Bharani Vasudev Setlur

Maker. Currently Arts Consolidated, Operabase, CueTV. Previously anthill, belong, babajob, musigma, webfluenz, 4am, picopeta simputer.

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

I’ve known @kunalb11 for 12+ years now, first as an investor in his company FreeCharge, then as a friend and confidant (and as an investor in his company CRED). Each time I met him, I came away boggled by how he uniquely fused a deep understanding of consumer psychology with incredible product t sense. CRED is not just a superb Indian consumer product; it’s one of the very best designed products in the world.

I would always wonder why Kunal was not bringing his talents to the rest of the world, and encouraged him a few times to launch CRED in the US, move to the Valley, or both.

It’s awesome and wholly unsurprising to see him bring his product chops and leadership to the #1 global consumer product. Great job by the Meta team on doing whatever it took to make this happen, and excited to welcome Kunal to the Valley, this time as a resident vs as a visitor.

Congrats buddy :)

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

It’s been a minute.

2015–2018
- Exited FreeCharge. Spent time learning and investing.
- Pondered about: Why can't trust be rewarded? Started with $1M of personal capital.
- Launched CRED to reward people for paying credit card bills on time.

2019–2025
- Built a system run by a team that values ownership, judgment, and craft.
- Grew from 0 to 17M members by aligning incentives with behaviour.
- Built several products during COVID lockdowns.
- Raised $900M+ from global investors. Did 4 ESOP buybacks.
- Made Indiranagar and IPL ads slightly more interesting.
- Received a full stack of regulatory licences.
- Lost 35 kilos.
- Scaled from 0 to ~$325M ( ~₹3,200 crore) in annual revenue across payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards.
2026
- First profitable quarter (yet occasionally asked what our business model is)
- Raised another $900M from Meta in primary and secondary capital.
- Announcing our 5th ESOP buyback.

Today

CRED is ready for its next phase. I am stepping back and @miten steps in as interim CEO, partnered with an incredibly talented team. He has been heading strategy and finance and suffering me since 2020. I’m stepping away from the operating role and will continue as a shareholder. My commitment doesn’t change. Just the role.

Extremely grateful to our members, partners, regulators, and investors who made this possible. And to our board, Shailendra, Micky, Saurabh for their extraordinary conviction.

Team CRED, I’ll still expect you to be a 10x version of yourselves.

As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally.

Meta comes in as a minority investor in CRED. No access to member data.

While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey. Will, thank you for scaling something the world relies on quietly, and for making this transition smooth.

Onwards.

[Will Cathcart @wcathcart]

Some personal news. After nearly 7 years leading WhatsApp, I'm excited to share who will take over the responsibility of delivering simple, reliable, and private messaging for the world. WhatsApp is in the strongest position it's ever been — and that felt like the right moment to step back.

I'm so proud of what we have built. We scaled end-to-end encrypted messaging to more than three billion people. We brought it to group chats, companion devices, new surfaces — and defended people's right to a private conversation across the globe.

Kunal Shah will be WhatsApp's next leader. He built CRED into one of India's most important technology companies and has a deep care for the people that rely on our apps. I’m very excited to see what Kunal and our amazing team continue to build.

Thank you for the privilege of serving people who rely on WhatsApp everywhere. 🙏

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models.

For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Be your self, not someone you were assigned to be!

Bezos won on time horizon, not AWS or 1-Click.

If your bets have to work in 3 years, you compete with everyone. Every smart, funded team is chasing the same 3-year problems. Short horizon, crowded field.

Stretch to 7 and the field collapses. Investors want returns, employees want vesting, founders want proof. Almost nobody can sit in a bet that doesn't pay for most of a decade. The patience is the moat, and it costs you, that's why it works.

But you can't fake a 7-year horizon on a problem you don't actually care about. Pick the users and the problem Moloch assigned you, the safe ones, the fundable ones, and you'll bail the first hard year. Pick the ones that are actually yours and you'll still be there when everyone else has quit.

So the real prerequisite isn't discipline. It's knowing yourself well enough to choose a problem and a set of people you care about that you'll serve them for decades.

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

The events of the last 6 months in technology are arguable amongst the most important in human history

The tools now increasingly exist for recursive self improvement of models & agents

We are likely in very early lift off & exponential

Largely unnoticed outside of tech

[Genesis AI @gs_ai_]

We are back. After one year of quiet building.

Introducing GENE-26.5, our first robotic brain that takes a major step toward human-level capability.

For years, robotics has struggled to learn from the world’s largest and valuable data source: Humans.

Solving it means rethinking the whole stack from the ground up:

- A robotics-native foundation model.
- A 1:1 human-like robotic hand.
- A noninvasive data collection glove for motion, force, and touch.
- A simulator that turns weeks of experiments into minutes.

GENE-26.5 is trained across language, vision, proprioception, tactile, and action. We designed a set of tasks to test how far we can go with this new paradigm.

Fully autonomous, 1x speed, one model, same weights. (Enjoy with sound on)

We are approaching the endgame for robotics.

And this is just a beginning.

[signüll @signulll]

everyone assumed ai would flatten the talent distribution.. turns out it amplifies the hell out of it.

it used to be: can you build it.

now it’s: do you know what’s worth building, & can you feel when it’s wrong.

that’s ~unteachable & ~unautomatable right now. models can generate 100 variants of anything but they still can’t tell you which one matters.

amazing talent is roughly priceless in the ai era because with ai it’s leverage++++++.

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

Announcing my new thing:

I'm launching a new public venture fund

USVC is built by AngelList with @naval shaping our investment strategy in the technology companies building our future

And unlike traditional venture funds, everyone can invest along with just $500:

[Bharani Vasudev Setlur @Setlur]

Working along with AI is 'inception dream layers', both from a context management, and time dilation.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

My idea of a good time is working with amazing engineers to create incredible technology 🤩

The Tesla chip research fab will have all the machines needed to do logic, memory, packing & masks in one building for a lightning fast development cycle. Heaven 💫

[BITS Pilani @bitspilaniindia]

We are pleased to share that Prof. Richa Singhal (Department of Chemical Engineering), BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus, has been awarded an Advanced Research Grant by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), Government of India.

Sanctioned Amount: ₹74,04,480
Duration: 3 years
Scheme: Advanced Research Grant (ARG)

The project focuses on converting carbon dioxide into high-value carbon nanofibers using electrochemical processes paving the way for breakthroughs in energy storage (supercapacitors, Li-ion batteries), sustainable manufacturing, and carbon-negative technologies.

Congratulations, Prof. Singhal!

#BITSPilani #BITSGoa #ResearchExcellence #ANRF #Innovation #Sustainability #CleanEnergy #CarbonCapture

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

- Drafted a blog post
- Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours.
- Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing!
- Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite.
- LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true.
- lol

The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

[Google Research @GoogleResearch]

Introducing TurboQuant: Our new compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by at least 6x and delivers up to 8x speedup, all with zero accuracy loss, redefining AI efficiency. Read the blog to learn how it achieves these results: https://t.co/CDSQ8HpZoc

[signüll @signulll]

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person.

when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that.

i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it.

& the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start.

the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled.

before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

Nittobo is a Japanese glass fiber company with 2,745 employees. Nvidia, Apple, Google, Amazon, AMD, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have all sent executives to Japan to personally lobby for supply. T-glass forms the structural core of every AI chip substrate. Nittobo controls 90% of it. It sells for $80 to $100 per kilogram. Standard glass fiber is $3 to $5. The thermal expansion has to match silicon almost exactly or the substrate warps and the chip fails. Nvidia locked up supply through long-term binding contracts. New capacity won't arrive until 2027. The CEO told Nikkei he won't expand at the pace of the AI market. He doesn't need to.

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

Wang Xingxing is showing confidence in the safety and reliability of his creations.

[anand iyer @ai]

Every API call an agent makes today requires an account, an API key, and a credit card on file. That breaks down when you have thousands of agents making millions of microtransactions per day. x402 uses HTTP's own 402 "Payment Required" status code, reserved and unused since the '90s, to let agents pay per-request with USDC stablecoins.

Stripe building their machine payments preview on top of it means merchants get the familiar PaymentIntents API with sales tax, refunds, and reporting built in.

[Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein]

Autonomous agents are an entirely new category of users to build for, and, increasingly, to sell to.

Today, we’re launching (a preview) of machine payments on @stripe—a way for developers to directly charge agents, with a few lines of code. 🤖💸

$ Let’s start tinkering… ⤵️

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

Global GDP growth has been stuck at 3% for 125 years.
ARK is projecting 7% by 2030.
When I asked @elonmusk about this, he went even further — 5x GDP growth in two years.
The 80% of people at Davos who don't believe this are anchoring on linear experience in an exponential world.