The Desk
8 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.
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.