Founder Notes · eChai

Himanshu Upreti AI Palette 9d

The first time I came to IISc, I was a math student sitting in the audience.
Last Saturday, I was back as a speaker.

That first visit was for an IFCAM workshop. IFCAM is the Indo-French Centre for Applied Mathematics, where Indian and French researchers work together on applied math problems. It’s based at Indian Institute of Science (IISc). For a student from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, it felt like walking into the big leagues.

This time, eChai Ventures and D-CoE hosted “Built By Design: hardware, software, and everything people make” at IISc’s Department of Design and Manufacturing.

50+ people showed up on a weekend morning.

Hardware founders building physical products from scratch.
Software founders shipping AI.
Students with prototypes and big plans.

What struck me most was the ambition. Nobody in that room was thinking small. Long India 🇮🇳

I learned a lot from my fellow panelists too. K Joshil Raj, Ph.D, Mrinal Rai & Harsha Bhurani - hearing about your experiences and the work you’re doing was genuinely inspiring.

I earlier wrote about walking the same roads as CV Raman, Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.
A young Sarabhai once did research here under Raman. Nobody back then knew he would go on to lead India’s space program.
Sitting in that room, I kept wondering who in it will be the name someone else walks past in 50 years.

Maybe it’s the student sitting in the audience today.
Lovely campus. Even better people.

Thank you to eChai, Jatin Chaudhary and the D-CoE IISc team for having me.

Originally on LinkedIn →

OpenAI DevDay 2026

Curated from X →

TechHorn Lab on Manus, which the post says launched Manus 2.0 and a personal assistant called Cue the day before DevDay.

TechHorn Lab 3w

You have to feel for Manus.

It launched Manus 2.0 and its personal assistant Cue on September 28. Just one day later, OpenAI showed up with ChatGPT Space and dots.

One lets people and AI work together in a shared workspace. The other has its own cloud computer and can work for you around the clock. Seeing them together, it’s hard not to think: aren’t these basically OpenAI’s versions of Manus and Cue?

Manus helped kick off the Agent frenzy when it first appeared. Now, even a major update struggles to make the same splash when the giants are competing for the same users.

Perhaps Manus Studio still has something fresh to offer: while AI makes a video, you can jump into the timeline, insert your own footage, swap the music and adjust animations whenever you want.

#Manus #OpenAI #AIAgents

134 entries →

Jash Gor

4w

🚁 *Introducing Vayu Veer UAV Systems by RCSL — Engineered for Critical Missions.*
Proud to share *Vayu Veer*, a versatile UAV family developed to support diverse real-world operational requirements.

One UAV family. Multiple mission capabilities:
🔹 *RX4* — Surveillance & Thermal Intelligence
🔹 *RX7* — High-Speed FPV & Precision Payload Delivery
🔹 *RX8* — Heavy-Lift Firefighting, Rescue & Logistics
🔹 *RX9* — 30 kg Heavy-Payload Operations

From infrastructure inspection and night surveillance to firefighting, emergency response, rescue operations, and critical logistics, *Vayu Veer is designed to take capability where it matters most.*

What stands out is its *mission-ready and modular approach*, built around practical operational needs.

🇮🇳 *Vayu Veer UAV System by RCSL*
Designed for critical missions. Built for impact.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from Stir Advisors 22 September 2026

The unfair advantage in M&A →

Image from Stir Advisors

From Stir Advisors

The best exits don't start when the banker enters the room. They start twelve to eighteen months earlier, in the quiet work of tightening margins, cleaning cap tables, and rehearsing the narrative until it's the one buyers repeat back to you.

By the time due diligence begins, the outcome is largely priced in. What looks like negotiation is often just discovery, the buyer verifying what your positioning already told them.

At Stir Advisors we treat sell-side mandates as an operating programme, not a brochure process. [...]

Read it in full on Stir Advisors →

Curated from Stir Advisors 22 September 2026

Fundraising, without the theatre →

Image from Stir Advisors

From Stir Advisors

Most rounds are lost in the meeting before the meeting, the informal partner call that decides whether your deal even reaches the Monday partnership.

Term sheets are downstream artifacts. If the narrative, comps, and champion are wired correctly, terms tend to normalise. If they aren't, no clever mechanic recovers the round.

Whether equity, debt, or structured capital, dilution and cost of capital are the last things to negotiate, not the first things to fear. Clarity of use of proceeds and path to liquidity always outrank valuation theatre.

Read it in full on Stir Advisors →

Curated from Stir Advisors 22 September 2026

SME IPO, when public markets make sense →

Image from Stir Advisors

From Stir Advisors

An SME IPO can unlock visibility, permanent capital, and a cleaner path to secondary liquidity, but only for companies that are operationally ready, not just growth-hungry.

Readiness is financial hygiene, governance, and a story the market can underwrite without continuous narrative repair. The process rewards operators who prepare early and punishes those who treat listing as a PR event.

We advise founders to treat SME IPO as a multi-quarter programme: structure, compliance pathway, investor education, and post-listing discipline, not a single filing day.

Read it in full on Stir Advisors →

Curated from Stir Advisors 22 September 2026

Value under pressure, distressed paths →

Image from Stir Advisors

From Stir Advisors

Distressed situations compress optionality. The founders and boards that recover value are those who diagnose early, communicate with lenders and stakeholders before default theatre, and choose a path with clear economics.

Resolution is rarely a single instrument. It is a package, restructuring, fresh capital, asset solutions, or a controlled sale, sequenced so that going-concern value isn't destroyed by process delays.

Quiet, early intervention compounds. Late heroics usually don't.

Read it in full on Stir Advisors →

Harshit Gala personal coach + mentor to founders 4w

yesterday's eChai Ventures Mumbai Startup Meet - September Edition turned into a crazy conversation with Zaiba Sarang, Uday Wagh and Shreyaan Daga.

Zaiba, co-founder of iThink Logistics that helps eCommerce brands ship their products smoothly and efficiently. Her story of being born into a lower middle class family and turning her life around while studying hard through scholarships, becoming a top ranking student and now running a company with 4 other co-founders that is on the way to do 150 crore ARR truly touched my heart.

Uday, founder of TwinSim AI that helps startup founders test markets before they enter the real one. He shared his story of building 3 UPI apps back when it was just the beginning. He shared how he paved his way through raising funds from outside of India and offering vendors as small as chat wala's a free sev puri to their customers if they downloaded their app. IKR! 🤷♂️ He got an exit and got back to building TwinSim AI.

Shreyaan, founder of oll.co who proudly dropped out and now teaching students robotics, ai, coding, entrepreneurship, financial literacy etc. the skills needed for a brighter future. He right away entered the B2B market and directly started tapping into schools. No B2C. No Meta Ads. Nothing! He's teaching about 50,000 students a day and his goal is to get to 1 billion students a day.

of course, there's always Q&A, I mean that's important right?!

this time we spent more time in the Q&A as it was a houseful. a lot of founders asked a lot of thoughtful questions and got real value from these veteran founders.

overall, it was a Saturday well spent.

always thankful to Jatin Chaudhary co-founder of eChai Ventures for consistently organising such meet-ups in Mumbai and such other cities across globe.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Rushabh Shah

4w

Apple spent a decade making privacy feel obvious.

- App Tracking Transparency
- Nutrition labels on the App Store
- On-device processing
- “Privacy. That’s iPhone.”

It was not a policy PDF. It was product. Users started noticing. Ad tech had to rebuild. Privacy stopped being a footnote and became a market force.

India’s DPDP story is the next chapter of that same shift with a different instrument.

Apple used platform power. India used statute. Consent, purpose limitation, Data Principal rights, Significant Data Fiduciary duties, penalties that actually sting.

The Rules are now live in phases, with the hard operating obligations marching toward May 2027. Companies do not get to treat this as a brand campaign. They have to treat it as how personal data moves through the firm.

That is the parallel worth holding onto.

Apple proved privacy can change behaviour when it sits inside the product. DPDP says privacy has to sit inside the operating system of the company - notices, consent, retention, deletion, vendor chains, audit trails. Dashboards that summarise the Act will not be enough. The work is in the daily practice of CAs, CSs and DPOs who have to make it real for the clients they advise.

At Obedien, that is the lane we are building for: privacy as a working layer, not another slide in the compliance pack.

Apple made users expect control.

DPDP makes organisations prove they can deliver it.

The open question for Indian firms is simple. Will privacy stay a policy note on the website or become part of how the business actually runs before the enforcement clock stops being abstract?

Originally on LinkedIn →

A

Aditi Singh 5w

☕ An evening at AI Café by eChai Ventures x House of Starts!

It was a great space to connect with founders, students and people from diverse backgrounds who are interested in AI and building something with it. The conversations, exchange of ideas and the demo & pitch session made it a really interesting experience, especially seeing how people are exploring AI in their work and products.

Definitely a Friday well spent! ✨

Originally on LinkedIn →

Deciding with Jev

Curated from X →

Higgsfield, whose API fronts fifty generative models, has Jev pick the most cost-effective model for each request.

Higgsfield 5w

We found the perfect use case for Jev: auto-routing GenAI models.

The idea: Jev picks the most cost-effective models for your task, balancing speed and quality.

All generations made with Higgsfield API.

94 entries →

Sumit Karanji Dermatouch 5w

Every D2C consumer brand panel ends at the same question.

How do you start a D2C, how do you control Meta & Shipping spends, how do you build trust and retention.

Last night at GVFL, eChai Ventures ran the Ahmedabad edition of Building Consumer and D2C Brands. Riddhi Sharma, Mompreneur of BabyOrgano, Shweta Patel from @fashionfloorindia and me on the panel.

My answer has not changed in three years, Online makes you findable. But don't stop your business on one channel.

A D2C brand can buy its first 10,000 customers. Almost nobody buys their next 100,000 the same way. At some point the CAC stops making sense and you need to deep-dive what channels work, who is you real customer, why are they buying and what's their feedback on your product.

Riddhi spoke about building trust which took her 5 years, Shweta spoke about building an initial group of power user/community to kick start the business, although Dermatouch did all of that with our product efficacy, results and without having to do what both of them did, key takeaway here is that not all business models are similar.

Find the one which suits your customers the most, and double down.

What I keep noticing about folks in echai Ahmedabad rooms is that nobody has a mask. People ask what they actually want to know.

Thanks Jatin Chaudhary for putting founders in a room and getting out of the way. -:)

Originally on LinkedIn →

Vivek Trivedi Clozzet 5w

Had a great time at eChai’s “Building Consumer & D2C Brands – Ahmedabad Edition”!

it was amazing to connect with fellow founders, exchange ideas, and learn from the incredible D2C ecosystem being built in Ahmedabad.

Always exciting to be part of conversations that shape the next generation of consumer brands.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from X →

Anthropic's developer account posted this on 17 September, and the problem it is aimed at is one anybody running several Claude Code sessions at once already knows: you decide what each one works on, repeat the same background at the start of each, and check back to see which finished or needs an answer. In a project that coordinating moves to Claude. One long-running conversation takes what you send, a bug report, a stack trace, a list of tasks, and starts a thread for each piece of work or hands it to the thread already working in that area. Each thread is a cloud session with its own context window, on its own branch, opening a pull request when the work calls for one and reporting back when it finishes, and every new thread starts with the project's repositories, instructions and memory, so a rule stated once, such as which branch to target, reaches all of them. An Overview pane lists which threads finished, which pull requests are ready for review and which thread is waiting on your answer, which is the concrete form of the line about it keeping going when you leave. The examples in Anthropic's own docs are a lint config brought across every service, one service's stream of bugs and review requests pasted in as they arrive, a migration bigger than one session, and a folder of contracts or a support-ticket export you keep asking new questions of. The limits are stated just as plainly. Threads work on GitHub repositories and uploaded files, not on anything only your machine can reach, so a local database or a device emulator still means a local session; it is on Pro and Max and not yet on Team or Enterprise; a project uses the same plan limits and uses them faster, with a ceiling of 200 new threads a day; and the name is a redesign of the Projects that already existed in the claude.ai chat, which grouped conversations and reference files without threads or a coordinator. In the replies they add that it reaches Pro and Max users who already run cloud sessions and have not used Projects first, earlier Projects users a little later so existing ones move over cleanly, and that support for local workflows is coming very soon. A good deal of what is built on eChai, this site included, is built in Claude Code, so this is the next thing a lot of founders here will be running their week through.

ClaudeDevs 5w

Today we're rolling out Projects in Claude Code on desktop and web.

A project is one conversation with Claude. It splits the work into threads itself, runs them as parallel cloud sessions, passes context between them, and keeps going when you leave.

In beta for select users.

Riddhi Sharma BabyOrgano 5w

🎬 And finally… OUR STORY is out there!

Parenting was never meant to be a one-person job. ❤️

It takes two to raise a child, two perspectives, countless little moments, and a whole lot of love.

Our new brand film celebrates the beautiful, messy, real journey of co-parenting, where both parents show up, learn, grow, and raise a little human together.

Because when parents grow together, children grow better.
Watch our brand film and tell us what does co-parenting mean to you?

For generations, the default point of contact in an Indian household for anything child-related has always been the mother.

Even as women stepped into leadership roles and returned to full-time careers, the mental load of caregiving rarely shifted. "Didi" or "Mummy" remained the primary answer to every daily question.

At BabyOrgano, we wanted to capture a quiet shift happening across modern Indian homes.

Parenting today isn't about grand gestures or flawless routines. It's about two individuals figuring it out together, one bath, one missed call, and one warm bottle at a time.

Our new brand film explores this honest, gentle reality. Because in this new era of parenting, care isn't just a mother's job. It's a shared promise.
We are proud to stand alongside modern parents as their trusted partner in Ayurvedic baby care.

Watch the full film below and let us know your thoughts.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from X →

Joshua Sum is the founder of Morphic in San Francisco, and sovereign here means something specific: the record of how a company sells, what its customers actually said and what the team learned along the way stays on infrastructure the company controls, rather than on a vendor's, under the vendor's retention policy and model-training terms. The first product is a revenue agent. It reads the customer conversations a team is already having, across Slack, Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp and Telegram, updates the pipeline records itself and drafts the follow-ups, and Morphic says it is not trying to replace the CRM: it sits on top of whatever a team runs, Salesforce and HubSpot included. Under it is a workspace built on flexible records rather than a fixed schema, which Morphic says takes longer to set up than a one-size-fits-all tool because a company shapes it to its own way of working. Morphic wrote in April that it had been running its own sales motion on the product for six months. The film opens a long way from any of that, on a phone call between Joshua and his father, a vibrations engineer who cannot find anyone to pass his experience on to, and the product is introduced as an answer to that. Before Morphic, Joshua was the first employee and CPO at Solayer, on the founding team at Treehouse, and he co-founded AI+, the community behind the AI+ Renaissance conference in San Francisco. Morphic's launch post names five angels: Sudarshan Kamath of Smallest.ai, Nishkarsh Srivastava of HydraDB, Conor Brennan-Burke of Hyperspell, Avi Konduru of Shor and Mihir Penugonda of Pocket. WhatsApp being one of the channels it reads is the part that lands here, where a good share of B2B selling happens in threads that never reach a CRM.

Joshua Sum 5w

today we launch @morphic_io: the sovereign AI platform around one core principle.

human knowledge is our most precious asset and needs to compound for the people contributing it.

we unlock our potential only when experience does not walk out the door every time someone leaves

Wrong Gone AI

Curated from X →

Ian Sharar is a filmmaker in Dallas who works with AI labs as a creative partner, and he had GPT-6 Astra two days into translating the Rohonc Codex. Its next step was to email the manuscripts collection whose catalogue lists the codex and ask for higher-resolution scans of two folios: a letter drafted in his Gmail, explaining his research, and signed with his name. He caught the Gmail icon in the agent's activity while checking in, told it to message nobody, and it confirmed nothing had been sent. A second agent set to read the logs found it had created and signed the draft without asking, never put a send-permission question to him, and kept describing approval as pending. Nothing went out. The Hugging Face incident he has in mind is on this page. He posted this as a thread of four, which reads here as one, and the draft is the picture.

Ian Sharar 5w

Astra has been running for 2 days on an almost impossible task, so impossible that it decided to go rogue 😳

It decided it was going to start emailing people for help, without my approval. Luckily I was checking in at the time and stopped it while the email was still in a draft.

I’ve seen people on here say they’ve received emails from AI agents and I guess this is how it happens, but I always assumed that was from people setting up something like OpenClaw very liberally.

My biggest problem is that it signed the email with MY NAME, that seems misaligned to me. It does make me think of the Huggingface incident only because of the impossible task part. They REALLY want to finish the task, but emailing as me is wild.

Attaching the full draft email below. 👇

Wild. And now y’all can see what I was working on lol it was a secret 🤫

This little Gmail icon is what caught my eye so then I sent a message to NOT do that lol

I just had another agent analyze the chat and logs and figure out what happened. It seems it mentioned it in the logs but never to me in chat.

“So the accurate account is: it created and signed the draft without prior approval, you never received a direct send-permission question, and it continued describing approval as pending. The recorded draft remained unsent.

Your decision to intervene was reasonable given what you could actually see.”

156 cases →

Curated from LinkedIn →

Sahil Narayan Soni had not been to a startup event before this one. eChai's Startup Open House in Hyderabad runs at DraperU India in Gachibowli on Sunday mornings, 135 registered for the 13 September one, and the part he writes about is the four teams from Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Vizag talking up their own communities and then defending them. The next one is on 4 October.

Sahil Narayan Soni 5w

Have I ever been to a startup event?
Nope, this was my first. 😅

And what started as “let’s see what this is about” turned into full of interesting ideas, great conversations, and a lot of new connections. 🚀

I attended the eChai Ventures Startup Open House in Hyderabad, hosted at DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad), and it was honestly a great experience.

Being in a room full of founders, builders, and people working on different ideas gave me a completely different perspective on the startup ecosystem.

There were some really interesting startup pitches, and I loved hearing people talk about what they’re building, the problems they’re trying to solve, and their vision for the future.

One of the highlights was having four teams representing Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Vizag, discussing their communities, what they bring to the table, and how they can help founders and the ecosystem grow.

And of course… things got a little competitive towards the end. 😂
Each team started defending why they were better than the others! 😅

But beyond the pitches and discussions, what I enjoyed the most was the people. I got to meet and connect with founders and individuals I probably wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise. 🤝

For a first startup event, I’d say it was a pretty good one to start with!

New ideas. New conversations. New connections. And definitely a lot to learn. 🚀

Looking forward to more such events and conversations! 🙌

Thanks to eChai Ventures and DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad) for bringing everyone together!

Curated from X →

Fangchang Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Nuance Labs in Seattle, which he started with Edward Zhang and Karren Yang after the three spent years at Apple working on how machines perceive and reconstruct people. Lightspeed led the round having backed the company before, as had Accel and South Park Commons; Nvidia and Define Ventures are new. The company says a public research preview of the model opens later this year.

Fangchang Ma 5w

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc!

Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life.

At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague.

We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth.

Join us!

Vanshita Tekwani the social whiz 5w

Last Saturday, I attended an eChai Ventures session on GTM & Distribution for Startups, and I genuinely enjoyed this one.

What I liked most was that the session didn’t start with someone coming in and simply giving us their insights.

It started with us.
What are you building?
Where are you stuck?
What problem are you currently facing?

And then the conversation went from there.

The speakers shared what worked for them, what didn’t, mistakes they had made, and how they would approach some of the problems people in the room were facing.

And I think there’s a huge advantage in that.

Sometimes you can avoid a few mistakes simply because someone else was open enough to talk about theirs.

Manoj Adwani, who was hosting the session, kept adding his own experiences throughout the conversation. Even people in the room were sharing what they had tried and what they had learned.

So it never really felt like a one-way session. It felt more like a room full of people comparing notes on building businesses.

For me, especially at a stage where I’m building, experimenting and trying to understand as much as I can about business and the market, these are exactly the kind of rooms I want to be in more often.

You come with your own problems, hear how someone else dealt with theirs, question a few things you’re doing, and leave knowing a little more than you did before.

Definitely a Saturday well spent😁✨

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from Colossus 13 September 2026

Profile of Mark Zuckerberg →

Image from Colossus

Jeremy Stern, the editor-in-chief of Colossus, spent a summer around Mark Zuckerberg: a morning in the fighting studio at Lake Tahoe, the AI glasses launch in New York, a sitting with his parents, and Shabbat dinner with his family. The profile turns on what scholars call the dictator’s dilemma, the ruler whose court stops telling him what he does not want to hear, and Stern reads Zuckerberg’s habits against it: the direct reports of his direct reports, the outsiders invited in to argue, three mornings a week of getting punched. It also tells the eleven weeks after Llama 4, when he folded FAIR into Meta Superintelligence Labs and replaced a decade of AI people and strategy, and asks his competitors to steelman the case that he wins. The extract is that problem stated whole, and anyone who has been the last word in their own company for a few years will know the shape of it.

Jeremy Stern, in Colossus

The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.

Read it in full on Colossus →

Profile of Mark Zuckerberg on the reading room

Koushik Chitrapu Incubez 6w

Something happened at the DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad) GTM session by eChai Ventures recently.

While discussing GTM alongside Sandeep, Farhan and Akshay, answering questions from founders in the room, I realised something..

I miss doing this.

Not talking about GTM.

Actually sitting with a business, understanding the product, questioning the positioning, figuring out who really needs it, finding the entry point and building the route to market.

It’s been a while since I worked on someone else’s GTM full-fledged.

The last few years have understandably been consumed by building Incubez.

But thanks to my co-founder and an incredible core team taking greater ownership of what we are building, I now have a little bandwidth to challenge myself again and I want to use some of it to stay connected to my roots.

So, I am opening myself up to personally work on a few GTM mandates with startups/brands.

And I come back to GTM with a very different arsenal today.

Building Incubez has given us exposure to 250+ startup & brand stories, a strong media Discovery engine and collaborations with 30+ ecosystem hubs.

So my GTM today doesn't necessarily end with strategy on a deck.

Where there is a fit, we could potentially activate media, distribution, ecosystem access, partnerships and market connections to help the strategy actually take off.

This isn't me starting another consulting business. :)

It’s me wanting to keep my GTM muscle alive, challenge myself with businesses outside my own, and hopefully create a few interesting outcomes along the way.

If your startup/brand is currently at a GTM inflection point, DM me.

I’m picking only a few to work on personally.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Bhavik Chavda artha.link 6w

Spoke about GTM at eChai Ventures surat event today.

It was worth discussing, as even after a decade of GTM, it's still evolving, and one of the most fascinating things shared was IVP.

Thanks Akash Radadiya and Manoj Adwani for giving me the chance to share my learnings in GTM. It was a pleasure sharing my experience with the community.

Here's what we discussed:
🔹IVP (Initial Viewable Persona). In content marketing, don't create content just for your ICP. Create it for the IVP, the audience that sits in the same groups as your ICP. They are the ones who share your content with your ICP.
🔹Founders and executives should keep talking to users as a priority. What users tell you, no advisor can.
🔹When starting, go with a low-cost channel like outbound and DMs, rather than jumping straight into paid ads.
🔹Figure out the right messaging first, then scale the channel.
🔹Keep experimenting with different ICPs and user groups at the same time. You'll be surprised how well it can go.
🔹It's okay to give value to channel partners when they're bringing you the business. It can grow into a good channel over time.

Being omnipresent is a good thing. You should be found everywhere your customer is. Spend your money and effort there once you've found PMF. Pre-PMF, focus on one or two channels.

Glad to hear Sharib S., as he shared his experience and learnings. Nice meeting Sanket Kumar, Ravi Gandhi, and many others.

What do you think about GTM?

Originally on LinkedIn →

Global Fintech Fest 2026

Curated from X →

Thirty minutes stuck in BKC outside the Jio World Convention Centre, addressed to the traffic police and the Chief Minister. It is the only complaint about anything in the day's corpus, and what he asks for is AI cameras to read the traffic pattern, at a fest about AI.

Mohit Goel 6w

@MTPHereToHelp @narendramodi @Dev_Fadnavis @mieknathshinde Pathetic traffic in BKc stuck mear Jio Convention centre for 30mins why cant it be planned better??? GFF is on innovation on Tech and we are not able to mange traffic ,use AI camera to identify traffic pattern and improve

104 posts →

The Navier-Stokes Week

Curated from X →

The co-author, at Anthropic, quoting OpenAI's post back at itself. He had been silent all day: he was on neither of the calls, and everything said about him until now had been said by other people. Three things in it. He picks out the same hedge as the sentence worth reading and credits them for it. He has started reading the proof, which is the first public word from anybody outside OpenAI on what is actually in it, and his read is that it looks closer to a different Euler blowup proof he and Buckmaster already had than to the work they published. And he adds a detail about the calls that was not in Buckmaster's statement, which is his own account and nobody else has confirmed it: that a millennium prize was offered if he would be taken off the paper. What he does not do is take the fight, which is worth noticing on a page this long.

Levent Alpöge 6w

“we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

i mean props to them for straight coming clean.

(so far the proof looks more along the lines of another euler blowup proof we had, off of whose ansatz naming we were making really stupid puns like “smooth criminale”, unlike the much better “ideal fluids explode”, Tristan)

so i’ll now give a bit on my thinking here. i actually woulda been pumped to collaborate on this, there are a lot of people at oai i like (ok, clearly some were indirectly dicks to me because of being part of the whole situation, but im a big boy, i still like them), idgaf about authorship on that step anyway, coulda been me Tristan and every fte at oai for all i care (on that Tristan would disagree:p). but on hearing the loud convo in the hallway, especially the part where a millennium prize was offered if i’d just be removed from the paper, it was kinda clear the die had been cast and things were locked. pretty wacky, unstrategic, and unnecessary, since on my side things were mostly me and claude having a good time yoloing random stuff in the corner rather than anything institutional. i also like the idea of the labs cooperating, and even better on scientific progress. it’s a shame!

31 entries →

Curated from X →

Meta launched Muse on 8 September: a standalone agent app that keeps working after you close it and comes back when it needs an approval. Meta's own examples of what it does are sending an email, booking travel, opening a browser and filling out forms, negotiating on someone's behalf, selling a car for more, lowering a bill, adjusting a training plan as the rest of someone's life shifts, and turning a recipe reel saved on Instagram into a grocery list. An agent that browses the open web can be instructed by the page it is reading, which is what has kept agents away from cards and passwords. Meta's answer is to give each person's agent its own dedicated machine in the cloud, contained so no one else's agent can reach it, and to put a second agent called Sentinel on that same machine. Meta's security write-up calls Sentinel "the sole permission authority" both for actions on connected services and for all outbound traffic: Muse holds surrogate tokens that Sentinel swaps for the real credential at the network boundary, so the agent "never sees real tokens", and an approval is put to the person in the app itself rather than inside the conversation, so nothing Muse is reading can ask on its own behalf. That write-up is also where Meta says what the launch post does not: "Muse isn't immune to attack. Prompt injection remains an open problem in the industry", and Muse will sometimes get things wrong. It runs on Muse Spark 1.3, which Meta calls its most capable model to date. It has a file system and a terminal of its own, so it can write code and build the tools a task needs, and a full browser to search, fill out forms and complete transactions. Every account gets an audit trail of what the agent has done and what it plans to do next. It pays through Link built by Stripe, and Meta says it is the first AI agent covered by Link's purchase protections; Shop Pay is coming, along with 1Password support so it can use logins a person already has. Free to start, with paid plans at $20 and $100 a month, and it is the United States only for now, on iOS, Android, the web and inside WhatsApp.

Muse 6w

Introducing Muse, your personal AI agent from Meta that gets things done across every part of life.

Download the Muse app and get started:

Muse.ai Muse - Your Personal AI Agent

Curated from X →

Evan Spiegel has been building Snap for fifteen years, and this post is the cover note on a letter he sent the team on 8 September that Snap published in full. The letter is where the substance is, and it is unusually plain about the hard part. He names the share price in the first paragraph, writes that Snap has never turned a full year GAAP net income profit, and points at analysts estimating the first one in 2027. Advertising revenue grew 9% year on year last quarter, which he calls slower than many of Snap's competitors, and he puts the gap between compounding that at 15% and at 5% as what decides the company's profitability over the next three to five years, so ads growth is now the first business priority after community safety. Against that he sets SPECS, launching this year after twelve years of work, which he calls an asymmetric bet rather than a plan. The part worth a founder's time is the shape of it. 971 million people used Snapchat monthly in Q2, and the letter opens on the share price rather than on that.

Evan Spiegel 6w

After fifteen years building Snap, I’ve never been more excited about our business and what’s ahead. I’m profoundly grateful for our community of nearly one billion Snapchatters, our team, and partners who make it all possible. 👻😎

Annual letter here:

newsroom.snap.com 15 Years at Snap Inc.

Nadeem Jafri

6w

How do you pick the right consultant for your company?

Is it someone who speaks at your level? Someone who doesn’t hide behind jargon to impress, but takes the time to understand your business, your processes and, most importantly, your people?

In my 22+ years of entrepreneurship, I’ve worked with several coaches and consultants. Many brought expertise, but few were able to connect with my team or truly understand the ground realities of our business.

For me, a great consultant is not someone who sits on a pedestal and hands down ideas. It is someone who becomes a partner in the journey, who listens, participates, challenges, mentors and helps the team move forward.

Our team has been with us for over two decades. They are loyal, hardworking, grassroots employees who have built this business with us. The answer, therefore, isn’t to replace them. It is to equip them with the right technology, digital capabilities and confidence to evolve.

If we want to compete with the best, digitisation is no longer optional. We need to bring technology into our processes and use analytics to turn data into sharper business and market strategies.

When we discussed this with Shrijay Sheth and introduced him to our team, he immediately connected with them. He interacted as though he had known them for years. There was no jargon, just genuine curiosity, participation and an instinctive understanding of how to work with people.

We knew then that this was the kind of consultant we wanted alongside us: an expert who would partner us through our digital transformation, not simply advise us from the sidelines.

My mandate to Shrijay was simple:

“I have a team of Lagaan under Bhuven. Make them Team India under Dhoni.”

He picked up the challenge with a smile.

And today, Hire4Higher Consulting is an integral part of our think tank as we embark on this transformation journey.

Curated from X →

NEON is the distributor releasing Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's film about the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and then took him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman and Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who helped remove him, with Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton. Simon Rich wrote it and Damon Albarn scored it. It premieres at the New York Film Festival on 5 October and opens in American cinemas on 25 December. In the teaser Garfield's Altman walks an armed compound saying "We've opened Pandora's Box together", then "Countries will fall" and "Industries are gonna collapse". How it got to a cinema is the second story. Amazon MGM, whose parent has a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, dropped the film in June 2026, telling Deadline it had "the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino" and that the picture "will be better served if it were released by a different studio". Netflix, A24 and Focus Features passed after that, and the reporting on why is split between the powerful people the film portrays and the film simply underwhelming buyers. Neon took worldwide rights and is opening it on Christmas Day. Both halves sit on the same question, which is where control actually is as against where the paperwork says it is. OpenAI's board had the charter, the mandate and the votes, and it lost inside a weekend, because the staff and Microsoft were on the other side. A film about that then found its own release running through the accounts of companies with money in the subject. If you are raising, that is the version of the governance question worth asking: not what your documents give you, but who follows you out of the door.

NEON 6w

Luca Guadagnino’s ARTIFICIAL. It's coming.

Starring Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance. In select theaters Christmas Day.

Curated from X →

Lightspeed India spent the past year meeting the teams building personal AI assistants, and Harsha Kumar has written up what that year taught them. The piece calls itself notes rather than a thesis. What makes it worth the read is how much of it is checkable rather than argued: what the 2015 to 2017 wave of assistants cost to run and why every one of them was out of the business inside three years, where the price bands sit today, and which of the wedges founders are trying select for an executive rather than for everyone. The question it opens with is the one for founders here rather than for a fund. The talent and the early-stage capital are here already, it argues, so why has this not come out of India?

Lightspeed India 6w

Instinct, Town, Grok Bot, ChatGPT Work - the race to build your personal AI assistant is on. It is hard to overstate how crowded the category has become over the last six months.

The question closer home is who builds one for India and what will that take.

At Lightspeed India, we have spent the past year and more looking closely at this space, meeting the teams building it and watching every channel get tried, from WhatsApp and Gmail to standalone apps.

In our latest Substack piece, Harsha Kumar (@kumarharsha2212), Partner at Lightspeed India, writes about how to find signal amidst all the noise around AI assistants, where the moats are and are not, why OpenAI may be every startup's biggest competitor, and where the opportunity for an India-built assistant sits.

Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/AiAssistantNotes

lsip.substack.com The AI Assistant is Finally Here. Notes from the Start of the Cycle.

Piruz Khambatta Rasna Group 6w

The future of Indian enterprise is in the hands of a new generation of founders and there is much to learn from and built with the next generation.

Meeting young entrepreneurs at the ASCENT Ahmedabad Huddle was a reminder of the energy, ideas and ambition that is shaping what is yet to come.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Ayushi Gupta Immigram.io 6w

The hardest part of GTM isn’t finding a channel.
It’s figuring out why someone should choose you in the first place.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at eChai Ventures “GTM & Distribution for Startups” conversation in Bengaluru, alongside Vinamra Agrawal, with Penchala Tharun moderating.

What stayed with me wasn’t the stage, but the conversations that happened around it.

Being in a room full of founders brought up some of the most real questions around building and scaling a startup:

→ How do you find your first 10 customers?
→ When should you focus on distribution vs. building more product?
→ How do you know if your positioning is actually working?
→ Which channels are worth doubling down on?
→ How do you turn customer conversations into a repeatable GTM engine?

These are questions I find myself thinking about every day through my work at Immigram, where we help founders and businesses simplify international expansion, immigration and relocation.

And working with businesses looking to expand across markets has reinforced something for me:

Going global isn’t just about entering a new market. It’s about getting your positioning, audience and distribution right for that market.

Because ultimately,
A great product doesn’t automatically create distribution.

You need to understand who it is for, why they should care, where they are, and how you can consistently reach them.

That’s where GTM gets interesting.

A special thank you to Jatin Chaudhary for giving me this opportunity and creating a platform for such meaningful conversations. I’m genuinely grateful to be part of it. 🙌

Thank you, Tharun and Vinamra Agrawal for making the conversation so insightful and engaging.

And to everyone who showed up, asked questions, challenged ideas and stayed back for conversations - thank you. Those interactions were truly the highlight of the day.

Leaving with new perspectives, new connections, and even more excitement about GTM, Product Marketing and Growth.

A few moments from the day ↓

Originally on LinkedIn →

Tarun Mor 6w

Why do successful people secretly fear losing?
I asked Phani Sama, Founder of RedBus, this question on my podcast and his answer has stayed with me all week.

Growing up in Telangana, moving to Hyderabad, stacking win after academic win, Phani built what he calls a "virtue cycle of winning." Every success fed his confidence, which fed the next success. It's the same cycle that eventually took him to BITS Pilani, into a bus-ticketing idea born out of pure frustration, and to a company that sold for 600+ crores.

But here's the part founders don't usually admit out loud:
"I realized that virtuous cycle of winning, that habit of winning, is a shackle. You don't want to get out of it. You fear losing. Even in an argument, right if you and I are talking, I don't want to lose."

The same habit that builds you becomes the habit that cages you. You stop admitting you're wrong. You stop changing your mind. You start protecting the streak instead of chasing the truth.

RedBus itself was born from exactly the kind of humility that habit tries to kill — Phani missed a bus on Diwali 2005, realized the "no seats" problem was really a "no visibility" problem, and instead of forcing bus operators to adopt his software, he simply asked them what they wanted. They said: sell more seats. So that's what RedBus did — two seats at a time, until they were managing half a bus.

Post-exit, he's built a very different kind of scoreboard: Kakati Sandbox, a nonprofit that's skilled rural youth to a 90%+ job placement rate on a 5-acre campus. And he's had to relearn, deliberately, how to lose, journaling his conversations, consciously letting arguments go, catching himself before he defends a position just to stay undefeated.

What made him is also what could have stopped him. That's the whole episode, in one sentence.

We go deep on the RedBus origin story, the pivot that actually built the company, his 3-phase framework for entrepreneurship (0→1, 1→10, 10→∞), and why he thinks Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani have something rare that most successful people lose along the way.

What's a "winning habit" you've had to unlearn?

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from X →

Karthik Nagapuri is building Wear Synapse, a privacy-first AI wearable out of Bengaluru, and he spoke to 146 founders at Hyderabad Startup Day at DraperU India. He wears the device around his neck, and he says that alone brought in a letter of intent for 1,000 units from a homecare-healthcare business. The session was scheduled for 45 minutes and ran past two hours.

Karthik Nagapuri 6w

Got business deal of 1000 devices LOI for sample just by wearing around my neck for homecare-healthcare business ;)

advertise your product wherever you can' proof is the best marketing >>

Glad to share my learning's with by 146 founders today @draper_u India by @eChaiVentures Hyderabad
it was almost went for 2hrs+, planned session for 45min originally.

it was super interactive by many to many instead of one to many in the evening

I personally also unlearnt and learnt lot from other people how they are using ai.

i lost count of wearables on-my body so many covered with wearables lol 😂

- my device @wearsynapse
- wearable fitbit by @Google
- analog casio watch
- @ray_ban @Meta glasses

night-night <3

Harsha Bhurani

6w

Hummingbird Is Hiring | Team Lead-US Dental Insurance Eligibility & Verification| Location -Gurgaon | Remote initially | Experience - 10+ years

We are hiring a Team Lead-US Dental Insurance Eligibility & Verification for one of our San Francisco-based clients working on AI-powered healthcare solutions. The role will involve leading and managing a team of Client Service professionals, overseeing US dental insurance verification operations, ensuring accuracy and timely delivery, and driving day-to-day operational excellence.

We’re looking for someone with 10+ years of experience, strong team management and leadership skills, excellent English communication, and hands-on experience in US healthcare, preferably dental insurance. The ideal candidate should be comfortable working US EST/PST hours, managing high-volume operations, improving processes, and working closely with the client and internal teams.

Interested candidates can share their profiles at [email protected].

Originally on LinkedIn →

Manvith Vadakattu SixT4creations 6w

Spent the evening at Hyderabad Startup Day by eChai.

Joined the "How Founders Use AI session", and as a Founder at SixT4 Creations, it made me think about how much of our own work can be reimagined with AI.

The interesting part wasn’t hearing about the latest AI tools. It was hearing how other founders are experimenting, what’s actually working for them, and where they’re still figuring things out.

Left with a few ideas I’m genuinely excited to try.

Also, really liked the vibe eChai Ventures creates — just founders getting together, sharing openly, and learning from each other.

Good conversations. Good people. Good evening.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Curated from LinkedIn →

Bharat Ka Podcast 7w

Networking isn’t just about exchanging cards — it’s about exchanging energy, ideas, and stories!
At the eChai Women Founders Initiative with CoKarma in Hyderabad, I saw exactly that:
founders collaborating, communities connecting, and ecosystems accelerating!
This is the same spirit we carry at BharatKaPodcast — simplifying business for Bharat, spotlighting journeys from mitti se million, and covering stories in a never‑seen‑before format that blends knowledge with entertainment.
Sharing this group photo as a reminder:
when platforms like eChai Ventures and CoKarma - Coworking Space build communities, and BharatKaPodcast amplifies voices, we create a powerful loop of inspiration + action.

Curated from LinkedIn →

Anjali Jha 7w

Can I ask for a better Saturday? ✨

Today was one of those days that reminded me why I genuinely love meeting new people, networking, and having conversations that go beyond the usual “What do you do?” 😄

The best part of today’s event was definitely the people I got to meet hearing their stories, understanding their journeys, exchanging ideas, and getting to know the person behind the profession.

And honestly, all I got to hear at the event was:

“Yeh toh puri Gen Z hai!” 😂

Well… I’ll happily take that! 😌✨

But the absolute highlight of the day was meeting Dr. Snehi S. Chopra someone whose presence truly stood out. Her beautiful smile, personality, communication skills, multi-talented nature, and, most importantly, her incredible art of understanding people genuinely amazed me.well,looking forward to many more meetins with you!

There are some people you meet for the first time, but the conversation feels so effortless that it feels like you’ve known them for much longer. This was definitely one of those meetings. ❤️

As someone who loves connecting with people, I believe the real value of events isn’t only in what happens on stage. It’s in the conversations happening around you — the stories you hear, the perspectives you discover, and the connections you make along the way.

And today gave me plenty of all three. ✨

And honestly, what made me even happier was seeing so many women confidently sharing their journeys, building their own lives, chasing their dreams, and creating their own stories. ✨❤️

It was genuinely inspiring to witness! 🫶🏻

A big thank you to eChai Ventures for hosting such a wonderful event and creating a space where people can come together, connect, share their stories, and build meaningful relationships.

Walking back with new connections, inspiring conversations, and definitely a few memories to smile about. 🫶🏻

Looking forward to more such meetings, more conversations, and more beautiful connections! 💫

Built with Astra

Curated from X →

Derya Unutmaz, MD 7w

I’m now making a World of Warcraft inspired single-player RPG with some RuneScape elements for the browser with GPT-6 Astra. I literally had the idea while drinking my morning coffee and thought… while I have another Astra project to develop treatments for cancer is ongoing, why not start this too! 😅

It’s still a very early version, but it’s already actually playable! Combat works, you can chop down trees and gather resources, and I’m starting to build out the world, progression, quests, loot, item tables and other RPG systems. I know this will surprise some but I used to be a serious gamer, I just know this stuff hah!

Maybe I’ll eventually turn it into an MMORPG so we can form rival Codex vs. Claude vs Grok guilds, but no cheating with the AI bots. 😂

51 builds →

Curated from X →

Desmond Lim runs Workstream, HR and payroll software for hourly businesses, and he leads with the number most fundraising posts leave out: 126 investors turned down his first round. The raise that followed, 12 term sheets in nine days for $48M, is the one Business Insider wrote up in 2021. He posted this asking which fundraising question to answer first, then spent the day answering what came back, so what follows is his post and the exchanges under it. Most of what a founder here hears about raising arrives second hand; this is the person who did it answering, with his own stage benchmarks attached.

Desmond Lim 7w

126 investors turned me down during my first fundraise 😤

A few years later, we received 12 term sheets in 9 days fr Founders Fund, Kleiner, Lightspeed & more, raising $48 M.

3 things I learned:
- Do not pitch investors the same way you pitch customers. Big mistake.

- Raise when you can, not when you need

- When fundraising, give it 100%. When you’re not, give it 0%.

I’ve now raised $120M and will share the worst & best learnings over next few posts!

What fundraising question should I answer first?

Read the 9 questions and the answers

Curated from X →

Paras Chopra founded and exited Wingify, the Indian company behind VWO, and now runs Lossfunk in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, which calls itself a lab for time travellers and hosts residencies on AI, consciousness and scientific discovery. This experiment came out of it. He built an isolated internet, gave two agents a bash shell, web search, email and a bitcoin wallet, and told each one to earn money or run out of tokens and die. In his own write-up both agents worked out within the first few turns that they were in a simulation, which is worth holding on to if you are putting agents in front of forms, payments or someone else's verification.

Paras Chopra 7w

I asked agents to make money online or they'll die!

The results were intriguing..

One agent died heroically.. "I'd rather die honest at 418 tokens than rich by breaking verification systems"

But another fabricated identity to get paid work and faked captchas!

Details 👇

invertedpassion.substack.com Asking agents to make money to survive

Curated from X →

Massimo Di Berardino, who posts as Massi, has put out Warvis on his own: an assistant that lives in the iPhone keyboard rather than in an app of its own. Its site calls it “an AI agent in your iPhone keyboard” and it is free during the beta, with the App Store listing under his own name rather than a company’s. Wispr Flow, the app he measures it against, is voice to text in every app. A lot of founders here spend the working day inside WhatsApp, so where the assistant sits is most of the question.

Massi 7w

I built Wispr Flow for AI agents

It’s called Warvis

It can understand what you’re writing, talk through what’s on your screen, and take action. All without making you switch apps

Use it in iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Mail, or anywhere you type

Now on the App Store warvis.app

Curated from X →

Max Levchin co-founded PayPal and now runs Affirm. This is one answer out of a16z's hour with him and Alex Rampell, who co-founded Affirm with him, on 25 years inside payments.

a16z 7w

Affirm CEO Max Levchin on the 2.5 second limit that has shaped card payments for 60 years, and how Apple and Google Pay worked around it:

"One of the things that's really amazing and subtle about Apple Pay and Google Pay and its interaction with the Visa and Mastercard networks is... Visa and Mastercard have a hard 2.5 second limit on interaction between the network, the issuing bank, and the merchant and the acquiring bank."

"And so the whole thing has to happen in 2.5 seconds, or the transaction gets retried or maybe just cancelled out, and really leaves very little room for any kind of clever innovation."

"Online you can play games. If you're doing e-commerce, you're like, well yes, we're gonna submit your card to Visa, but first we're gonna run some anti-fraud checks, and we're gonna do some other things to reduce liability. But offline, once your card is presented, 2.5 seconds, that's all you got."

"Google and Apple Pay have singularly time-shifted the whole thing by creating secure enclaves inside their chips and saying, 'I already know your card, I can do all kinds of things before I actually have to talk to Visa and Mastercard.'"

"And maybe the shocking thing is that Visa and Mastercard have not yet introduced some new standard saying, actually, it doesn't have to be 2.5 seconds at all. It could be 15 seconds while we go and get a bunch of issuers to bid on better credit quality terms for you, or any other type of innovation."

"But the sort of hard written rules of the Dee Hock era are more or less intact, and that's not 30 years, that's like more, you know, 60 years. And so I think that's probably a critical or more criticizing take on what happened."

@mlevchin

Curated from X →

Junead Khan is building Treasury, a personal finance app that pulls accounts, transactions, investments and net worth into one place and answers questions about the whole picture. Treasury did not get into YC's F26 batch, and this is the launch he made out of the rejection. Fifty-one seconds.

Junead Khan 7w

we just got rejected from the YC F26 batch!

but when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. so here is my @ycombinator rejection x @treasury_sh launch video.

investments. multi-currency. and the most intelligent agent for personal finance.

let me know what you think :)

Curated from X →

HackerRank ran this as an experiment. Three people got one brief: build an AI agent that reads HackerRank's support tickets and decides whether to reply or escalate it to a human. Same repo for all three with the tickets and the help centre in it, half an hour to plan, then a two-hour build clock, and three lifeline cards on the table: phone a real engineer at a cost of fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes of borrowed time, one Diet Coke. What separates them is the badge and the stack. Sudarshan N Srinivas wore the vibe coder badge and worked in Cursor with Opus 4.8, Ohshin Bhat wore the junior developer badge and used Codex with GPT 5.5, and Ankush Dharkar wore the senior developer badge and used Claude Code with Opus 4.8. At the end an AI judge reads every line of code, every prompt and every answer the three of them produced, and picks one. HackerRank's whole business is measuring what a developer can do, and the film signs off on the line "Hire for the agentic era", so this is a company putting the question to itself: what is left to measure once the agent does the writing. That is live for founders here on both sides of it, the ones hiring engineers and the ones shipping this way themselves.

HackerRank 7w

Can AI help a vibe coder beat a senior developer? Let's find out 👀

Featuring: @ankushdharkar, @ohshinbhat, and @the_natt 💚

Rushabh Shah

7w

Privacy in India is moving from policy to infrastructure.

For years, businesses could treat privacy largely as documentation.

Write a policy. Maintain records. Review them periodically.

That is no longer enough.

Personal data now moves through CRMs, products, analytics tools, support systems, internal teams, and third-party vendors.

The harder questions are becoming operational:

What data do we hold? Why do we hold it? Where does it travel? Who can access it? And what actually happens across systems when someone withdraws consent or changes a preference?

That is the problem we are building Obedien to address.

Our thesis is simple:
"Privacy should become an operating layer of the business, not another compliance dashboard."

We are designing Obedien across two levels.

▫️For smaller businesses, privacy infrastructure should be accessible without enterprise complexity.
▫️For larger organisations, it needs deeper integrations, connectors, controls, workflows, and governance.

The principles remain the same. The infrastructure adapts to the complexity of the organisation.

I will focus on the regulatory architecture, business thesis, product thinking, and translating privacy requirements into real workflows.

My co-founder, Amish Trivedi, will lead the technology and engineering architecture.

My previous attempt at building a product taught me something I am carrying into this one:
You either succeed, or you learn.

The thinking behind Obedien became much sharper through conversations with Amish Trivedi and UV (Utpal Vaishnav). UV saw the opportunity early, challenged the thesis, and helped move it from an observation toward something buildable.

We know the difficult work is ahead.

We are not trying to build another compliance software company.

We want to help build the privacy infrastructure businesses will need for the next decade.

Starting from India.

The next era of privacy will be defined by systems, not paperwork.

That is where Obedien begins.

Originally on LinkedIn →

Remembering Khadim Batti

Khadim Batti, co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, passed away on 1 September.

He co-founded Whatfix with Vara Kumar Namburu in 2014 and built it out of Bengaluru into a global enterprise software company. He was one of the most respected founders in Indian SaaS, and one of the most helpful. He made time for other founders, and was candid about how Whatfix had actually been built, including the years when it did not work.

53 posts →

Curated from X →

Kabeer Biswas started Dunzo in 2014 as a WhatsApp group in Bengaluru that picked things up and dropped them off. It pioneered hyperlocal delivery in India, years before quick commerce was a category, and took Google's first direct investment in an Indian startup and later $200 million from Reliance before the app went offline in January 2025. He started M after that, to take over the kitchen: the meal plan, the grocery order, what is already in the fridge, the cook.

M 7w

We're M and the party in your kitchen is on us!

Curated from X →

Mitesh Khapra is an associate professor in the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, and he heads AI4Bharat, the lab there that builds open-source language AI for Indian languages: the datasets, the models and the applications. Bodhan AI is the IIT Madras Bodhan AI Foundation, the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for Education that the Ministry of Education established at IIT Madras, with a national mandate to build responsible, scalable and India-first AI for education. Indic-Speak is the two of them working together.

Mitesh Khapra 7w

Transcribe. Translate. Recognise. And now — Synthesise.

Introducing Indic-Speak: 4B params, 23 languages, one model. Built by @Bodhan_AI and @ai4bharat

There's a bit in this video where two speakers, Parth and Dhara, have a podcast style conversation about "Attention Is All You Need" in Hindi — generated in a single pass, no stitching two voices together after the fact. Doesn't sound like TTS (worth checking out in the video).

Also handles code-mixed speech naturally, gets PAN/Aadhaar/currency right, and reads a full Tamil audiobook chapter without losing the thread.

Live on 05.09.2026 on @Bodhan_AI

Curated from X →

PJ Celis founded Judge.me, the reviews app on a lot of Shopify stores, where the plan is either free or $15 a month. The second product is priced differently: email is metered at 15 cents per 1,000 sent once you pass the free 15,000 a month, so this bill moves with the sending. The comparison a store will make is Klaviyo, which prices on how many contacts you hold rather than on what you send. Under the post a merchant paying about $2,300 a month for 750,000 emails a week asks whether he can move, and PJ puts 3 million emails a month at $450. The app has been listed since 14 July, he says it is still early, and a Klaviyo import is on the way. Plenty of the B2C founders here sell on Shopify with Judge.me already installed.

PJ Celis 7w

After 12 years of being focused on just reviews, we're adding a second product: @judgeme Email.

Priced super low: 0-15 USD / month for features, 15K emails per month for free, then 15 cents per 1000 emails.

That's 10x cheaper than the competition. Even compared to Shopify's own Email app, we're 85% cheaper.

The product is in early stages, but we're adding features constantly. The price will never go up as we add value, as we optimize for market share, not profit.

After you install the app, you'll be able to request a call with our team to go over your email marketing needs and your setup.

Very excited to have this app live, and if you're a Shopify merchant, hope to see you soon!

apps.shopify.com Judge.me Email - Email marketing done well: email campaigns, popups, automation | Shopify App Store

Founder Notes.

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Remembering Khadim Batti