Shreyas Kulkarni

1 in 2 local biz fail in first 5 years. We're using AI to change that. Sharing our journey of empowering local businesses with AI agents, one store at a time.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@Khushiimehtaa5 I have, I met with a tier 1 vc and hired my founding GTM lead, thanks to @boardyai

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

We are building on top of pi and credit goes to @openclaw for getting this on my radar.

[Lucas Meijer @lucasmeijer]

crazy how many products are built ontop of pi. why the pi libraries and not any of the other ones? is it because typescript? api design? composability? right place right time? luck? must be a lesson here.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@ItsRoboki thank you @ItsRoboki

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

I left Google a little while ago. It took me longer to leave it in my head. This post is overdue because I did not know how to summarize what Google gave me. It was not a title, a project, or a name on my résumé.

Google changed my sense of what is possible.

It taught me that scale is not just about reaching more people. It is about solving a problem so deeply that it can work for people you may never meet.

It also taught me that the most ambitious ideas often seem obvious only after someone builds them.

But at some point, you have to bet your life on what you believe.
Most of us wait for certainty. But a calling does not arrive with proof.

It is a problem you cannot stop thinking about. A future you feel compelled to build, even before you know exactly how.

For me, that problem is local commerce.

I started building websites for local businesses when I was 16. After years of building at Google, I am returning to where I began, only now with a much bigger ambition.

That ambition became Ocally. (More on that soon)

For now, a late goodbye to Google, and heartfelt gratitude to the colleagues, managers, mentors, and friends who shaped how I think and who I am today.

Hello, Ocally.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@shaunbjohnson Congratulations, we should talk!

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@sharpeye_wnl Thanks @sharpeye_wnl Glad to have you along in the journey !!

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

Enterprise sales are more about who’s selling than what’s being sold.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The danger of selling to big companies, if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment. But it's not. They love having meetings! It's almost all they do.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The danger of selling to big companies, if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment. But it's not. They love having meetings! It's almost all they do.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@sharpeye_wnl @Menace_thakur Solid month 1 effort!
It’s been amazing seeing you and @Menace_thakur !grow into the role and navigate all the messiness and ambiguity!
Onwards 🚀

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

We are building store level revenue optimization systems for local retail chains.
Wedge : Pet retail chains with 10+ stores, 50M+ annual gross revenue.
Product promise : per store revenue attributable playbooks for customer acquisition, retention and monetisation.
Team : ex Google, Walmart with decade+ experience building for local.
Current state : MVP, design partners committed, onboarding in progress.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

Damn, one short.

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

The next trillion-dollar founder has 12 followers on X rn.

I will find you & fund you!

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

Pivoting because you are not able to sell
to a specific set of customers no matter how good / right your idea was is still a valid reason to pivot.

[vas @vasuman]

The problem with a lot of founders is they pivot ideas when they don’t find customers

But the reason they didn’t find customers is very rarely about the idea

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

I hope it’s just for engagement and you don’t really mean this.
Why are you thanking an accelerator for rejecting you?

[Mat Sherman @Mat_Sherman]

Thank god YC rejected me 11 times so I would have the fire in my belly long enough to stumble upon our current model, which will help millions of founders network into tech and raise their first dollars without destroying their cap table on day one. Thank you YC 🙏

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

The best bets not mainstream, but are in mainstreet. It’s boring, not sexy. We are building it.

[Brett Calhoun @brettcalhounn]

The best bets aren't sexy or mainstream. Where is no one else building?

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

Dude buys a Bentley in Bali and wants people to believe he is a good investor.

[Phantom Stays @PhantomStays]

Fools who say “bali is full of brokies” are purely retarded

Met this dude in the sauna who just went 26x on an angel AI investment. Nicest guy, quiet, humble. Invited me to an event, I returned the favor the next night. Only told me a week later he bought a Bentley after the co went public.

Now he has an incubator for AI/tech startups - currently working on transforming the Australian mining industry with remotely operated drones instead of heli teams. in deep talks abt spinning up a fund together.

But yeah ok, bali is full of posers right?

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

OpenAI just made every single YC company consider being their token resellers.
And give up equity while doing so!!

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

What’s being described here is solution validation, not product-market fit.

Product-market fit is when your version of the solution is adopted by a meaningful part of the market and demand starts pulling the product forward.

Customers taking a risk on you because the pain is severe is an early signal. But PMF is when that behavior becomes repeatable at scale across the market.

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

Real product-market fit is customers absorbing risk to use you because the pain is that bad. “We'd need to see more customers first” means you don't have it.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

The moat around raw model intelligence is collapsing faster than most frontier labs expected.

Open source is already “good enough” for a massive percentage of inference, which means intelligence alone cannot justify slower UX or materially higher costs forever.

The real battle is shifting toward speed, distribution, workflow integration, and owning the interface layer around the model.

Frontier reasoning will still matter for the hardest tasks. But for most tokens, “fast + cheap + good enough” is going to win.

[Sam Altman @sama]

i get some anxiety not using the smartest-available model/settings.

but sometimes i dont mind if it's really slow.

i wonder if we should focus more on a price/speed tradeoff relative to a price/intelligence tradeoff.

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

While it seems right in an idealistic setting, everyone knows that true leadership is a balance between the two.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Accurate

[Shreyas Kulkarni @fromshreyas]

@Jason I’m in