Simran Malhotra

Building @VegaStack with @kmanojkumar. Follow along for rants, fails, and tiny wins ✨

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

building a startup in 2026 is a completely different game than 3 yrs ago, this podcast is the clearest breakdown of what actually matters now

on ideas - ideas are not valuable. everyone has them. what matters is founder-market fit. did you live this problem so deeply that no one can tell you it's not real? Shopify founder just wanted to sell snowboards. Stripe founders just thought internet payments should work better. the company came from frustration, not a smart idea.

on building - Wispr Flow's biggest insight wasn't voice to text, it was that when you dictate, you're running two brain processes at once - one thinking about the idea, one thinking about punctuation and formatting, they killed the second one. That's why users don't say it makes them fast, they say it feels effortless, that's the depth of insight that builds a billion dollar product.

on competing with big companies - big companies can only obsess over a few things at once, everything else ships at 60%, that 40% gap is exactly where startups win. Anthropic won enterprise by saying no to everything except code for 3 straight years, Focus is not a strategy - it's the whole game.

on distribution - the cost of building software has collapsed, the new bottleneck isn't how hard it is to build, it's how fast you can get it in front of ppl and whether they stay. Great talent is also scarce now coz the best ppl just start their own thing instead of joining yours. Wispr Flow solves this by hiring ex-founders and giving them entire business units to run with agents.

on markets - just because the market doesn't exist doesn't mean the idea is wrong. Uber, Airbnb, Stripe - none of those markets existed before they created them. the founder believed it before anyone else did, that belief is the only thing that keeps you going when 20 VCs say no.

on iteration - iteration velocity solves every problem, not just engineering ones, every great company looks obvious in hindsight. Google had 10 search competitors, the devil is always in the details nobody wants to talk about.

on SF - SF is the only place in the world where a billionaire brags about driving a Chevy Bolt, money is low signal, building is the only status symbol. Everywhere else conversations feel one click behind not coz ppl aren't smart, but the environment around you decides whether your delusional ambition gets encouraged or killed. SF encourages it, most places don't.

on finding your ppl - if you feel like no one around you gets it, don't go looking for a community, build something and put it out. the right ppl find you. A Discord, a GitHub repo, a tweet - whatever, every person in this podcast found each other by doing stuff publicly.

what all of this adds up to - the game has changed but the filter hasn't, are you building or are you talking about building?

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@vaaselene losing connection to your own product is the quiet killer, you don't notice it happening, you just slowly stop caring about details that used to matter, and users feel that gap before you even admit it to yourself

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@Business_Nerd_ I think about this a lot, the ppl who leave at the hardest moment aren't wrong exactly, they just can't see what you see yet. and you can't fully explain it either, which is the loneliest part

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@AlexHormozi energy spent deciding drains the same tank as energy spent doing

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

slop isn't a prompt problem, it's a systems problem.

a factory shipping defective units doesn't have a worker problem, it has a quality control problem. nobody is checking the output before it leaves the building. the fix isn't to blame the worker, it's to build the checkpoint.

same with AI output, the prompt got you 80% there. the missing 20% is the review step most teams skipped when they automated the workflow. someone needs to own the output before it reaches the customer, a human eye, a second pass, a standard for what good looks like.

the teams producing slop aren't using worse AI, they just never built the gate.

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@SimonHoiberg same thing happened with stackoverflow, then no-code, then copilot,eventually the debate stops and it just becomes how you work

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@hnshah predictions are mostly for ppl watching from the sidelines, if you're actually in it, you're too busy reacting to what just changed to have strong opinions about what's coming next

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@elgermerlo 2am brain skips all the second-guessing and just ships, turns out that's sometimes the feature without all the overthinking baked in

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@hnshah and because every thought can land somewhere, nothing has to be finished before it gets shared, which is why half of what we see online is someone thinking out loud and calling it a take

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

Most people confuse AI SDK, AI Gateway, LLMs, and Embedding Models.

Here's how they actually fit together:

𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗗𝗞 = the library you install in your codebase

It's how you write code that talks to AI models, generateText(), streamText(), useChat(). Runs inside your app.

𝗩𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘄𝗮𝘆 = cloud infrastructure your requests pass through one API key. Built-in caching, cost tracking, rate limiting across all providers. Not a model. Not required, but useful at scale.

They're not alternatives. They work together:

Your Code (AI SDK) → Vercel AI Gateway → Claude / GPT-4 / Gemini

𝗟𝗟𝗠𝘀 𝘃𝘀 𝗘𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀: two completely different jobs:

LLMs → generate text (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini)

Embedding Models → convert text to numbers to find meaning and similarity. They don't generate anything.

They're used together in RAG:

→ Embedding model finds the right documents from your knowledge base

→ LLM reads them and generates the answer

Building AI products means knowing which tool does what.

Confusing these leads to wrong architecture decisions.

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@josephmiclaus 💯

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

The X algorithm isn’t deciding if your post is good.

It’s running ~20 separate bets on how each person will react to it, and quietly subtracting points every time it thinks someone will scroll past.

Once you see the scorecard, you can’t unsee it. 🧵

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@itss_miniii 💯

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

CLIs are becoming the product surface again.

Not because terminals got fashionable. Because coding agents read `--help`, try commands, recover from errors, and keep going.

A 401 should not just say "unauthorized". It should tell the agent the exact reauth command. Interactive for humans. Non-interactive for agents. Useful errors for both.

Anyone shipping a CLI in 2026 is actually shipping 2 products.

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

@zarazhangrui the build is finite, the attention problem never is - you can ship and be done, but distribution is a treadmill you never get off

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

Vibe coding is not agentic coding.

Vibe coding is accepting output because it looks right. Agentic coding is pair programming with a very fast junior engineer who sometimes lies with perfect confidence.

Read the diff. Challenge the plan. Use sub-agents for review.

The human is still the control plane.

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

X’s feed isn’t random. For each post, it predicts how you’ll react, weights ~20 signals, subtracts the negatives, penalizes spam and repeat-posting, and filters the rest.

Write for a long look, a private share, and a new follow.

That’s the whole equation.

[Simran Malhotra @simran1596]

Before scoring even happens, a post is dropped if:

→ It’s too old

→ The viewer muted or blocked you

→ Your text contains a keyword they muted

→ They already saw it

And after scoring, a safety layer screens for spam and low-quality content, a flagged post is removed no matter how high it ranked.