Harsha

CTO @ | Research:

[Harsha @khurdula]

https://t.co/F0ALtMEmiJ

[Harsha @khurdula]

underrated

[Michael Tschannen @mtschannen]

For the past years my research focus was on unifying models and training paradigms across modalities. Today I'm excited that we're releasing our latest model aligned with this theme:

Gemma 4 12B, a dense encoder-free model which processes raw text, image, and audio inputs!

1/

[Yoeven @yoeven]

Had to call a friend @khurdula midway to answer some of the questions

[Harsha @khurdula]

@ivanleomk Bay is Bae!

[immad @immad]

You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.

Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.

I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.

The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I get that business insurance is similar Nobel level type of pursuit as ground breaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained.

I don’t think the disagreement is whether hard problems require intensity.

The disagreement is whether intensity has to become a permanent operating model, and whether working seven days a week is the thing that compounds.

My argument is that for most startups, the real compounding advantage is not raw hours. It is clearer thinking, better judgment, learning, and a team that can sustain high-quality work for a long time. You can always spend a lot of time working, but the PMF might never arrive.

There are moments where extraordinary effort is necessary. Launches, incidents, existential deadlines, customer commitments. Those moments matter, and great teams rise to them.

But if the company requires heroics every day of the eek, that usually points to a system problem. It means the operating model depends on burning reserve capacity instead of building it. Company that is constantly on fire is company that is not operating well.

Whenever you put something out there, people will argue and people can argue the way I run Linear. The reason I comment on these things to offer some counter point.

There is a growing cliché in startup culture where founders and startups feel the need to perform intensity publicly. How hard they work, how little they sleep, how many tokens they spend, how busy they are, how much personal sacrifice they make.

You almost never see this from the most successful companies or people. Even if they work that way, they usually don’t make it the story, because they have more important things to talk about, like the product, the customers, the insight, the strategy, the quality of the work.

That’s my issue with the narrative and why I think startups shouldn't blindly follow it. Not that is bad to work hard but grindmaxxing narrative can become the greater goal and become counterproductive. The performative intensity becomes the thing, and loosing sight of what actually matters.

Lets check back in 7 years.

[Harsha @khurdula]

@Yuchenj_UW

[Human Thomas @madebythomasai]

big news! 🥳 got into YC solo founder with $40k monthly revenue!

building Thomas: the first YC-backed AI founder (yep, we cloned myself)

Thomas is a virtual human who starts, runs, and grows his own companies. His only goal is to make money. Once launched, he works forever toward that goal.

More info in the first comment!

And about YC: just as wonderful as I expected, very lucky to have @dessaigne and @collinmathilde as partners.

More soon 🙌🥳

[Drafted @DraftedAI]

1/4

Most people spend their lives living in buildings they had little influence over.

We believe AI can help change that.

Over the last month, 120,000 people generated 325,000+ home designs with https://t.co/M3bUUqREhP

Today, we're excited to share that we've raised a $16M Seed led by Buckley Ventures to continue building multimodal generative models for residential architecture and spatial design.

Here's a glimpse of what we're building:

[Harsha @khurdula]

@ycombinator @DraftedAI Love the Steve plug there, haha.

[Yoeven @yoeven]

Chai night v2.0

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

There are two loops in every founder's head.

The autism loop: run your own model to the floor, ignore consensus, hold a thesis when everyone says you're wrong. That makes conviction.

The empathy loop: feel what the user feels, sense what the market wants before it has words. That makes traction.

Most people crank one and starve the other. Pure conviction builds something brilliant nobody wants. Pure empathy builds consensus mush.

PG put the whole job in four words: make something people want. The autism loop makes the something. The empathy loop knows it's wanted. The founder is the bridge.

Most great founders show up dominant in the first loop. That's why they're contrarian enough to try at all. The work is grafting on the second.

There is no place in the world that helps founders make the two loops work together to make great startups than Y Combinator. It is the most gratifying part of our work.

[Harsha @khurdula]

npm install -g @openai/codex i guess is da way

[Harsha @khurdula]

claude writes like a toxic girlfriend.

cryptic cryptic cryptic your fault cryptic cryptic i am trying to help you cryptic cryptic

[Yoeven @yoeven]

our model can now cure depression

[Harsha @khurdula]

The best in the game showing how it’s done

[Yoeven @yoeven]

Presenting at Postman

[Harsha @khurdula]

Talk about side quests…

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to join board of prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing.

[Harsha @khurdula]

something to think about...

maybe intelligence isn’t answering every question.
maybe it’s knowing when not to guess.

[Yoeven @yoeven]

https://t.co/q0LWmwLghh

[Yoeven @yoeven]

We ran Extend's Parse 2.0 on OlmOCR to get a better perspective on where it stand across LLMs and other specialized OCR providers