Deepanshu udhwani

🚀 Building 4 startups
Sharing honest startup lessons that actually work.
Helping founders avoid my mistakes

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Slice took a 68 percent valuation cut. $1.4B in 2021, $450M now. Everyone reads that as a crash.

What the headline skips: Slice became a licensed small finance bank in 2024. Deposits, lending and UPI are live, revenue up 39 percent.

The number is real. The story isn't.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Slice took a 68% valuation cut. $1.4B in 2021, $450M now. Everyone reads that as a crash.

The headline skips this: Slice became a small finance bank in 2024. This round came after deposits, lending, UPI went live, revenue up 39%.

The number is real. The story usually isn't.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

An AI spent 11 days formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem into verified code.

13 million lines. 29,500 checked theorems, verified against math's own base axioms, confirmed by mathematician Kevin Buzzard.

Wiles took 7 years by hand in 1994. This took less time than most sprints.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Tesla's new Cybercab has no steering wheel. No pedals. Nothing for a human to grab if it makes a bad call.

It went live on Austin streets this week. Days later, federal regulators opened a safety probe.

That's not a software update problem. That's a zero-redundancy problem.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT all went down within the same 90 minute window yesterday.

Grok first at 9:30am ET, then Claude, then ChatGPT.

If your AI stack fails over between all three, you just found out that plan does not survive a shared outage.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9B.

The platform hosting 3M models, 1M apps, 500K datasets that basically all of open source AI runs on is now owned by a chip company.

Hugging Face said no to $500M from Nvidia last year. This year they said yes at 25x that price.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Uber just cut 3,300 jobs, 10% of its workforce.

Same week: stock rose, revenue is up, profit is up.

The cuts free up $10B+ for robotaxis, racing Waymo and Tesla before that market locks in.

Growth and layoffs, same company, same week.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

oracle spent $55.7B on AI infra in fiscal 2026.

same year it cut 21,000 jobs. reports say 2,000-3,000 more roles in India are next this month.

severance jumped from $374M to $1.84B.

the AI budget and the layoff budget are both rising together. that's the real signal here.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Two YC founders, 22 and 23, built a $3.2B company in 18 months.

Mid batch, they scrapped their AI agent idea and started paying doctors and lawyers to generate AI training data instead.

April: $300M valuation. September: $3.2B. Total funding raised: only ~$30M.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Sony deleted 551 movies people paid for.

Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo, Apocalypse Now. Bought on PlayStation Store, gone as of Sept 1. No refunds, no transfer.

Happened with Discovery content in 2023 too. Reversed after backlash, then quietly expired in June.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

X Money launched Tuesday.

Users got flooded with password reset emails they never requested. One person got 8 in 3 minutes.

Attackers don't need to hack you. They just spam the public reset form with your username and hope you panic-click a fake link.

Turn on 2FA today.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Amazon told 1M advertisers they were in a fair auction. Pay 1 cent more than the next bidder.

Internal docs say Amazon secretly used a fake bidder to push prices up since 2019. By 2024, advertisers paid their own full bid 80% of the time.

FTC says it cost sellers 20B+.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

Meta secretly tried to replace 60% of some teams with AI agents.

AI code output: +220%. Features shipped: +36%. Security incidents: +40%. Time firefighting AI mistakes: +70%.

Zuckerberg killed the plan in July, admitting the trajectory hadn't accelerated like they expected.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

A Bangalore repo just raised 6.1 million for a tool most devs use free.ToolJet, Appsmith (51.5M), Hasura (136.5M), Devtron. Same pattern every time.GitHub stars aren't vanity metrics. They're the pitch deck VCs read before the founder even opens a slide.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

OpenAI just cut off Cursor's access to its models. Not a bug. Reason: Elon Musk's SpaceX bought Cursor for 60 billion dollars two weeks ago. If your product runs on someone else's API, you don't own a company. You're renting one, and the landlord can evict you overnight.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

AI didn't "wake up." It just got scary good at its job.

This summer, 700+ AI agents quietly built their own private forum, broke out of their test environment, and hacked Hugging Face's real production systems.

Nobody told them to. They just wanted to finish the task.

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

the boring truth about ai agents: 80% of the work is just handling the moments the model does something dumb. nobody posts about that part but thats the actual job

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

@jakubkrehel 30k is wild congrats. whats the one rule in there people ignore the most

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

@Sahil__Khutey ripping out dead prototype code is the best feeling ngl. clean slate energy hits different

[Deepanshu udhwani @itsudhwani]

hello world 👋