India vs Abroad: The 3 Signals That Should Decide Your Career Bet | Aviral Bhatnagar | FWS

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Download 1% Club App Now!https://app.onepc.io/?c=fws-yt-vidAviral Bhatnagar is the Founder and Managing Partner of ajvc (A Junior VC), a pre-seed venture capital fund that closed its maiden fund at over ₹200 crore. Before starting ajvc, he spent close to a decade in early-stage investing, most recently as a lead investor at Venture Highway, where he covered SaaS, consumer and AI. He studied engineering physics at IIT Bombay and graduated top of his class from IIM Ahmedabad, and he runs one of India's most closely watched pre-seed funds largely as a one-man operation out of Pune.In this episode, Aviral breaks down how venture capital actually works at the earliest stage, where nothing is certain and the company being funded is often just three people with an idea. He explains why quantum mechanics shaped his investing philosophy more than any finance textbook, how the power law governs returns in VC, why roughly 0.2% of funded Indian startups ever reach unicorn status, and why even the best fund in venture history saw the overwhelming majority of its investments go to zero. He also walks through the arithmetic of a ₹200 crore fund spread across a hundred companies, and what a single breakout outcome does to the entire portfolio.The conversation then widens into India's economic trajectory. Aviral lays out his "Long India" thesis, first written in 2021, and explains why he chose to stay in India over a global career path a decade ago. He argues that heavily AI-exposed economies face a sharper correction than India does, why he is bullish on AI but not on the current format of AI companies, and why he expects an IT services 2.0 moment for the country. On jobs, he compares the current anxiety among engineers and Gen Z to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and uses Jevons paradox to explain why cheaper technology has historically expanded demand for skilled work rather than eliminating it.He closes with the non-obvious themes he believes will create wealth in India over the next decade: AI-led services, the r