Karthik Vellanki

Building @ontaurushq

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

Full announcement: https://t.co/UQHxP5e0Fl

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

We just raised $4.3M from @generalcatalyst with participation from @gokulr, @toddgoldberg, @rahulvohra, @aarthir to build an AI-native consumer brands company that owns, launches and operates brands end-to-end.

Consumer brands are still built with fragmented teams, slow feedback loops, and manual workflows. We’re replacing that with a unified stack of AI agents that owns and operates our brands.

We’re building the AI-native Procter & Gamble - powered by agents, not org charts.

If you want to solve hard agentic problems and move atoms at the speed of bits, come join us. It’ll be fun!

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@hahnbeelee grep works well for coding agents because you’re generally looking for function names which are precise. Outside of coding, semantic search still has a lot of utility.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@evanjconrad @HotAisle “There’s always a buyer” ≠ Risk Management. Markets will clear even in a downturn but doesn’t mean every seller can stay solvent. I see how SFC is valuable by making it easy to find compute, but I don’t see it covering risk. Airbnb is a great marketplace but doesn’t cover risk.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@tanayj @thinkymachines Second order effects of Nvidia having such insane margins.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@solarizid @typedfemale Hiring TPU kernel engineers definitely doesn’t mean they’re losing money on inference. Every AI lab has kernel engineers, it’s just table stakes.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@mayfer This seems to be conflating representation with the actual number? The representation of irrational numbers maybe a function but the number itself is a fixed and single value. The hypotenuse of a right triangle with two sides of length 1 is very much a fixed value.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@tszzl This isn’t a great analogy. Ads manager doesn’t have any value by itself, even if didn’t exist at all, media buyers would physically call to buy ads on Meta. If ads manager stopped growing and became culturally irrelevant, people would still use it.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@Austen Not to sound pedantic, but low level coding still exists in that scenario. Even if you abstract away everything, the instructions sets to do matrix multiplication is still code.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@skdh @bernieblume Shouldn’t theoretical physics be before math? Math is more fundamental than physics.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@lulumeservey He gets criticized for inaction but I’ve never heard a compelling argument on what “exactly” he could have done differently. He could have managed Wall Street better but there’s no way Larry/Sergey/Zuck/Satya would have even attempted to disrupt the greatest cash cow ever seen.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@deedydas @JeffBrines These are all very good when you start from scratch and want to generate a video, but they fall short when you want to maintain continuity and consistency with characters/scene. And there’s really no concept of “editing” yet - they regenerate the entire video again.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@dnlkwk M&A, and more specifically the serial M&A you need for roll ups is not trivial. There’s a huge possibility of adverse selection where you’re only able to acquire bad companies or overpay. The well run companies with a high NPS are equipped to infuse AI and scale on their own

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@andrewmccalip You need both a high tolerance for risk and a strong, centralized regime to build mega-projects. Think pyramids, Trans-Siberian Railway, Panama Canal, Three Gorges Dam. Even the Hoover Dam cost 100+ lives - something no modern democracy would politically tolerate today.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@gauravvohra > Away from laptop for 10 mins
> Repeat security theater

We don’t give Google enough credit for making auth nearly seamless and incredibly secure. Every other auth system punishes you with bad UX to pretend to be more secure.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@ludwigABAP Since the moon landing, infant mortality rate dropped 73% and life expectancy is up by 15 years - which surely counts as progress outside the world of bits. Stagnation narratives are driven by unmet sci-fi dreams (flying cars, jet packs). We just progressed on different vectors.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@ptsi @haridigresses @altcap a) probably doesn’t apply in this deal right? I don’t think Thrive is struggling to get into any deals. If anything, their “loss leader” deal was OpenAI which allows them to get into any deal they really want to.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@celinehalioua @lisabonos @washingtonpost Noob question: what’s the expected increase in lifespan (either in number of years or avg lifespan)?

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@signulll Counterpoint: they “lost” the shopping walled garden 2 decades ago to Amazon, but product search is still a massive business.

They own YouTube and Meta allowed Instagram to be indexed. Google can’t/won’t build creator ecosystems on all paradigms but it’s not a lost cause.

[Karthik Vellanki @wekarthik]

@chamath @levie Forking android would have made no difference. They wanted to reach the Apple consumer base in ways Apple wasn’t permitting them to do. Apple consumers are not switching to a fork of android. They can do anything they want on Android now (without worrying about anti trust)