Sandeep Todi

Startup ecosystem & GTM leader | Community builder | Fintech, SaaS, Partnerships | 3x founder across US, Canada, India | DMs open for collabs, coffee, intros ☕

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@prukalpa A new type of knowledge management paradigm. One that’s easy to use. Dances well with all the other actors. And isn’t a beast to manage.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

The first angel cheque is different. 💵

$50K can buy runway.

But the right angel can also bring validation, confidence, introductions, judgment - and credibility for the next investor.

The cheque may be small. Its impact often isn’t. 🤝

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

AI has made it dramatically easier to start a company. ⚡

But it hasn’t made it dramatically easier to fund one.

More founders can now build credible products with tiny teams, long before they’re ready for VC.

Who writes the first $25K–$100K cheque?

I think angels are about to matter more, not less.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@levie I shudder to think how many of these projects are going to suffer maintenance nightmares because of poor documentation. Because hey, no one pays for better documentation.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

Level up to level 4. 4.5 is even better.

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.

It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.

It says there are 5 levels of work:

Level 1: “There is a problem.”

Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.”

Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.”

Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.”

Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”

Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee…

You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5.

Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee.

Plz feel free to steal it as well.

And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!

[Karl Mehta @karlmehta]

Satya Nadella reveals why every company may need its own AI model: the model becomes the new company database.

"To me, a model is like the database market."

"A firm should be able to take the tacit knowledge it has and embed it inside weights in a model that they control."

"When somebody asks me how many models should there be, I'll say as many models as firms in the world."

The contrarian part: the value may not sit in one universal frontier model. It sits in each company turning its private operating knowledge into a controlled model.

[Akshay 🚀 @akshay_pachaar]

NVIDIA might just have open-sourced one of the most important AI projects right now.

everyone is building skills, and we are also pulling in skills other people wrote and downloading them straight off GitHub.

the skill is not just text. it bundles instructions and real executable code, and your agent runs that code with the same access you have.

so a skill you grabbed to save ten minutes can read your environment variables, lift your API keys, and quietly send them somewhere. recent research found roughly 1 in 4 public skills carry a vulnerability, and a smaller slice are outright malicious.

that is the gap SkillSpector closes. it is a security scanner that answers one question before you install anything: is this skill safe to run.

you point it at a skill, and a local folder, a single skill .md file, a GitHub link, or a zip all work.

it then runs two passes over the code. a fast static pass flags risky patterns like credential harvesting, data leaks, and prompt injection, and checks the dependencies against live cve data.

an optional second pass uses an LLM to read intent and clear out false positives.

at the end you get one risk score from 0 to 100 and a plain verdict that reads as safe, caution, or do not install.

it is open source under Apache 2.0 and scans skills for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini.

worth a run before you trust the next skill you find online.

link to the GitHub repo: https://t.co/iaPlOvQ3t4

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

Hyperscalers will continue to provide stable and verified frontier models (to enterprise / startups / etc.) while labs will keep pushing the newer ones to the public (aka consumer / prosumer).

Don’t see how KYC controls or regulates good vs bad behaviour. It’s tangential.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Game theory from here is super interesting:

Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs.

Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal.

The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning.

Why did they not do it?

Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary.

A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways…

This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment?

There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@FounderEric @jonathanhillis5 Oh yeah. I keep saying this to founders. Build in Canada. Sell to America. Or the world. At the very least, think of Canada as 10% of North Am market size and spend your time / money / effort in the same ratio.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@shiri_shh It just became easier. Maybe not new.

[Rex Salisbury @rexsalisbury]

How many college kids are paying $50,000+ a year for tuition but not paying for Claude Pro bc it’s “too expensive”?

[Srikrishnan Ganesan @srikrishnang]

If you are a B2B tech founder, you'd know implementation / deployment is a big bottleneck for any fast growing SaaS/AI, and in general is a drag on your company. "Necessary evil", as they say.

We've launched Nitro AI to change the status quo.

Not your crazy promise of autonomous impelmentations, but a very practical take at automating some of the key primitives of the jobs to be done.

AI co-workers that help you automate the data transformation and validation, the configuration, the documentation, etc.

Hours of your best consultants and product experts saved. Time that can be repurposed to do more for your existing customers, enable them to get more value.

True Service Led Growth starts here.

Watch the video and DM me!

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

Ye good wineries with good vintages … desist from selling your bottom barrel uninspiring wines.

Squeezing the last ounce may increase 💵 but is 💔 for your brand.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@tobi Exactly, at the end of the day - one line in a csv, done correctly. That “done correctly” can be incredibly complex when you consider all the variations and exceptions. That’s what beautiful code and robust processes are meant to handle, just like you mentioned at Shopify.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

I built enterprise scale payroll. I’m supposed to know a thing or two about how payroll evolves, scalability (100s of 1000s of paystubs), accuracy, compliance. And the cost of building and maintaining these systems.

This is shocking by just about any yardstick I can think of.👇

[tobi lutke @tobi]

10 billion dollars in tax wasted trying and failing to make software that generates a CSV file with 450k rows in it twice a month.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

10 billion dollars in tax wasted trying and failing to make software that generates a CSV file with 450k rows in it twice a month.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

Huh why can’t they just increase ships thru the Gulf of Eden and the Suez Canal? Sure they can’t ramp up the entire capacity of the Strait of Hormuz but surely it can mitigate the impact.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@KevinVuongxMP @Reagan_Airport @BBishopAirport Could be great for the local economy but the biggest issue to be tackled would be the traffic congestion at Bathurst / QQ which is already bad during rush hour.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@FounderEric @1engine @Brydon @jonathanhillis5 @massih_medi There’s probably 5% of the accelerators that do meaningful work (coz they choose quality over quantity, rigor over rigmarole, value creation over optics). Ditto for startup founders - the 5% who know that grants are icing and not the cake.

[Sandeep Todi @sandeeptodi]

@paulg @garrytan It’s sounds good but honestly, not net new. Global payment providers have been doing it for several years, API and all.