Savita Kini

CEO , AI/ML Startups. Always Learning. Mom in Tech. @babblelabs @Cisco @cornell.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@paulg Theoretically yes I agree. But current crony capitalists, regulatory capture, has not helped improve people’s lives. Healthcare is US is gone worse. MetLife denied orthodontic procedure for my daughter after confirming 2 yrs ago- reason so weird I need Gemini to interpret.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

I am mulling over this. Audio transcription to work well needs more than a good STT - Siri’s fiasco is lesson here. This hype may not sustain. Reminds me of the erstwhile Flipcamera. I still have one for antique donation to computer history museum.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Pocket (@heypocket) is your notetaker for real world meetings.

In the last 5 months, the team has delivered over 30k units with a $27M annualized run rate, growing 50% month over month.

Congrats on the launch, @AkshayNarisetti and @gabrieldymowski!

https://t.co/BGJPC0lJtD

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

100% agree with this. Moving back to India post-mba in my 30s taught me many things that otherwise my life in SV would not have. Most important was being comfortable in my skin. Travelling across India - seeing the challenge and opportunity with young population.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Removing friction is how rich people end up losing agency and human IQ

It starts with Uber-everywhere, grocery delivery, all-inclusive holidays, then private driver, chef, assistant etc… without noticing you’re also removing exposure to reality

I see this in London with young ambitious professionals aka HENRYs (High Earners Not Rich Yet) trying to remove every tiny friction from life so they can focus on work + gym + sleep + money, while forgetting that a lot of the “inefficient” shit they’re deleting (cooking, walking somewhere, random talks etc) is also just… being a human in your 20s/30s

The thing is you’re not only saving time, you’re removing thousands of tiny reps of dealing with the world. Finding the place, fixing the booking, working out what to do when the train gets cancelled, asking someone for help, improvising because the plan is fucked. None of these makes you smarter on its own, but remove basically all of them for 10 years and I’d be surprised if it has zero effect. You can become incredibly high-agency at work while weirdly low-agency at normal life

It’s why so many high-agency rich people are deliberately paying to add friction back into their lives (difficult travel, long treks, sailing, marathons, remote places, silent retreats, climbing mountains, etc). They’ve understood that once comfort is abundant, difficulty becomes scarce. The luxury good eventually becomes optional hardship. The distinction is agency. Being forced to walk 10km because your car broke down sucks. Choosing to hike 20km in Patagonia feels meaningful

The way I think about it personally is just aggressively remove boring / repetitive friction, while keeping a decent amount of unpredictable friction. I’ll happily pay more for the direct flight, live centrally to kill a commute, outsource cleaning/admin, take the Uber if it genuinely saves 40 mins. A 15-min annoyance x300 a year is actually expensive. There is absolutely no hidden life lesson in doing your laundry for the 800th time or spending 2h getting somewhere you could reach in 30 mins

Think the objective of wealth shouldn’t be zero friction, but simply choosing your friction. Basically removing all the boring shit so you can expose yourself to more of the interesting stuff

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Removing friction is how rich people end up losing agency and human IQ

It starts with Uber-everywhere, grocery delivery, all-inclusive holidays, then private driver, chef, assistant etc… without noticing you’re also removing exposure to reality

I see this in London with young ambitious professionals aka HENRYs (High Earners Not Rich Yet) trying to remove every tiny friction from life so they can focus on work + gym + sleep + money, while forgetting that a lot of the “inefficient” shit they’re deleting (cooking, walking somewhere, random talks etc) is also just… being a human in your 20s/30s

The thing is you’re not only saving time, you’re removing thousands of tiny reps of dealing with the world. Finding the place, fixing the booking, working out what to do when the train gets cancelled, asking someone for help, improvising because the plan is fucked. None of these makes you smarter on its own, but remove basically all of them for 10 years and I’d be surprised if it has zero effect. You can become incredibly high-agency at work while weirdly low-agency at normal life

It’s why so many high-agency rich people are deliberately paying to add friction back into their lives (difficult travel, long treks, sailing, marathons, remote places, silent retreats, climbing mountains, etc). They’ve understood that once comfort is abundant, difficulty becomes scarce. The luxury good eventually becomes optional hardship. The distinction is agency. Being forced to walk 10km because your car broke down sucks. Choosing to hike 20km in Patagonia feels meaningful

The way I think about it personally is just aggressively remove boring / repetitive friction, while keeping a decent amount of unpredictable friction. I’ll happily pay more for the direct flight, live centrally to kill a commute, outsource cleaning/admin, take the Uber if it genuinely saves 40 mins. A 15-min annoyance x300 a year is actually expensive. There is absolutely no hidden life lesson in doing your laundry for the 800th time or spending 2h getting somewhere you could reach in 30 mins

Think the objective of wealth shouldn’t be zero friction, but simply choosing your friction. Basically removing all the boring shit so you can expose yourself to more of the interesting stuff

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@karrisaarinen Our https://t.co/BSuQFvh0S1 website - I wouldn't have been able to get it out if not for google ai-studio and now I make changes/edits with replit. I like to keep replit vs claude code becoz claude is not 100% trust worthy on design /implementation.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@paulg Finding someone passionate about the problem, is in same place in life journey and has complementary qualities/strengths is not easy. There are many successful founders who brought trams along as they iterated. Facebook is also solo founder technically, and several others.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@paulg I love your general posts but this one ain’t gelling. How do some “teams” get to sit with you with legitimate ideas, then they get an idea and buy a domain, call themselves a stsrtup. Is this typical YC thing 🤔.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@deedydas 💯.. already seeing too many ai-native for the same ideas / spaces. But none of them or only a few them will /can actually be a “pharma company” or a bank or investment shop. Also many of the founders are coming from consumer background and realizing enterprise is diff.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

I have never waited for permission. I tried when I was 15. It was always no so I figured why bother. By 18, it went to persistence not permission. With my dad. Then teachers. Then professors. Then bosses. Life continues. Breaking one wall, one new barrier, one new pivot.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced that intelligence is overrated.

Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong.

The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Especially now. AI is making it a commodity. Courage is not. And it can’t be replaced. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t.

I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. Permission is taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.

Courage beats intelligence. Remember that.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

Seeing other comments - sorry not there yet. And no people will not switch from their trusted cleaning lady so easily. Maybe 20 yrs from now - my daughters gen, sure. Becoz my cleaning lady’s kids are also getting education. Until then she needs her job.

[Alexander Koch @alexkoch_ai]

Today, we’re launching Tau’s humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at $30 per hour.

Access is initially invite-only as we scale operations. If you don’t have an invite yet, join the waitlist at https://t.co/JrRpjIzRZv.

All footage is shown at 1× speed. Each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@ycombinator @sama @paulg @garrytan Question: why do you ask people's Date-of-Birth in YC applications. Seriously, I would like to understand what is the use of DoB in building a startup. It sounded like I am filling up some India beurocratic office form.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@paulg @veronica_humble Even their 6 month old selves. The teenage years seem to change things but there’s little things I notice that are same when my daughter was 3/4 months old. Curiosity about the world, sharp ears for gossip, slow, small eater.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@ycombinator @maxkolysh Glad to see aging care receive attention. Similar to child care. Subsidized by women but with more complexity of medical care. Human caregiving is here to stay, cannot be replaced. We are building for family caregivers - human centered, data driven. https://t.co/nQgZz4cUyl

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

For over a decade now, I have come to trust my instinct in systems tho king whether it was a biz problem or Engg. A muscle built over time. Building prods. Doing difft roles. Curiosity to learn the big picture. To understand how things work. This interview really resonated.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @Netflix's Chief Product and Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone:

1. Elizabeth believes that “systems thinking” is becoming the most important skill in the AI era. In engineering and product, this means people who can see across business domains and build the common capabilities that let many teams move quickly. In design, it means experience designers who create templates and design systems so that non-designers can ship work that stays coherent and on-brand. The underlying driver is velocity: when more people are doing more types of work at higher speed, you need to be good at building common scaffolding.

2. Systems thinking is learnable: zoom out one level from your specific problem. Given a task, step back one click—what bigger problem does this serve the business, will it scale across the product surface areas, should it become a platform capability? The companion habit: do your job in a way that helps your manager do theirs. This will force you to think about how all the pieces fit together.

3. Expect a storming phase before a forming phase. The role confusion people feel right now (“What is my job anymore?”) is the predictable middle of any transformative technology. Elizabeth’s advice: focus on high-quality source-of-truth data, guardrails on what ships, and constant internal reinforcement that humans own what they create.

4. The top AI labs converged on Netflix’s culture. High agency, high talent density, top-of-market pay, bottom-up thinking, fast experiments—the traits Lenny hears constantly from AI labs were in Netflix’s early culture deck. Elizabeth’s explanation: excellence comes from hiring exceptional people, trusting them to do great work, and holding them accountable.

5. Netflix’s culture is centered around building “excellence as an operating system.” High talent density, radical transparency, context not control, and the keeper’s test. These work together to create an environment of trust and accountability, without bureaucracy. But it’s also uncomfortable. It requires tolerating people making decisions you’d make differently, resisting the reflex to add process when things go wrong, and letting people carry the weight of their own choices. Elizabeth describes the hardest part as “being comfortable in that discomfort.”

6. The keeper’s test is as much about recognizing great people as it is about removing the wrong ones. The test—“If this person told me they were leaving, would I fight to keep them?”—is often cited in its difficult form: the moment you realize someone isn’t the right fit. But Elizabeth uses it predominantly as an entry point for honest performance conversations that are deeply positive. Most of the time the answer is “I would fight so hard to keep you,” which creates the opening to articulate strengths, discuss impact, and name what’s working. Good feedback hygiene needs a forcing function; the keeper’s test provides one.

7. Specialization is trending down—adaptable generalists are trending up. We’re shifting away from narrow stack-layer specialists (pure frontend, pure backend) toward people who can navigate fluidly across layers. The same logic applies to business domain knowledge: the mindset of “I’m a payments expert, full stop” is less valuable than “I know payments well enough and I’m willing to imagine what the future version of this looks like.” The meta-skill is learning to learn, not locking into a single lane.

8. Netflix’s approach to AI fluency is a universal principle, not a level-specific expectation. Rather than rewriting career ladders to specify what AI competence looks like at each level, Netflix added a single aspiration across all roles and levels: AI fluency. What fluency means varies by function and seniority, but the non-negotiable minimum is the same everywhere—an open-minded, experimental mindset, genuine curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@DavidSacks Also, tell us how many people in the US can actually use existing AI. Enterprise adoption has stalled. Labor is unskilled to adopt and leverage what exists. Maybe do what Singapore is doing - up-skill the workforce across the board.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@DavidSacks Its not the problem of data centers but lack of STEM Talent -- fundamental focus on Math & Science. I am chasing our Menlo Park School district administrators /Board. They still don't get it. When did US high schoolers last win the International Physics/Math/CS olympiads.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

Thoughtful post. For many of us from internet side - this makes sense. However, it leaves open questions -what is definition of AGI. Will AI really help humans become better? Can it stop wars ? Diseases from spreading ? what exactly will AI do better - other than coding.

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

https://t.co/PTeDiv1b6L

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@joshelman @illscience Being more human is also going back to the old ways of caring for our loved ones as the global demographic shifts to more over 65. For the first time, we are seeing a shift to more people aging than kids being born. From individualism to community oriented consumer play.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@amasad This is like the early days of internet building. Maybe we will get towards interoperable model ecosystems as well so one models biased o/p doesn’t create ripple effect through the ecosystem. Aka - healthcare, hiring, education. Diversity benefits everyone.

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@nrmehta I also see neoclouds getting hit like the clecs/smaller internet dc providers from 2000. There were a number of them who built capacity for consumption that didn’t materialize

[Savita Kini @savitakini]

@nrmehta Coming from the pre-2001 exp, seeing what happened, as a young engr I was caught off guard. But this is pattern repetition. Anyone who has been inside a large enterprise or dealt with one could have predicted this 🤷🏻‍♀️. I didn’t believe the pontification here on X.