Devarsh Saraf

Building Bombay Founders' Club

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@deedydas This quietly reshapes how you build anything in India. We plan gatherings assuming people won't cross a city on a weekday — proximity beats programming. The variable that matters isn't distance anymore, it's travel time, and the two have fully diverged.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@levelsio The "Cursor sidebar for editing" framing is exactly right. The magic is the agent working on your actual timeline state, not generating from a blank prompt — editing is mostly judgment over existing material, which is where agent-in-the-loop beats one-shot every time.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@emollick The leap here isn't the code, it's that it drove Unity and Blender like a user. "AI writes code" was step one. "AI operates the tools we operate" is the step that actually changes who gets to build.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@Jason Very task-dependent though. For well-scoped, verifiable work the gap has basically closed. It's the long-horizon, ambiguous, agentic stuff where frontier still pulls ahead. "Negligible" is true right up until the task stops being easy to check.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@Nithin0dha The screens-off hour is the real unlock — did more for my sleep than any app. Same block with physical books here, but I've made peace with it: what goes in matters more than the format. Lovely that the wind-down is shared time with them.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@Codie_Sanchez The "build clear standards" one is the whole job. Most people confuse high standards with high control. The real skill is setting the bar clearly enough that people can hold it when you're not in the room.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@HarryStebbings @ml_angelopoulos The incentive problem is the whole thing. People are only fully candid when the room can't cost them anything — no press, no one to impress, no revenue on the line. It's why the honest conversations still happen in closed rooms, not on mics.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@kunalb11 The browser bit matters more than it looks. So much of how Indian founder communities actually run lives on WhatsApp — bringing calls to desktop quietly kills a real friction for anyone on a laptop all day.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@levie Verifiability is the real axis. The work that feels safe because it's soft — judgment, taste, trust, relationships — is hard to automate precisely because you can't cleanly check the output. The fuzzier the scorecard, the more durable the job.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@paulg Same trap with names. We just renamed our founder community and the pull is always toward being clever. The confident choice is almost always the legible one — people trust what they can read at a glance.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

Same route, same day: the noon Mumbai–Delhi might run 10 min late. The 6pm routinely loses you an hour.

Most delays aren't random. I'd rather not book into a pattern.

If you fly often, try it before your next booking.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

I take 80+ flights a year. One 2-minute habit has saved me days of sitting in airports.

Before I book, I run the flight number through FlightAware.

It tells you how often that exact flight is delayed — and by how much.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

I put out a hiring call last month. 500+ applicants.

Most disqualified themselves before I read a single CV.

Not because of their experience. Because of their email.

4 things that quietly cost people the job:

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

4. Using AI without thinking. Use AI, please. But if you paste my post into ChatGPT and send me whatever it returns, so did the other 50 people. Sameness is the fastest way to get ignored. The tool was never the point. You were.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

I put out one hiring call. 500+ applicants. Most of them disqualified themselves before I read a single CV. Not on experience. Their email just screamed "I don't care." Four things that quietly cost people the job:

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

3. Spelling my name wrong. You had to type it to email me, and it was in the post you replied to. If you won't check your work once before hitting send, you've told me everything about the work you'd send me later.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@Appyg99 The "visionary founder" is mostly a story we write backwards, after the execution worked. Most of the ones I've watched up close were just unusually willing to do the boring thing in year ten. Execution is the vision, revealed slowly.

[Devarsh Saraf @SarafDevarsh]

@BoringBiz_ Made this switch from banking myself. The pay cut is real but it isn't what gets you. It's losing a legible scoreboard. Finance gives you external status. In a startup nobody claps, so you generate your own conviction. Pick the one you'd still do if it stayed small.