junk Punks Story
Logan Sullivan started a junk removal business at 17 with a 200,000-mile truck. Today Junk Punks runs franchise markets across Florida and Wisconsin — built on turning founder knowledge into repeatable systems.
She saw the same gap from two sides. Then she built the bridge.
Katerina co-runs a small business and became a mother — two experiences that revealed the same broken system from opposite ends. Small businesses can't find reliable part-time workers. Skilled parents can't find flexible work. Momploy is her answer: a Toronto GTA platform building the local trust layer both sides need.
She had no CS degree. She used AI to teach herself to build.
Anastasiia Shumilo had no computer science background when she decided to build software. She taught herself Flutter and Xcode using AI, founded Shumi Technologies, and is now developing Draw Flow — an AI-powered construction technology platform that automates drawing analysis, quantity takeoffs, and cost estimation for construction professionals.
Dylan Field and the design tool Adobe couldn't buy
Figma's $20B deal with Adobe collapsed in December 2023 under regulatory pressure. The independent path that followed turned out to be the higher-variance outcome — and the more valuable one.
What Mira Murati left OpenAI to build
She was the CTO who shipped GPT-4 and Sora. She left at the peak of OpenAI's public arc. Then she raised what may be the largest seed round in venture history — for a company with no product.
Aravind Srinivas and the company that decided to rebuild search
Perplexity's bet was that the next interface for the open web wouldn't be ten blue links — it would be a paragraph with citations. Three years and several billion dollars of valuation later, that bet is still running.
Legend of Toys raises ₹21 Cr to play for keeps.
A Bengaluru toy brand has hit ₹30 Cr ARR in 18 months — and it's now backed by six investors to build India's first premium play universe.
Kovon raises $250K to fix a broken pipeline.
A Bengaluru startup is building the infrastructure layer for India's blue-collar workforce to find global jobs — without the middlemen. TDV Partners led the pre-seed.
BabyBillion tops global YouTube charts for seven straight weeks.
A Bengaluru kids' content studio, launched in December 2023, has overtaken every Western kids' brand on YouTube. The full plate is coming soon. This is the briefing.