Pallav Kulhari

Independent Consultant | Writing Quit 9to5 (Nonfiction) | IIT Kanpur 2020

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

You’re either creating or consuming, all the time.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

What happens when AI starts finding bugs in human psyche?

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@EXM7777 Interesting idea

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@garrytan @AsideAI @bot let’s try this.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

Same

[anita @anitakirkovska]

im not gonna lie, but nothing comes close to how useful Grok Bot has been for me in the last month 👀

[Quit 9to5 @Quit9to5Book]

From Quit 9to5. Every hour your job decides for you instead of you deciding for yourself has a cost. The book calls it the Alignment Tax. Notice how much of it you paid this week. Join the waitlist: https://t.co/txCr5pHVWM

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@EXM7777 You mean have personal evals?

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

I don’t think it’ll be that easy to “vibe-build” entire companies.

There’s institutional inertia, deep context to understand, network effects, switching costs, and plenty of other barriers that more intelligence alone won’t instantly erase.

That said, it’s not binary.

The labs will still capture some of the most valuable markets. The harder question is how much, and how quickly.

[Erik Newsham @eriknewsha]

by this time next year, most of labs revenue will come from what they build in-house and then sell further up the stack. the average users just don't

1. have deep enough pockets
2. work on hard enough tasks

gpt-synopsys and anthropic wet lab are the first of many products which come as a result of labs gatekeeping and utilizing superintelligent swarms to create new and capture existing markets. currently by use of footholds and in the future independently. by 2030 labs will have eaten practically every economically valuable sector such as finance, legal and healthcare.

what's to stop labs? why wouldn't they? how can a 10,000 employee healthcare company stand a chance if they are up against 10 million vastly superior agents to the swarms publicly available?

the labs understand this and are hence preparing for the "grand capture" by donating shares to the public (anthropic and spacexai already committed with openai about to) to minimize p(public revolution).

the question becomes what to do. one option is obviously to join a lab. if you want to join the lab I believe the best "unit chance of joining lab/time" ratio is proving scaleable user acquisitions and publishing relevant hot topic things on X.

if you don't want to join a lab, acquiring factories, propietary data, licenses, land and things that are human facing and exist in a stack of value creation will be fruitful as they become the primary bottlenecks once suffcient swarm cognition is solved

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

Soon he’ll say:

day 17/ we did an internal meeting

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Day 14/

Small quality of life improvement. You can now edit previous messages within a thread in the desktop app. Long time requested, and took way too long to get that one out.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@thsottiaux Soon he’ll say:

day 17/ we did an internal meeting

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@pratyush_r8 @Meta @AIatMeta both Google and Meta have these people for when you start to reduce the budget… they reach out and try to help but never really have deep insights

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@thsottiaux Technically, a reset every day stops making sense, lol

It’s like a 24 hour limit

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.

My observations:

1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.

2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.

3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.

4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.

5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.

6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.

They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.

7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.

8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.

Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.

10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!

11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.

12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.

13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.

14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.

15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.

16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.

17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?

18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.

19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.

20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.

21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.

Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.

Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.

Happy to be home and locked in.

Until next time!

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

As an @IITKanpur alumnus, I feel pride and shame in the same breath.

The biggest irony of the moment is that both @AshutoshRanka and Gyanesh Kumar are @IITKanpur alumni.

How weird?

The former is extremely courageous, while the latter is showing unprecedented levels of cowardice.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@shipper_now What if they ship more shippers?

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

It has arrived :)

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

Need 'mark a chat unread' in Codex @thsottiaux

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@mrfundman But most of the bookmarks are “read later” by people who haven’t really read them.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

I live in a Tier 3 city.

And @rapidoapp_ was launched here only recently.

In this short time, I've already heard of 3 women who had to jump off and run from their riders. Same story each time. The rider takes her somewhere isolated, and she ends the ride on the spot and rushes towards a nearby place with more people.

Thankfully, all three are safe. And these are only the ones I've heard about. Even they probably never reported it. So here I am, reporting it to you, Rapido.

Here's what you can (maybe) do:

→ In new towns, watch the GPS closely. Flag every detour, random stop and abruptly ended ride.

→ For women passengers, send tested riders with a long record of successful rides, not someone who joined last week.

→ Don't wait for complaints. Make proactive audit calls asking women: did anything feel wrong?

→ In the longer run, @Uber_India, @rapidoapp_ and the rest should build an army of women riders and drivers. Women would gladly pay a premium for it.

I appreciate your wonderful entrepreneurial work. Expand to new towns as fast as you want. But please just don't let women pay for your speed.

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@poteto Recursive Self-Development

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

@CEO_AISOMA That’s what I’m waiting for

[Pallav Kulhari @pallavkulhari]

Hats off to the Indian government.

Great work.

It has shown how strategic it can be.

Three Cockroach Janta Party leaders were picked up at Delhi airport before they could even reach the protest. Dhruv Rathee was detained. Gatherings of five or more were banned in parts of Delhi. Metro stations were shut, and hundreds of protesters were detained.

Planning. Speed. Coordination.

It was all there when the government wanted to stop young people from questioning the voter-list changes.

NOW IMAGINE IF INDIA CHASED RAPISTS, MURDERERS AND CRIMINALS THE WAY IT CHASES PROTESTERS.