Nilam Ganenthiran: Building a Beacon in the Fog of AI - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 37]

Our teacher today is Nilam Ganenthiran, founder and CEO of Beacon, a centrally managed technology holding company that acquires the vertical software businesses serving the real economy.

Nilam shares the immigrant story that shaped him and why trust becomes the scarce resource as AI turns competence into a commodity. He revisits the hard lessons of his eight years building Instacart, from leading in wartime to the morning Amazon bought Whole Foods. And he lays out the thesis behind Beacon, the bet that distribution and trust hold their value even as the cost of building technology falls, and why he sees a holding company as the right vessel to serve the parts of the economy that technology too often forgets.

Please enjoy class with Nilam Ganenthiran.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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