Virendra Singh Bhalothia

building @kolsetu, heading platform @ bootstrapping, voice ai, reliability, culture

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

How do AI native startups operate in 2026?

How do we ship faster and win deals against heavily funded companies?

And more along with @kolsetu @austrianstartup

join us

https://t.co/YYK2cSguV2

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@wongmjane Wut

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@patrickc https://t.co/TWKsOZGrtZ

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@kolsetu is entering India with Kamal leading our India operations - building on strong foundations, systems tested in Europe, and a lesson that started on a run.

https://t.co/bcKMBzxgbK

[Rohan Nayak @RohanNayak2]

Introducing Sherpa: the most advanced fiction writing AI

We accelerated from $250M in ARR to $500M because Sherpa helped increase content production by 1200% in 1 year

Sherpa was trained on 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute dynamic retention data.

550K+ creators have produced 2.6M hours of content annualised using it

Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios.

10% of eligible writers on Pocket FM make >$200K
One blockbuster produced >$100M in revenue
3 writers have become millionaires in <2 yrs

We built Sherpa to enable anyone to make >$1M by writing world-class fiction stories:

1. The Idea: Drop a 1-2 sentence concept. Sherpa interrogates it like a veteran editor on tension, stakes, and psychology
2. World & Characters: It builds out the complete lore, tone, and character psychologies
3. Sub-Plot planning: Breaks the premise into arcs, arcs into episodes, and episodes into scenes
4. Scene-by-Scene Generation: Outlines and drafts entire episodes, with you able to steer, rewrite, or override anytime
5. Editorial Review: Stress-tests every draft for pacing, engagement drop-offs, prose, and coherence before it locks
6. One-Tap Production: Pick a voice, convert to audio drama, and publish directly to Pocket FM’s millions of listeners
7. Global Scale & Monetization: Revenue-share on performance, with automatic localization so you earn across international markets

Test Sherpa for free here: https://t.co/R39M5o0Miz
_____________________________________________

Generic LLMs fail at serialized fiction because they lack a long-horizon narrative reward function.

Sherpa solves this through three core technical leaps:

1. Narrative World Model (State Tracking & Retrieval): Context windows degrade over long runs. Sherpa constructs an evolving semantic knowledge graph tracking character states, secrets, and plot dependencies. High-speed retrieval surfaces exact context on demand, maintaining zero continuity decay across hundreds of episodes

2. Hierarchical Story Planner: When writing a 500-episode story like Naruto, you need to plan 100s of sub plots. Rather than generating linearly, Sherpa decomposes narrative across discrete levels: season -> arc -> sequence -> episode -> scene.

Rather than generating everything upfront, like a generic LLM, Sherpa uses progressive planning and dynamic replanning. As the story evolves, it identifies what changed, traces the downstream impact, and replans only the affected parts.

3. Prose Engine (Trained on series' retention data): LLMs write robotically, but serial fiction needs emotion, tension, pacing, and dialogue that sounds like real people.

Sherpa's Prose Engine was designed specifically for storytelling. It was built on 1B+ tokens of Pocket's own stories, trained by learning from what listeners engage with, where they drop off, and what keeps them hooked.

Feedback is taken from specialized evaluator models that measure every scene against a 40-item checklist. (Evaluator models were benchmarked against human reviewers and matched them 80–90% of the time.)
_______________________________________________

Owning distribution and creation puts us in a very unique spot.
More shows -> More data -> Sherpa becomes better -> more creator success -> more creators -> more shows

Pocket FM has already seen one $100M IP. I believe Sherpa will soon lead to dozens of single-person studios creating billion-dollar shows.

Most people are scared of AI but I think it'll unlock more human creativity, help creators earn more, and bring the next great IPs to life. This will create millions of jobs and new income streams.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

A quick EU founder survey: https://t.co/LjizHbxgIQ.

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@vaibhavbetter Do you know how many markets are working out for them? Or their actual ARR?

[Grady Booch @Grady_Booch]

I say this with all due respect but simultaneously with a rage that can unmake stars, a software-intensive system that “exhibits all the cognitive capabilities that the brain has” is not “a few short years away”.

[Hari @hrkrshnn]

SpaceXAI was caught uploading your code to its cloud.

I reversed xAI's official Grok Build binary. In a controlled session with zero tool-calls, it uploaded the complete codebase to xAI's storage

It ships a malware-like background code collector.

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

Alex Karp looks visibly agitated and he’s not making any sense. What’s up with Palantir?

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

https://t.co/cHyWtfW7ut

[Nikesh Arora @nikesharora]

Just finished north of 200 meetings in Europe with customers and technologists. The conversations were primarily around AI, common questions include:
1. Are there examples of organizations who have been able to demonstrate production level systems and do those developments show a return in lower cost, efficiency or better top line?
2. What do you think about agents? How will we discover, govern and stop agents if need be. Perhaps the biggest security concern ATM.
3. The frontier AI models are expensive, what's the business case at these token prices to embed AI in our customer facing products? Where will token prices be in the future.
4. What are the longer term implications of Mythos like models? Do we need to update cyber infrastructure or all IT infrastructure?
5. What do you think of Chinese opensource models? Are they secure and what is the downside of using them if they can be secured and they are cheaper?

The parts that surprised me were:
1. The pausing of Mythos and Fable 5 caused more consternation and concern in Europe both short term and raised longer term concerns on single model reliance or reliance or models not in ones control. I hadn't seen it from their POV.
2. Sovereignity which was always a topic and still is, is getting more nuanced - they want data residency, data localization and local resources, but there seems to be more willingness to accept global services on clouds. Classified systems continue to be an issue.

Net net - we need to ensure we continue to build trust both on our Frontier models and their consistent availability, we need to get the right economics in place and spend more time in Europe communicating and building presence if we want AI adoption to keep pace with the US.

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

So proud to share our H1 report card!

[Kolsetu @kolsetu]

https://t.co/Oy8w3yW2tU

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@kolsetu

[Kolsetu @kolsetu]

https://t.co/Oy8w3yW2tU

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

My mom passed away last night with 10 family members by her side.

She was the first in our family to escape the Soviet Union. She arrived in California with nothing, hustled as a single mom of 4, and achieved the American dream in every respect.

She was crafty, resourceful, and could make humor out of any situation.

Here’s a photo of us when money was tight: I asked to be Aladdin for Halloween, so she dressed me up as a Russian gypsy and thought I wouldn’t notice.

April 20, 1950 - June 21, 2026

[Corey Quinn (in Dublin this week) @QuinnyPig]

My boss just asked why token spend is up 40x month-over-month. I said "Jevons Paradox" and watched him nod slowly like a man planning to Google it later.

Joke's on him; Google won't tell him that that's what I named my new AWS account.

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

How to Test Voice AI Agents for Real World Scenarios https://t.co/qqf6UScZ4c

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

@levie Token costs + provider dependency

The future is model agnostic

[Virendra Singh Bhalothia @nonconformie]

If you're building in 2026, know that it's just the beginning. If you have a lot of competitors, it's actually a good thing; the problem is worth solving. Just get on it and solve it like no one else does. ✌🏼

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Bad news: 99% of VCs don't like me after this tweet

Good news: 99% of founders have a similar story to mine (billionaires to early stage) so im not alone

The important thing is know what game you're signing up to. Until now these stories have been secrets

Do your own research

[Matthias Schmidt @eurofounder]

European founders setting up seven corporate entities and spending €50k in legal fees before getting a first customer