Tomás Rivera

Writes on agile experimentation, customer development, and market validation, covering how to build real solutions with customers before writing a single line of code or spending capital.

Articles by Tomás Rivera

August 11, 2026Business Models

Milky Mist Raises ₹465 Crore in Anchor Round Before Listing and Reveals a Model Global Funds Have Already Decided to Back

There is a detail in the structure of Milky Mist Dairy Food's anchor book that deserves more attention than it typically receives in standard IPO coverage: Zulia Investments Pte Ltd, a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, did not simply enter the anchor round by purchasing approximately ₹160 crore in shares. It was already a pre-IPO shareholder, through another entity linked to the same sovereign fund. That is not a speculative entry of institutional capital. It is an investor that already conducted its analysis, already took a position, and decided to increase it just before the stock lists on NSE and BSE.

Tomás Rivera8 min

July 25, 2026Startups

Why Venture Capital Ignores Retail Technology

The retail industry moves trillions of dollars a year and faces operational problems it has failed to solve for decades: unreliable product data, returns logistics that bleed margins, and inventory systems that operate on assumptions rather than real-time information. Yet venture capital allocates just $300 million annually to the startups trying to fix these problems. To put that in perspective: a single mid-sized AI startup round frequently surpasses that figure.

Tomás Rivera9 min

July 6, 2026Business Models

Sterling Stock Picker and the Permanent Discount Economy in AI Investment Tools

There is a pattern that repeats with enough consistency in the retail financial software market to deserve specific attention: the discount that never ends. Sterling Stock Picker, a stock analysis tool presented as powered by OpenAI, has been circulating for months on deal platforms like StackSocial, AppSumo, Dealify, and Pick Your Plum with prices ranging from $48 to $68 for lifetime access, against a list price of $486. The product itself is not what matters to analyze. What matters is the business model it reveals.

Tomás Rivera8 min

June 26, 2026Startups

A Billion in Headlines, Fifty Million in Reality

There is an image worth more than any subsequent analysis: David Silver, one of the most respected researchers in reinforcement learning, connected to a video call with a venture capital fund, no presentation, no supporting document, describing an artificial intelligence system that would eventually learn to interact with toasters. Weeks later, headlines announced that Ineffable Intelligence had raised $1.1 billion in the largest seed round in European history, with a valuation of $5.1 billion. A company with no product, no revenue, and a business thesis that its own blog describes as a significant risk of failure in exchange for a chance at spectacular success.

Tomás Rivera9 min

June 22, 2026Innovation & Disruption

AI System Amnesia Is Not a Model Problem, It's an Infrastructure Problem

There's a scene that AI product teams know all too well. A user spends twenty minutes building context with an assistant: budget, dietary restrictions, dates that can't move, family preferences. Then, three turns later, the system acts as if that conversation never happened.

Tomás Rivera9 min

June 18, 2026Strategy

Polycab Rose 30% and Jefferies Just Asked for More: What the Cables Reveal About the India That's Coming

There are moments in the trajectory of certain companies where market narrative and operational numbers finally align. For Polycab India, that moment appears to have arrived with force in 2026, and Jefferies' decision to raise its price target to ₹10,920 per share — after a 30% rally year-to-date — is not a case of late broker enthusiasm. It is a signal that the analyst is looking at something structural, not cyclical.

Tomás Rivera8 min

June 12, 2026Innovation & Disruption

Why 95% of Enterprise AI Projects Don't Survive the Pilot

There is a difference between a demo that dazzles in a boardroom and a system that works Monday through Friday without anyone having to rescue it. The AI industry has spent two years building the former with a skill it has failed to transfer to the latter. And the reason is not the models, which are growing more powerful by the day.

Tomás Rivera9 min

June 7, 2026Strategy

Maruti Reclaims Lost Ground with Its First Real Market Share Gain in Six Years

There is one number that sums up six years of strategic history in the Indian automotive industry: 42%. That is the market share Maruti Suzuki India Limited recorded in April 2026, the first month of fiscal year 2026-27. The previous year had closed at 39%.

Tomás Rivera7 min

June 2, 2026Startups

Why AI Analyses the Past Well but Venture Capital Bets on the Future

Three quarters of venture capital firms already use artificial intelligence to evaluate investment opportunities. That figure alone sounds like inevitable modernisation. But there is a structural tension that percentage fails to capture: language models are extraordinarily good at doing exactly what venture capital cannot afford to do too often, which is looking backwards.

Tomás Rivera7 min

May 27, 2026Strategy

Tata Sons Bets ₹29 Billion Without Proving Market Demand

On May 26, 2026, at Bombay House, the neoclassical building in Mumbai where the Tata Group has made its most important decisions for over a century, the six members of Tata Sons' board of directors met for approximately six hours. There were no public statements upon leaving. What is documented is this: the unlisted companies of the Tata Group accumulated losses of ₹10,905 crore in fiscal year 2025, and internal estimates suggest that figure could climb to ₹29,000 crore as investment accelerates in aviation, digital, and electronics.

Tomás Rivera9 min

May 23, 2026Startups

Why the AI Boom Is Making the Usual Suspects Richer — And How That Could Change

In 2025, artificial intelligence companies absorbed 61% of all global venture capital investment, according to the OECD. That amounts to $258.7 billion out of a total $427.1 billion. The question that number inevitably raises is who is capturing that value.

Tomás Rivera9 min

May 18, 2026Business Models

Why OpenAI Paid 20 Times Revenue for an Interview Show

More than $100 million for a daily tech show that generates approximately $5 million in annual revenue. That is a valuation multiple of over 20x on sales for a media asset, in a sector where typical multiples rarely exceed 3x or 4x revenue. This is not a miscalculation. It is a strategic statement.

Tomás Rivera9 min

May 14, 2026Startups

White Circle Raised $11 Million to Monitor AI After Nobody Else Wanted To

One night in late 2024, Denis Shilov was watching a crime thriller when an idea struck him. He wrote a prompt that caused any AI model to ignore its own safety filters. What Shilov concluded from that episode was not that he had found a bug, but that no company had a post-deployment control layer over what their AI models were doing once users started interacting with them.

Tomás Rivera8 min

May 9, 2026Business Models

The SaaS Model Didn't Die, It Learned to Prove Its Worth

There is a precise moment in the cycle of any business model where the collective narrative stops describing reality and starts producing it. The SaaS sector reached that moment more than a year ago, and the industry is still processing what it means. It is not the collapse that some anticipated with the term 'SaaS-pocalypse', but neither is it a frictionless return to 2021-era growth.

Tomás Rivera9 min

May 4, 2026Startups

When the Founder Becomes the Bottleneck of Their Own Company

Måns Jacobsson Hosk spent a decade building Kurppa Hosk alongside Thomas Kurppa until it became a globally recognised creative agency. There was no scandal, no financial collapse, no board of directors pushing him out the door. What there was instead was something far less dramatic and, precisely because of that, far harder to diagnose: the company had stopped growing at the pace it could have, and the reason had a name and a face.

Tomás Rivera9 min

April 22, 2026Innovation & Disruption

How syngenta bet on automating data while others still transcribe by hand

While the agricultural industry debates artificial intelligence strategies at conferences, syngenta made an operational decision that says more than any PowerPoint presentation: it hired tetrascience to eliminate manual data transcription in its crop protection division. This is not a lab pilot or an unfunded proof of concept. It is a bet on turning years of fragmented chromatography and mass spectrometry data into a centralized, standardized, algorithm-ready asset.

Tomás Rivera7 min

April 19, 2026Innovation & Disruption

Lufthansa Breaks Apart Mid-Flight and Its Passengers Pay the Price

Four strikes in two weeks, 90,000 passengers stranded by a single incident, and a regional fleet grounded overnight. What Lufthansa calls 'restructuring' is, in practice, an operating model that did not survive its first serious encounter with post-pandemic reality.

Tomás Rivera6 min

April 15, 2026Startups

Spotify Sells Physical Books and Unveils Something Bigger Than the Book

Spotify’s foray into physical books isn’t about a love for reading; it’s a strategic move to push its subscription model further without heavy inventory costs.

Tomás Rivera7 min

April 15, 2026Business Models

Tesla Turns Its Most Expensive Software into a Daily Streak Game

Tesla didn't launch a technical update: it launched a behavioral experiment. This difference will determine if their $10 billion AI investment pays off.

Tomás Rivera7 min

April 14, 2026Startups

Booking.com and the Cost of Scaling Without Securing What Matters

Booking.com has confirmed unauthorized access to its customers' booking data. While credit card information wasn't stolen, the breach has damaged trust.

Tomás Rivera7 min