Wrapping 2025 at The Chatter
New Year's Edition
Hi! This is Kashish. This New Year, instead of a regular edition, we decided to take you on a personal tour of what we’re trying to do, where we are, and what we’re aiming at. We’ll resume regular editions from next week.
The Chatter started with an honest internal quest. Company con-calls, we knew, were a goldmine of information about India’s businesses. They tell you how businesses work, where entire industries are headed, and what managers feel about the wider economy. Really, there are few places so filled with fresh business information. And occasionally, there’s also hilarious corporate drama and intrigue. As people trying to decode the world of business, we simply had to learn how to navigate them.
To get to all the good stuff, though, we would have to learn how to cut through all the fluff, and through managers tooting their own horn. We would have to learn the skill of filtering the signal out of the noise.
We decided to build that skill in public view.
If we managed to do a decent job of this, we knew we could become that filter for our audience as well. That became the single goal of this project: surface what mattered — anything that told us something meaningful about a business or the economy.
That meant, early on, we decided to give up on things that would get in the way. Like speed. We weren’t trying to find breaking news, so we could afford to spend time digging through ideas. We had no intentions of going viral either, so we avoided looking for hot-takes.
We narrowed our job down to a single thing: giving context. There are little, easy-to-miss nuances to most management commentary. If you’re engaging with a business or its concalls for the first time, you can easily miss the importance of what’s being said. If we could only learn to spot places where a little context could go a long way, dear reader, we realised we could add value to your life.
That’s what we’ve been trying to master for the last seven months. And on the way, over 31,000 of you have plugged into this experiment. We couldn’t be more grateful.
When this began, it was just Krishna and me. Today, Meher and Vignesh have taken charge, with the team’s support. And, of course, there’s AI.
If we tried to read through the transcript of every single con-call that interested us, we would all be old men before we made our way through a single quarter. Instead, we’ve learnt how to prompt AI models into throwing up the 20-40 most interesting or insightful nuggets of information. That short list then goes through our team, which manually filters through them for quotes that actually add value. We sometimes worry that we miss a few things, but given how much ground this helps us cover, it’s a trade we’re comfortable with.
Along the way, Krishna vibe-coded a really nice AI-powered website that makes our lives much easier.
The Chatter is now becoming an umbrella, with several experiments running together.
One of them was Points & Figures. Where Chatter focused on con-calls, Points & Figures was its visual counterpart — looking through investor presentations, annual reports, and the like, to find the most insightful or hard-hitting charts, slides, and other visuals.
Another experiment was Plotlines, though we’ve suspended it for now. Plotlines was an attempt at joining the dots, stitching the themes we were discovering through Chatter into wider narratives. That turned out to be harder than we first thought. Hopefully, though, we’ll eventually crack a way of doing so consistently.
The experiments will continue this year. For instance, we want to see what new formats we can crack. So far, The Chatter has been a text-first publication, unlike The Daily Brief, which has a video counterpart. We’ve experimented a bit with Twitter as well, but we haven’t really cracked something that works. If you have ideas for how we can get this out to people who care for this sort of stuff, let us know. And if you shared it with them yourself, we would be delighted!
Ultimately, we want The Chatter to become a source of ideas for anyone interested in business or finance. You could be a stock analyst that doesn’t have the time to go through every concall, an investor looking for a new idea, or simply someone that wants to learn more about how businesses work — if even a single quote we’ve covered sparks an idea, we would have done our job.
Thank you for all the support and love you’ve shown us. Wish you a very happy New Year. See you in 2026!
Great Effort by your Team. It brings some great insight for retail investors like us. My sincere compliments to the Team. Keep up the good work. Our best wishes are with you.
In a world that often rushes past those in need, you choose to pause, care, and act in the quest to educate small investors. This is highly admirable. My gratitude. Wish you all the very best in 2026