Atul Khola 💊

Bunking @zero_university • designed for @CRED_club @cult @toppr @medianet • founder @

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

Me trying to download torrents as a kid.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@VancityReynolds clicked it. bought four. i own a horse now.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@garyvee my landlord does not

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@Jason series A: her. Series B: her lawyer. Series C: her memoir.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@garyvee bro made 10,000 videos about the plan

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@pmarca 14 hours

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@garyvee post 47 of 94 today, his patience era is going great

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@Jason [checks notes] *Chick-fil-A receipt*

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

put 'no micromanagers' in the job post. i am the micromanager.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@garyvee Sir you've been yelling this for 15 years

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@tensor___boy And penalise it

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

🔴 I'M BUILDING THIS OUT OF HATE! 🔴

I'll be honest. I don't love education. I never have.

I grew up inside it, then started my career building more of it. I lasted long enough to learn how it really works, and I left swearing never again.

You know the shape of it. A syllabus older than the students. Forty kids taught like they're one kid. Nine hours of school, four of tuition, then a room full of us mugging up the same shit until we could repeat it on cue. It was never built to find smart people. It finds good memorisers.

Your Netflix knows you better than your school ever did.

And if you didn't fit it, you were told you were the problem. You weren't. The system was just bad at you.

I only know it can be different because of design.

In design, nobody asks where you studied. You open the portfolio. It either blows them away or it doesn't. The degree doesn't count. The work does. It's the fairest test I know, because it asks one honest question. Can you actually do the thing?

For years that was true for design and almost nothing else.

So that's what we're building @zero_university for. Proof of work, for everyone. Not a grade. Not a profile you wrote about yourself. A real record of what you can actually do, and how you got good at it. Something you can't fake.

Picture what that unlocks. No take-home assignments. No seven rounds of interviews to slowly find out what your work already shows. You stop proving yourself from scratch in every room. You walk in already proven.

And we built Zero so we only win when you do.

Most schools treat students as customers, so they're built to chase more of them, not to make the ones they have any better. We flipped it. You're not who we sell to. You're what we build. So we'll never trade you a degree, a hostel, and a nice story about your life for four years and a fat bill.

Zero is free. And our beta users get a guaranteed interview, the one promise your college couldn't make you after all those years and all that money.

This is the first launch.

The thing I hated most turned out to be the thing I'm here to build. I'm writing this from a treadmill in Vietnam, and I haven't felt this alive in years.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@APompliano @cfosilvia celsius. voyager. blockfi.

[Navid Nathoo @navidnathoo]

kinda worried our co-workers feel too real... this guy belongs in a rom com. instead he's your manager helping you to figure out how to increase productivity at amazon fulfillment centers. @zero_university

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@Rasheemhamsa @zero_university @rive_app + @Rasheemhamsa = 🔥

[Rashi @Rasheemhamsa]

I made this XP hover animation for @zero_university , then fell down a rabbit hole with Data Binding in Rive.
The animation's the fun part. What hooked me was the handoff. With Data Binding, I expose the moving pieces as settings the developer can actually see and control. Like leaving the volume knob out where they can reach it. They plug in real data and reuse the interaction across the app without me rebuilding anything.
So it stops being a finished asset I hand off. It becomes something they can wire into the product and bend to fit.
Designing interactions is fun. Designing ones that survive contact with a developer felt better.
@rive_app

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

Guaranteed interview and costs you nothing. Beta open now: https://t.co/sRRQwoGEAW

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

15th august 2025: “can we make a quick demo video that helps people understand what @zero_university does?"
that was the whole brief. simple. something for early investors to finally get the thing we'd been building for months. the obvious move was the one everyone makes. a screen recording. a cursor gliding through features, click by click, the way every product on the internet shows itself off.

we almost did exactly that. done is better than perfect, right?

but the design team that builds zero, we call it ‘cartel’, runs on one rule. be the first to do something, or the best at it. screen recordings have been polished and made cinematic for years now. the best we could have been was one in a million. and we're just not wired for that. we'd rather try the thing nobody's pulled off yet.

then the real problem showed up. zero doesn't fit in 30 seconds. every single feature could be its own company. it isn't a tool that solves one neat problem. it's an experience. and you can't make someone feel an experience by watching a cursor click for four minutes.

but everyone reading this has been to college. we all know exactly where it's broken. and people don't remember features. they remember stories.

so we decided to tell one.

This still makes me laugh. we didn’t have the budget to tell one. i actually priced out real actors, a real set, a real crew, the whole works. Definitely not something a start up is going spend on. and this was a year ago, when ai video was still called slop. lip sync was broken. realism was a fantasy. character consistency wasn't even in the conversation yet. convincing the team to bet weeks on something nobody had proven was its own quiet war.
we bet anyway.

@VengadaS65199 directed it. @madebytushar was one of the first people i'd watched actually wrestle ai generations into something usable. Aarav cut it all together. @whossanjay , @Rasheemhamsa and @rolledpipe animated piece after piece. it took hundreds of generations just to get the direction right.

this video was only ever meant for investors. explaining zero in a room takes me 30 minutes. this does it in four. People loved it and 67% of people watched till the very end. four minutes, in a world that swipes away in fifteen seconds.

by today's standards it isn't even impressive anymore. the models we used have upgraded by 5 models since.
but a year ago, this was cinema. Special thanks to @higgsfield_ai @higgsfield

it was never supposed to be public.
today it is. ↓

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

started meditating to be less reactive. got mad at the app.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@APompliano 26 is not recovered. 26 is the guy still in the hospital tweeting that he's fine.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

@APompliano celsius had a waitlist too. so did voyager.

[Atul Khola 💊 @pixelandpump]

made plans to be less flaky. cancelled to stay consistent.