Akash Ramachandran

mle @meta | @CarnegieMellon | the drumming, writing tech brother

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

I write to learn. About the world and myself

Covering
- AI
- travel,
- an immigrant’s perspective,
- how I see my art (Tabla playing)
- flow
- running
- breathwork and more

Now:
https://t.co/brW9HmztIi
Previously
https://t.co/AULS7pgKVK

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

framed wall-hanging gifts for your loved ones

2025: iris scans / night sky on special date
2026: memory graph

[supermemory @supermemory]

Your memory graph is your AI's portrait of you.

flex it 👇

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

when losing 35kilos is just a side quest on the path to becoming Whatsapp’s head, curious to see what else happens on this inspirational trajectory

[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.

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

@illscience *consume such vast changes quickly

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

Agree with most of this except:

> now they build all of them and let users decide

while you can experiment more and ship, the limit becomes the human brain’s (customer’s) ability to consume such vast changes.

specially for changes visible to the customer (like social media interfaces etc).

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

its not that he didn’t wrestle with it himself. but to have persisted long enough on that path, despite the daily noise onslaught, without taking eyes off the prize is rare

respect.

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

youtube bubbled up this @sourceryy podcast where @deedydas mentions aspirational traits in the person he admires the most: Glean founder @jainarvind

https://t.co/SiLEbnHL7s

felt like a blast of fresh-air to hear stories of such a strong internal locus of control.

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

zen focus on the 1 thing that matters.

deedy read enough startup info on the internet to have vIeWs and pestered him with questions.

arvind: you have a lotta questions. pretty good questions. but they’re not the right questions.

only 1 question matters: do customers love us. just work on that.

3/3

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

love all the ways “show don’t tell” is manifesting itself with ai

[David Pan @davep]

One thing about Cursor that's been genuinely surprising is how minimal the internal documentation is. In the pre-AI world this would've led to chaos. But things move so fast now that most documentation would have a half-life of only a few weeks. The company has embraced on-demand AI research directly from the sources of truth: code, databases, meeting transcripts. It really feels like the future.

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

@Alfred_Lin what about the bold part ?
right + contrarian + bold > right + contrarian + not bold

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

want this spa experience

[Midjourney @midjourney]

Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

@nityasnotes read hamming’s you and your research this weekend where he says similar things

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

@nityasnotes lol Carnegie’s famous “my heart is in the work” saying is CMU’s motto
gets taken too far no doubt

[gabriel @gabriel1]

coding interfaces are 100B+ market cap already (excluding codex and claude code who are the largest)

knowledge work interfaces will be even bigger market (coding is a subcategory of knowledge work)

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

or perhaps there’s a window of time before this newly captured taste becomes common. And that time delta is where you meaningfully raise the floor ?

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

this blog by Taste Labs ceo @thaiscbranco_ semi-formalized taste in a way i had not considered before.

https://t.co/ItAEQcitMf

[Thais Castello Branco @thaiscbranco_]

We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs.

Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.

And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners

AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design.

There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer:

- We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments.
- We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs.

We want a future where AI feels right.

If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

[my take] net net a good read on a framework for subjective taste quantification. though unsure whether “raising the floor” of design taste requires proprietary datasets that Frontier Labs can’t access and absorb into their models in the future.

[Akash Ramachandran @akashramzz]

[my take] this defeats the point of taste right ? it needs to be hard to develop it . else it’s common.

“ Millions (no, billions) of people will create and most won’t be experts or have the patience to develop taste, so we need to make it easier for them to create great things”