In telecom, most of the data we rely on has dubious provenance. tjthinakaran.substack.com/p/…

Back to school, and back to learning from experts. We kick off the school year with @matt ramerman: tjthinakaran.blog/one-expert… Link to series: tjthinakaran.blog/tags/one-e…

That is one advantage of a consumption-based model: Revenue can overshoot bookings as customers ramp. tjthinakaran.substack.com/p/…

Software can abstract away the complexity of telecom; it cannot absorb the bill. tjthinakaran.substack.com/p/…

Voice lands the workload → the workload needs context → context rewards consolidation → consolidation creates attachment → attachment makes cross-sell work. tjthinakaran.substack.com/p/…

Sinch kicks of Q2 earnings coverage. “Connect your agent” is replacing “upload your contacts.” open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

Symeon Brown's excellent piece on IRSF (network.id.me/article/how-id…) got me thinking about the Musk effect on One-time passwords: open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

Klaviyo shows off it's best quarter ever as a public company. open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

The FCC is coming after the phone number inventory. Follow the money, it turns out, is still good advice. This time, the Commission is asking whether spam can be stopped at number provisioning, not just after the call is made. open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

On the surface, the requirements seem simple. Collect four pieces of information. Keep them for four years. But as Stuart Butterfield put it, if you think it’s simple, you don’t understand it well enough. More on the FCC’s KYC proposal. open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

Imagine your 95-year-old grandpa wrote candidly about what he thought of life, war, love, government, and God. Now imagine he was also a world-famous philosopher and historian. Will Durant published his first book in 1917 when he was still in his early thirties. Later, with his wife and writing partner, Ariel, he went on to produce an eleven-volume, ten-thousand-page work, The Story of Civilization. Along the way, they won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That framing matters because Fallen Leaves is unapologetically candid. Some turns of phrase and judgments will make modern readers wince. It has the spiciness of a grandpa who has seen everything and is not compelled to soften his views. The book is a short treatise on the ideas that mattered most to Will. He completed it as a manuscript, intending for Ariel to read and review it. That never happened. He died roughly a year later, within two weeks of his wife’s passing. He writes about ambition, mortality, and meaning with the clarity of someone who has lived the full arc of a human life. This book reminds you that wisdom, like ambition, is a private quest. tjthinakaran.blog/2025-book-…

Braze, Bandwidth, and now Klaviyo joined Twilio, Sinch, and LINK with a share buyback program. In a sector that has taken a shellacking, buybacks signal confidence in the company and in the market around it. But not all buybacks are the same. open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

In this morning's email: 1. Braze (almost) matches Klaviyo's growth. 2. DBNR as a proxy for how much customers like you. tjthinakaran.substack.com/p/…

In this morning's email: 1. We unpack Bandwidth Inc. earnings 2. One Expert, One Topic — Peter S. Hyun open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

Peter S. Hyun's story started on a one-way flight from South Korea to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. His parents arrived with more faith than certainty, chasing an American dream that—within a few years—included four sons in three-and-a-half years (including Peter and his twin). In the Hyun household, service wasn't a slogan; it was the operating system. With a father who moved from business to the ministry and a mother who served as a nurse, Peter was raised with a deep reverence for their adopted country. They viewed government work as a form of ministry—work done strictly in service of others. That belief hit home years later when Peter served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Standing in a ceremonial courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, Peter would read the names of hundreds of new citizens and move the court to administer the oath. He would then share a detail that silenced the room: “One generation ago, my parents stood where you are standing. Today, their son is an officer of the United States, ushering you into citizenship.” For Peter, that wasn't just a career milestone—it was a torch being passed. Today, that same through-line defines his work: a profound reverence for service, paired with a relentless fluency in how government actually functions to help people flourish. tjthinakaran.blog/one-expert…

In this morning's email, I unpack Sinch's Q4 2025: open.substack.com/pub/tjthin…

In this week’s newsletter: 1. Twilio racks yet another consecutive record-breaker 2. Why I am a cross-selling skeptic 3. The omnichannel messaging chat lnkd.in/gsp8prUg

There are plenty of five-second clips of Jensen saying he doesn’t like to fire people and would rather “torture them to greatness.” That can create the illusion of utopian job security, but as the book shows (and as Stephen Witt experiences himself), that “torture” can mean a public, two-hour dress-down at an all-hands for screwing up. The point isn’t softness; it’s that Jensen believes the greatest risk in business is the death of risk-taking. If failure gets you fired, people stop making big bets—and NVIDIA never becomes the bedrock of today’s AI ecosystem. Along the way, the book reveals Jensen as a textbook Level 5 leader: personally humble, fiercely professionally driven, ambitious for NVIDIA more than for himself, and disciplined about taking blame while giving credit. And yet, it’s equally clear there is no obvious public successor. He has built the world’s most valuable, decentralized startup, but there’s no visible number two. Maybe there can’t be. The combination of hardcore engineer, consummate CEO, and savvy statesman is too much to reasonably expect from anyone—anyone but Jensen. tjthinakaran.blog/2025-book-…