Rohit Malhotra

• BD Manager by day, podcaster by night
• 450+ episodes hosted
• Ex @oyorooms
• 4K+ read my newsletter:

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

Bajaj Finance Limited's journey is a story of growth and transformation:

- Founded in 1987, originally focused on vehicle financing for Bajaj Auto.
- Expanded into personal loans, SME financing, and mortgage lending.
- Reinvented in the 2000s, led by Sanjiv Bajaj and Rajeev Jain.
- Now one of India’s largest NBFCs, serving 88.11 million customers.
- A key player in shaping India's financial landscape across diverse sectors.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

Enterprise Customers: The BIGGEST Growth Lever

Listen here - https://t.co/xVea2tIHvh

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

Most people think being wealthy is having a fancy car, expensive watch, or a big home.

It's really about having the ability to have coffee with your wife, gym in the afternoon, lunch with friends, and being able to see your family for dinner.

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Negativity & pessimism is killing so much potential.

People stop trying & they join the chorus of resignation…
And by “fitting in,” they lose the life they could have had.

Be the biggest optimist you know.
Go create a fantastic life.
Try for unreasonable things.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Have a place where you go to think. A porch. A trail. A coffee shop. A park bench. Somewhere your mind knows it's time to slow down. Most people spend their lives searching for answers. Few create the conditions for answers to appear.

[Alex Garcia 🔍 @alexgarcia_atx]

i worked for sam for just over a year.

in that timeframe i became a 10x better copywriter.

example

I'd write something, send it to him, and i'd get a text at like 11pm saying, "this sentence is written in a passive voice. it makes you sound soft. you bench 400 pounds. write in an active voice."

h/t @thesamparr

[Justin Welsh @thejustinwelsh]

If you want to be successful, you need high standards.

The quality of your work, the quality of the people you hang around, and how you treat your own mind and body.

Whatever you decide to tolerate, you'll end up producing. Make sure you set that bar high.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Go to bed.
Same time every night.
Non-negotiable.
If kids, tell them they’re on their own.
You have a schedule to keep.
No kids, no excuses.

Best thing you can do for yourself.
And others.

Better mood.
More willpower.
Clearer mind.
Better human.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

AWS pays its own sellers to push you.The lever is not the partner discount. It is SaaS Revenue Recognition — AWS field reps get quota credit for co-selling partner solutions through Marketplace. MDF reimburses up to 50% of marketing spend.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

Partner incentives are not a rewards budget. They are a bet on the one partner behavior a platform most wants to buy — and Stripe, Twilio, and AWS each bet on a different one.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

Twilio makes partners build the margin themselves.ISVs are charged on usage. The partner marks up that consumption and keeps the spread — Twilio does not write the check. Its Build program runs Bronze, Silver, Gold, and reserves referral incentives for the top tiers only.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

Startup Growth: Enterprise Sales vs. Product-Led

Listen here - https://t.co/447yz8UoEV

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

I'd say about 66% of founders step back from sales when they hire a VP of Sales

95% of the time, it backfires

You don't get that time back. You just use it in different parts of the sales process.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs. I’ve heard from people who are wondering anew about the FDE career path since OpenAI and Anthropic started building new teams to place FDEs within client organizations.

The rise of FDEs for AI workloads is one way AI is creating new jobs (and why the jobpolcalypse narrative of upcoming job market collapse is false -- there will be many AI and non-AI jobs). However, I believe there will be far more AI Engineer jobs than FDEs, as I explain below.

The FDE role was pioneered about two decades ago by Palantir, which sent engineers to government locations to work on secure, air-gapped networks. In addition to having good technical skills, FDEs need communication skills and sometimes business skills. For example, they may need to speak with clients to understand their needs, formulate a strategy to prioritize projects, explain complex technology, and respectfully push back if a client asks for something unrealistic. They’re enjoying a resurgence because of the amount of work involved in taking an off-the-shelf LLM and building it into a custom agentic workflow that fits particular business needs.

However, I believe the number of AI Engineer jobs will be far larger. A company might accept a few FDEs to be embedded within its organization. But most companies will want far more of their own employees working on their projects. While my organizations do hire FDEs, we hire far more AI Engineers! Also, a common client concern is that it is hard to find vendor-neutral FDEs — they are, after all, there to deeply integrate a particular vendor’s product into a company. In this moment when it’s hard to predict which AI service will be the best one in a year’s time, optionality (the ability to pick whatever vendor turns out to fit best in the future) is very valuable. In contrast, letting FDEs tightly bind a company’s processes significantly reduces optionality.

Right now, I see surging demand for AI Engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompting, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode). As the AI Engineer role matures, I expect it to fragment into more specialized roles, like the generic Software Engineer role from decades ago fragmented into frontend, backend, mobile, data engineering, devops, and so on.

What will be the future, specialized AI engineering roles? I don’t know. Perhaps there will be AI FDEs, LLMOps Engineers, Evals Engineers, AI Data Engineers, Harness Engineers, and other roles we don’t have names for yet. But for now, I see a lot of AI engineers who are generalists create a lot of value. Skilled AI Engineers are in very high demand! As our field continues to mature over the coming decade, I look forward to new specializations within AI Engineering that create even more job opportunities.

[Original text: The Batch newsletter]

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

The older I get, the more I realize that optimism is a competitive advantage. Not blind positivity. The belief that problems can be solved. That things can improve. That your actions matter. People who believe a better future is possible are the ones who create it.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

I don’t think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five year run in technocapital history. God help us all. I pray that when Judgement comes He can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery.

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

AI Model Costs Skyrocket: Understanding the Real Price

Listen here - https://t.co/SalDayXS8Y

[Rohit Malhotra @rohitmal]

US Market Strategy: Founder's Guide to Global Growth

Listen here - https://t.co/xAWemDZip2

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

[Romàn @romanbuildsaas]

I'm 30. I built an AI startup called GojiberryAI to $2.5M ARR. Got accepted into YC.

If I had to start from 0, here's exactly what I'd do:

1. Sell it before I build it.

No code. Just a simple slide deck (mine was 6 ugly slides) explaining the problem, the solution, the outcome, and the price. I made my first $10k that way, before writing a single line.

2. Pick a painfully specific customer.

Not "B2B SaaS." Something like "founders at 20-person SaaS companies about to hire their first SDR." So specific that the right person reads it and thinks "that's me."

3. Start outbound on day one, but only to people showing intent.

Not scraped lists. People engaging with competitors, changing roles, raising money, or publicly posting about the exact problem I solve. That's the gap between a 1-2% reply rate and 25-40%.

4. Lead with value, never a calendar link.

Send a blueprint, not "got 15 minutes?" Let the resource do the selling, and the trial becomes the obvious next step instead of a pitch.

5. Pick ONE channel and go deep.

For us it was outbound first, then Reddit (10M+ organic views), then LinkedIn lead magnets. I wouldn't touch a second channel until the first one was clearly working.

6. Talk to customers every single day.

The product doesn't matter until you understand the problem better than they do. Spend 90% of every early call listening, not demoing.

7. Only build once people are actually paying.

Then keep it dead simple and price it to sell itself. We landed on $99/mo with a free trial, so the funnel runs without me dragging anyone onto a call.

8. Do this relentlessly for about 12 months.

That’s roughly how long $0 to $2.5M took us.

Bootstrapped.

No outside funding.

Most founders don’t lose because they can’t build.

They lose because they build too early, sell too late, and quit the channel before it compounds.