Smile Bhateja

Cofounder Dr.Water | IRONMAN | Tweets are notes to self

[Smile Bhateja @SmileBhateja]

A brand is one simple thing, trust. Your customers trust you.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

100%

[Smile Bhateja @SmileBhateja]

@shobhitic They failed to do the main thing: entertain.

Jokes, and abuses.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

You think you're good at thinking until you write

[Smile Bhateja @SmileBhateja]

@dineshpaii The store has aura

[Naval @naval]

Great products are not so much invented as discovered.

[Figma @figma]

FIGMA MOTION IS HERE
FIGMA MOTION IS HERE
FIGMA MOTION IS HERE

Live from Config 2026

[Smile Bhateja @SmileBhateja]

Are we saying these aren’t linked? Just speculating

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I don't know if it's obvious information or not but if you talk to random people in San Francisco the general thing they say is that software is commoditized cause so easy to make anything with AI fast (like how I cancelled all my SaaS subscriptions and just vibe coded a replacement for free) and that everyone smart is getting into hardware cause it's still difficult to enter, kinda related to the Midjourney Medical thing too

[Diana @sdianahu]

1/ fast AI inference is about to replay the history lesson from search engines on why low latency is so important

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The next generation of young people who change the world will almost certainly be the people who are most adept at making long-running multi-stage multi-team agent tasks work extremely well, and at high volume and across every part of their personal and work lives.

[jack @jackbutcher]

You win by being the best answer to one question.

[Naval @naval]

The product is the mission.

[Smile Bhateja @SmileBhateja]

@nivi beat @FoundersPodcast

[rohan @lets_dig_deeper]

indian vc's need more young partners 25-30 years

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

[Naval @naval]

A man expresses love through duty.

[Nayrhit B @NayrhitB]

Two months after closing our $9M round, I told our investors I was going to take our revenue to $0.

On paper, we were every VC's dream - growing 40% MoM, hit $1M ARR in <9 months, new customers signing every week.

Underneath, we were a services agency held together by humans. Gross margins 40-50%, customers quietly churning, early-stage SaaS/ecomm not finding enough value to stick.

I'd seen this movie as a VC. So in the first board meeting, I told our new investors we were pausing all GTM & letting revenue go to zero for 4-5 months.

Imagine writing a $9M check & being told the company is going into a 4-month coma.

Here's what those 4 months looked like:

Month-1: Found the high retention pockets of customers & sharpened GTM for them. Killed the GTM motions attracting churny customers.

Month-2: Removed humans from the content pipeline. Gross margins jumped from 40% → 90%+.

Month-3: Shifted the promise from "we'll bring you traffic" → "we'll bring you leads." Focused on MQLs over impressions.

Month-4: Refreshed Stripe every day & watched revenue tank. Painful.
And boom! Relaunched in January.

12 months since money wired, we're now 4x the ARR our investors came in at - despite a 4-month hiatus.

If we'd kept pressing the old business, we'd have capped at $100-200M ARR with 40% GMs. While telling ourselves we had a generational business.

P.S. The hardest founder decision isn't picking what to do. It's picking what NOT to do, even when there's a lot of instant gratification in that path.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

In a recent batch talk, YC General Partner @t_blom broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company.

He walks through how to create recursive, self-improving AI loops, and why founders who get this right will run companies that improve while they sleep.

00:00 — Companies Are Roman Legions
00:54 — Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model
01:55 — Extract the Domain Knowledge
02:24 — The Recursive Self-Improving Loop
04:12 — The Holy Shit Moment at YC
05:50 — Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops
06:29 — Burn Tokens, Not Headcount
07:23 — Middle Management Is Over
08:05 — Make Everything Legible to AI
09:40 — Regenerating the YC User Manual
11:19 — Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable
12:18 — Where Humans Still Matter

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

All vibecoders eventually realize that the difficulty was never in building the product; rather it was in acquiring users.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

I’ve had very good results running autoresearch with local qwen 3.6 26b model as long as I had a simple vibed pi “advisor” extension that allowed it to periodically ask GPT 5.5 for ideas. I think this direction has a lot of merit.