Harsh Gupta

Swipe and Apply with ApplyBee AI..
Went to @SRCCofficial , Won couple of olympiads and currently building in Tech @fdotinc Fellow

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

I am launching Applybee AI after months of building in stealth.

Applying for jobs today feels broken.

Same forms.Rewrite resumes.
Multiple portals.
Most of the time… no response.

Meanwhile recruiters already use automation to filter candidates.

Unfair right??

[Kautuk | Conscious Engines @Kautukkundan]

Wanted to do this since a very long time

Introducing - Bangalore Paper Club
A series of offline research gatherings, under The Research Room India.

We're hosting the first edition this Thursday at Araku Indiranagar. Come over! and bring people with you.
---

Obviously inspired by the YC Paper club, the idea is to meet researchers in real life, present papers, discuss interesting problem statements and work together on some of them. We'll be doing presentations, recording them and putting them on YouTube.

I started "The Research Room India" community a while ago and it hit 500+ members recently. It's nice to see people interacting with each other over deep tech, taking feedback and also providing commentary to others. I met some really smart people through that, some of them joined my team at Conscious Engines as well.

It was natural that we had to take the next step which is to bring such people together offline.

Research as a topic is usually perceived as boring, too technical or nerdy. It may not be fully true.
The idea is to add a little bit of glamour to research so atleast more people pick it up and find it interesting, hosting it Araku, one of the hottest venues in Bangalore is a step towards that direction haha.

Link to the Luma event in the comment

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@AnthropicAI Lesgoooooooo

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

[Etched @Etched]

We're coming out of stealth.

We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.

Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.

Our first racks ship this summer.

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@vitaliidodonov Pdf

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school.

1. Starting early is the single biggest advantage you have. If you save $10,000 at age 22, never add another penny, and earn 10% a year, you have $600,000 by retirement. wait until 32 to start, and the same money only grows to $232,000. The decade you lose at the beginning costs you more than any decade later because compounding does its heaviest lifting at the end.

2. The return rate matters even more than most people grasp. That same $10,000 at 22 earning 10% becomes $600,000. At 15% it becomes over 4 million. At 20%, the rate Warren Buffett has achieved, it becomes 25 million. Einstein called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. Ackman's lecture is essentially a demonstration of why.

3. Avoiding losses matters as much as chasing returns. if you reach for a 20% return but lose half your money every 12 years from bad decisions or a rough patch, your 25 million collapses to 1.8 million. Buffett's rule one is never lose money. Rule two is never forget rule one. the math of recovery is brutal, so protecting the downside is not caution, it is strategy.

4. Debt is safer, but the upside is capped. Equity is riskier, but the upside is unlimited. In the lemonade stand example, the lender who put up $250 earns a steady 10% and gets paid back first if the business fails. the equity investor who put up $500 earns over 100% if it succeeds but gets wiped out if it fails. The equity holder earns more precisely because they took the risk the lender refused.

5. The risk that matters is permanent loss, not price movement. most people think risk is the stock price bouncing up and down every day. Ackman says ignore that. the real risk is whether you will permanently lose your money. Short-term volatility is noise. the question that matters is whether you get your capital back with a return over the long run.

6. Avoid startups and complicated businesses. You do not need 100% a year to build a fortune. you need 10 to 15% over a long period. so skip the lemonade stands and unknown ventures. Invest in public companies that are established, liquid, and have to clear real hurdles before going public. If you cannot understand how a business makes money, avoid it no matter how good its track record. Ackman cites Enron, a business almost nobody actually understood.

7. Invest in a business you could own forever. if the stock market closed for 10 years, you should not be unhappy holding it. Coca-Cola is his example. easy to understand, sells a syrup and earns a profit on every drink, the population keeps growing, and it is nearly impossible to disrupt with new technology. McDonald's is another. People have to eat, the food is cheap, and they keep growing. find a business you would be comfortable holding through anything.

8. You want products people are loyal to and will pay a premium for. People buy generic flour and sugar without caring about the brand. but they want the Hershey bar, the Cadbury bar, the see's candy specifically. you do not want to sell a commodity that anyone can sell cheaper. You want something unique that customers refuse to substitute even at a 20% discount.

9. Low debt is a safety feature. In the lemonade stand example, $250 of debt was manageable. But if it had been $1,000 and the business hit a rough patch, it could have gone under and wiped out the shareholders. Find companies with little debt or so much profit relative to their interest payments that a bad year cannot sink them.

10. Barriers to entry protect your returns. You want a business that is hard for someone to compete with tomorrow. Coca-Cola's market presence is so strong that you expect to get a Coke at any restaurant. Pepsi has coexisted with it for decades, but neither can put the other out of business. If a competitor can show up next year with a better version and steal the customers, the business is not worth owning long term.

11. The best businesses are immune to outside factors you cannot control. Coca-Cola has survived 120 years through world wars, nuclear weapons, and every kind of crisis, and each year it makes slightly more money. You want companies that do not depend on commodity prices, interest rates, or currency moves. A business that keeps earning regardless of what is happening in the world is the kind you hold forever.

12. Low capital intensity is one of the most underrated qualities. The worst businesses require massive reinvestment to grow. The auto industry has to build enormous factories and buy machine tools before selling a single car, and those tools wear out. GM's stock barely moved over 40 to 50 years for exactly this reason. Coca-Cola, by contrast, sells a formula and collects a royalty. American Express takes a few percent of every dollar spent on its card. a business that earns a royalty on other people's capital is one of the best things you can own.

13. Pay down debt and build a cushion before you invest. If you have high-interest credit card debt, paying it off is a guaranteed return equal to the interest rate. same logic, to a lesser degree, with student loans at 6 or 7%. and you want 6 to 12 months of expenses in the bank so that losing your job tomorrow does not force you to sell. You can only handle market volatility if you do not need the money.

14. Be a buyer when everyone is selling and a seller when everyone is buying. The natural human tendency is the opposite, a lemming-like instinct to sell in a crash and buy in a bubble. people sold into the 1987 crash when they should have been buying. The only way to resist this is to be financially secure enough that the money at risk does not affect your life, so you can withstand the swings without panicking.

15. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Ben Graham's idea, which Ackman repeats. short-term prices reflect the whims and emotions of investors. long term, prices reflect the actual value of the underlying businesses. If you buy good businesses at reasonable prices and hold them while they grow, you make money over time as long as you are never forced to sell at the wrong moment.

16. A stock is just a bond where you do not know the coupon. Flip a price-to-earnings ratio over, and you get an earnings yield. A stock at 10 times earnings is a 10% earnings yield, which you can compare directly to a 3% treasury. the difference is the bond's coupon is fixed and the stock's coupon, its earnings, moves up and down. Ackman wants an earnings yield higher than a treasury that will also grow over time, so he does not need to be right about explosive growth to earn a good return.

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

Imagine Vibe coding w this

[AI at Meta @AIatMeta]

We’re sharing the next major milestone in our non-invasive brain-to-text decoder research: Brain2Qwerty v2.

Building on v1, which was published today in @Nature, Brain2Qwerty v2 is the highest-performing end-to-end pipeline capable of real-time sentence decoding from raw brain signals. It advances beyond character-level performance to decoding words and semantics, enabling accuracy for overall communication.

We believe this research has the potential to make a real difference for the millions of people who suffer from brain lesions or disorders that prevent them from communicating.

🧵👇

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@LinkedInLunat1c There’s something called “payment gateway fee”. Lol

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

There’s something called “payment gateway fee”. Lol

[LinkedIn Lunatics @LinkedInLunat1c]

Does this count?

[Deedy @deedydas]

WhatsApp may be the statistically best app we've ever made.

It's a product manager's dream with its unparalleled addictiveness (DAU / MAU) of 87% and stickiness (M1 retention) of 86%, both #1 in the world while having the #1 most monthly active users for any non preinstalled app of 2.7B users.

Here are the top 25 most used apps in the world by MAU on both these metrics. Some surprising observations:
— There are now 15 1B+ user apps in the world, 8 by Google, 4 by Meta.
— The 3 that aren't are TikTok, Telegram (!) and ChatGPT
— Telegram has more users than Spotify, Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, Snap!
— ChatGPT's one month retention is #5 after WA, Instagram, Chrome and Youtube. 2yrs ago, it was been #20 by M1 retention
— Shopee, a shopping app in southeast Asia, is huge and retains users better than Amazon!

Useful way to break down consumer businesses especially within certain categories (X vs Reddit vs Threads is a good one). It's shocking how few new apps have been able to break through in the past 10yrs.

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

Committed 🦾
Will come back to this post

[Nathan @arcane_bloom]

One day I will take a photo of golden gate myself using my phone

I give it one or two year max

Let's commit to it 💪
We got this man

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@arcane_bloom My fav guy @HarryStebbings and goated VC podcast 20vc

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

Deserved

[Chanhee @hiddnest]

fuck you

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@niketrajdwivedi @NishHairyourway does it and regrets

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@hijunedkhatri What’s the point of having his number if you can’t get him to chat. Just did my part 🥲

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@chandrarsrikant @Goenka_Tushar1 I trust you and @moneycontrolcom for so many reasons

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

This man is just insane

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

It’s been a minute.

2015–2018
- Exited FreeCharge. Spent time learning and investing.
- Pondered about: Why can't trust be rewarded? Started with $1M of personal capital.
- Launched CRED to reward people for paying credit card bills on time.

2019–2025
- Built a system run by a team that values ownership, judgment, and craft.
- Grew from 0 to 17M members by aligning incentives with behaviour.
- Built several products during COVID lockdowns.
- Raised $900M+ from global investors. Did 4 ESOP buybacks.
- Made Indiranagar and IPL ads slightly more interesting.
- Received a full stack of regulatory licences.
- Lost 35 kilos.
- Scaled from 0 to ~$325M ( ~₹3,200 crore) in annual revenue across payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards.
2026
- First profitable quarter (yet occasionally asked what our business model is)
- Raised another $900M from Meta in primary and secondary capital.
- Announcing our 5th ESOP buyback.

Today

CRED is ready for its next phase. I am stepping back and @miten steps in as interim CEO, partnered with an incredibly talented team. He has been heading strategy and finance and suffering me since 2020. I’m stepping away from the operating role and will continue as a shareholder. My commitment doesn’t change. Just the role.

Extremely grateful to our members, partners, regulators, and investors who made this possible. And to our board, Shailendra, Micky, Saurabh for their extraordinary conviction.

Team CRED, I’ll still expect you to be a 10x version of yourselves.

As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally.

Meta comes in as a minority investor in CRED. No access to member data.

While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey. Will, thank you for scaling something the world relies on quietly, and for making this transition smooth.

Onwards.

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

It’s been a minute.

2015–2018
- Exited FreeCharge. Spent time learning and investing.
- Pondered about: Why can't trust be rewarded? Started with $1M of personal capital.
- Launched CRED to reward people for paying credit card bills on time.

2019–2025
- Built a system run by a team that values ownership, judgment, and craft.
- Grew from 0 to 17M members by aligning incentives with behaviour.
- Built several products during COVID lockdowns.
- Raised $900M+ from global investors. Did 4 ESOP buybacks.
- Made Indiranagar and IPL ads slightly more interesting.
- Received a full stack of regulatory licences.
- Lost 35 kilos.
- Scaled from 0 to ~$325M ( ~₹3,200 crore) in annual revenue across payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards.
2026
- First profitable quarter (yet occasionally asked what our business model is)
- Raised another $900M from Meta in primary and secondary capital.
- Announcing our 5th ESOP buyback.

Today

CRED is ready for its next phase. I am stepping back and @miten steps in as interim CEO, partnered with an incredibly talented team. He has been heading strategy and finance and suffering me since 2020. I’m stepping away from the operating role and will continue as a shareholder. My commitment doesn’t change. Just the role.

Extremely grateful to our members, partners, regulators, and investors who made this possible. And to our board, Shailendra, Micky, Saurabh for their extraordinary conviction.

Team CRED, I’ll still expect you to be a 10x version of yourselves.

As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally.

Meta comes in as a minority investor in CRED. No access to member data.

While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey. Will, thank you for scaling something the world relies on quietly, and for making this transition smooth.

Onwards.

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@anieasyy Yeah its composio and OpenAI

[Harsh Gupta @PMFwithharsh]

@StackDhruv This has to be sexiest location I am at in Indiranagar. Shifted 3 days ago. Rent is lesser. There’s is a Room vacant. I can check for you with owner