If you spend a week in the bubble, you’d be convinced that by next quarter every human interaction will have been successfully outsourced to a swarm of autonomous agents. The “AGI is coming” energy is so dense that it feels like a mandatory atmosphere.

Then you leave the bubble. You fly anywhere else, and the rest of the world is on a completely different plane. They are still struggling with the “Amnesiac Agency” problem — people who forget context and losing institutional knowledge like it’s loose change.

Truth is, the inevitability of an agent-first economy is real.

At Engram, we are observing a massive re-routing of the GTM stack. We aren’t just moving to a generalised AI economy. It’s a detailed, orchestrated Agent Economy where everything is led by the conductor holding the baton.

So if you aren’t building an agent-proof business today, you are effectively becoming invisible to your customers of tomorrow.

Selling to Silicon, not Carbon

For twenty years, marketing was about optimizing for humans. We built for “vibes” and the LinkedIn dopamine scroll.

That is shifting. Decisions are no longer being made solely by humans clicking a link. They are being made by agents scanning your technical documentation, your founder’s social signals, and your historical decision-making patterns.

An agent evaluates you on Semantic Consistency. If your LinkedIn post says you are “customer-first” but your documentation reads “feature-obsessed,” an agent flags that as a hallucination risk. We’ve started agent-proofing our own presence at Engram to ensure that when an autonomous researcher scans us, the provenance of our claims is verifiable across every surface.

The Tactical Logic: How Agents “Judge” You

This isn’t just theory. The framework of how agents evaluate other agents is already being standardized. A bit of nerd-ing out, if you will.

The foundational work here is “Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench” (Zheng et al., 2024), which explored how models use chain-of-thought grading to audit the reasoning of other models. That framework is now showing up in production — in UC Berkeley’s recent work on agentified assessment, where assessor agents audit other agents through standardized interfaces, and in the evaluation logic embedded in Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol. [Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05685]

When a “Buyer Agent” evaluates your company, it isn’t just looking for keywords. It is auditing your Reasoning Trace. It asks: Does this company’s past behavior support their current claims?

So what do you do to build an ‘Agent-proof’ company?

A disclaimer, this is something every founder building today is asking. Nobody knows the right concrete answer to it but a few tactical areas that are setting frameworks:

1. Metadata over Prose: Agents ingest structured data faster than marketing copy. Your technical documentation and site metadata must be as high-fidelity as your homepage.

2. Linguistic Fingerprinting: Generic prompts produce generic outcomes. To stand out, you need a system that ensures every output carries your specific brand “fingerprint” and institutional memory.

3. The Reasoning Ledger: Agents are built to find inefficiencies. They look for the delta between what you say and what you actually ship. Shoring up your brand means closing that delta.

Which means, dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Bring clarity even if you evolve. Stay consistent. Show up and do the things that build repetition that grows in an upward spiral because the only way out of the cluelessness is through experimentation and evaluation.

And lastly, take time to think things through and build a qualitative benchmark that you, your team are able to document and map so you know what got you where. (a realistic but shameless plug to the whole reason we’re building a marketing brain with memory that’s sharp to remember how you behave and why you do)

The Heart of the Machine: Where People Fit In

The agent economy will arrive unevenly, the way every technology shift does. Most of the global economy still runs on WhatsApp messages, word of mouth, and relationships.

This raises the obvious question: Where do people fit in?

The truth is, people will always sell to people. The agents are just the orchestrators. The real leverage isn’t in the automation itself, but in the taste, rationale, and judgment that feeds it. It’s the human who orchestrates the agents, and that human’s intuition is what changes how agents are trained and how they operate.

This is the heart and soul(MD) of what we are building at Engram. We are teaching AI to understand a business by keeping the intuition and judgment of a founder at the centre. The pattern mapping we do is specific to a high standard of outcome, not just a generic prompt simulation.

Brand matters now more than ever. When everyone is selling the same commoditized functionality, your brand—and the human judgment behind it—is the only thing that separates you. Agents and humans alike are going to need that differentiator to make a decision.

The agents are already watching. The question is: what are they learning about you?

Not too long ago I decided to lean into art I find inspiring to reference my writing - even if it’s about technology and AI. The deeper I build, the more I desire comprehension of what I can’t articulate.

Visual credit: Sol LeWitt’s work is enigmatic. He leaves instructions for his viewers on how to engage with his art. Although most of his work was in the 80s, the ironic corelation to agentic orchestration feels like an imitation of life for many. More about his work here.

The chat box is a temporary window. Useful, but fleeting. (And frankly, a bit exhausting to keep talking to.) The actual unlock happens when AI stops asking you for instructions and starts reminding you of your own intentions.

I’ve been running tiny experiments with Engram for the past 4 weeks that have helped me unlock the latter. It started with a simple goal: show up better online.

Here’s what actually happened.

Four weeks ago I set up an experiment. The cover story was “show up better on social.” The real experiment was something else: I wanted to see if I could use Engram to embed myself inside a specific ecosystem — founders building in AI, specifically around context, memory, interfacing, infrastructure — and let the process of engaging in public surface the trends that mattered before they became obvious.

I fed it everything. Tone of voice. Writing style. How I think. What we’re building at Engram. Transcripts of customer calls. Then I gave it four narrow topics and said: everything else is noise. (more succinct prompting, I realise, works better)

For the next month I did targeted reply-guy work with intent. Tweets were surfaced to me every few hours — the ones on my radar, with response angles already drafted. I showed up in the same rooms, over and over, until the rooms started showing up for me.

The hypothesis underneath all this: industry trends move top-down. The people experimenting in public, inside the closed echo chamber, are usually the ones who find the thing that eventually becomes the mainstream use case. For a company building in marketing, trend mapping isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.

What I didn’t expect was how much the experiment would sharpen the product I was building while I was running it.

Four things the ecosystem is actually saying

After a month of this, four patterns showed up across founders in SF and Bangalore, across timezones, across stacks. All of them, it turned out, circling the same underlying problem: memory synthesis.

1. The commoditization of content vs. the scarcity of taste.

Austen, Polina, Udayan — different threads, same observation. AI removed the floor on production. Anyone can generate a GTM plan or a blog post in three seconds, which means the baseline output feels aggressively average. Mid, as the kids say.

The POV I kept coming back to: content is effectively free now, so its value is trending toward zero. The leverage has shifted entirely from making the thing to knowing what to make. Judgment and taste are the only things that don’t commoditize when software layers converge. Everything else is a race to the bottom.

2. Context fragmentation at scale — the team brain crisis.

This one was loud. Jian Wang’s four-layer context system, Shann’s “marketing council” concept, a dozen quieter threads about knowledge management breaking as teams scale. Companies are moving so fast that half the team doesn’t know why the other half is running a campaign.

AI companies are usually the first to break under context loss because they move at 10x speed. Without a centralized memory layer, you’re just burning tokens on entropy. Memory is the only mechanism that lets a brand compound instead of resetting to zero with every new hire or campaign.

3. Auditing and infrastructure as peace of mind.

Guillermo Rauch, Kunal Shah, and a growing chorus of operators are pivoting how they talk about AI. It’s moving from execution engine to auditing and infrastructure layer. The focus is on finding inefficiencies, preventing downtime, avoiding lock-in — not pumping out more volume.

Using AI to audit where your brand narrative is leaking is a higher-ROI move than generating more tweets. Moving brand compliance and context to the gateway level is how you prevent catastrophic context loss at speed. This isn’t a productivity play. It’s an insurance play.

4. Interface shifts — from output to memory.

Vinit Sarode, KreditBee’s CEO, a handful of others pushing toward voice-first and highly contextual UX — where the app actually alters its behavior based on listening to the user’s specific history.

The defining interface question for the next generation of AI products isn’t “what does it output?” It’s “what does it remember, and for whom?” Most tools give you a fresh, amnesiac brain every time you open a tab. The winners are the ones that hold the context of your last 100 decisions — the ones where the interaction feels like fate rather than math.

The Throughline: Cost of Amnesiac AI

Four different patterns, one underlying pain: the cost of amnesiac AI. Volume is a trap and memory is the moat.

Every one of these observations is really a symptom of the same thing: we built AI tools that forget you the second you close the tab, and now we’re trying to patch the problem with longer context windows, more prompts, better templates. It’s not working. The floor keeps falling out because the foundation was never there.

Which brings me back to this post you started reading.

I didn’t write it. Engram did — because for the last four weeks it has been reading my tweets, my drafts, my calls, the arguments I make in public, the ones I abandon before sending.

Ysterday I replied to a Greg Isenberg thread about AI agencies. I didn’t log it, didn’t flag it, didn’t tell Engram it mattered. By end of day it had pulled a thesis out of that reply I hadn’t named yet and drafted a piece around it. (more on that soon)

That’s not a longer context window. That’s shared memory. A system that reads information like patterns, not outcomes. One that works when I don’t. One that finds context when I don’t provide any. One that’s learning who I am while I’m busy being me.

The interface of the future isn’t a better chat box. It’s the “what” that stays behind once the session ends. The people I’ve been watching for a month already know this. They just haven’t named it yet.

Not too long ago I decided to lean into art I find inspiring to reference my writing - even if it’s about technology and AI. The deeper I build, the more I desire comprehension of what I can’t articulate.

Visual credit: Vera Molnar, De La Serie (Des) Ordres (detail), 1974. Vera Molnar was thinking algorithmically about painting in the late 1950s, before she ever touched a computer. Her philosophical core was “Je ne trouve peut-être pas, mais je cherche” (”I may not find, but I seek”), and she eventually learned to code to build an entire system she called the machine imaginaire, where the whole point was to introduce a little disorder into a strict order. Her body of work is deep. Here’s an interview that will blow your mind!

Somehow chat has become the de facto start point for AI products. It just reminds me of my own Claude projects workflow: threads with no names, context that doesn’t carry, starting over all the time.

All through the sprint I kept thinking: we’re building intelligence products inside interfaces that are making people work more, not less. Which is very, very counterintuitive.

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with a customer whose meticulousness I have deep respect for. I got a preview into her Claude projects. Manually written markdown files, detailed skill files, an entire backup architecture built by hand. I kid you not — it was impressive. They’re still early, haven’t shipped yet. But one of the things that genuinely worried me was this: the minute she goes from planning to execution, her being the load-bearing wall of context and structure — in an ecosystem where there are multiple people, voices, and data points coming in — is going to be exhausting. Most products today cannot hold that kind of context. Which also made me think about why I decided to build in AI in the first place.

I genuinely believe AI can do my job. At least most of it. The parts that involve pattern recognition, synthesis, research, drafting, understanding market signals, orchestrating across surfaces — yes, absolutely. The parts that are human behavior led and relationship building — I don’t think AI can do that, and honestly, I’m not ready to let go of it either. But in this attempt to be very intentionally made redundant, I notice how many people would love for that kind of redundancy to exist.

And then I look at my own workflow — and it’s a case in point of everything I just described.

Last week I spent maybe three hours on a piece that should have taken fifteen minutes. Not because I was thinking hard, I was fighting the interface. Telling it this is not what I sound like. Trying to optimize my project for the correct tone, structure, voice — over and over, in a flat conversation thread with no memory of what we’d worked on the week before.

The model is not the problem. I keep coming back to that.

Models have the capability. It’s the interface that models come packaged in that expects people to do more cognitive work, not less. As someone spending at least four to five hours a day actively using AI to do my work, I want the context, I want the continuity, I want the product to do what it’s supposed to do.

Not a skill issue - an interface issue.

What we’re doing (and expecting) is asking a linear, static surface to sustain the complexity of a human mind mid-execution. 

Before we even get to the question of AI taking jobs: if that’s the ambition, if these products are supposed to replace meaningful human work, then the interface has to show up for how people actually work. Not how we work when we’re planning. How we work when we’re doing.

Planning and doing are not the same cognitive mode. Planning is linear enough for chat to hold. Doing is a feedback mechanism — there’s contradiction, there’s information coming in sideways, there’s brainstorming, visualization, decisions that reverse themselves mid-thought. The surface has to hold all of that without asking you to reconstruct everything each time you sit down to execute.

Chat was designed for attention. Real-time, responsive, presence-based. What it was not built for is execution. And yet here we are — with complex orchestration fully possible on the backend, with visual outputs that are actually buildable — still defaulting to one flat thread as the primary workspace. That doesn’t seem as much as a technical constraint as an uncreative design choice.

The question our sprint kept surfacing: how are we designing AI products to bake in efficiency, bake in output, when we’re making them completely static?

We want to emulate the human mind. I would not want to emulate your mind only through chat. That curiosity for interface design — for understanding how a human mind actually moves through work — is something I’m bringing into our customer discovery now. Watching how people think and work has been more valuable than understanding the pain point we think we’re solving.

Founders who have built workarounds around this — markdown systems, elaborate project memories, six-step prompt flows — I get it, I really do. But that’s not their job. Their job is to build their company.

Every time I see one of those “here are six Claude prompts to build out your GTM marketing flow”, I want to find the Series A AI founder or the GTM head who’s actually using it without rebuilding the context every other Monday.

Behavior over workflow. That’s the shift.

So yes — Lord, please make me redundant.
(Lord, in this case, is mostly our engineering team and the patience of our customers)

We’re here to build the thing that can do everything I’ve ever had to do professionally, so I can do the parts that actually need me. If we get this right, I’ll call you all for my gallery opening by the time I’m 40.

FWIW, we can’t get there inside a chat window. Intelligence needs somewhere to live and it’s not in a chat thread. Especially not one that will confidently tell you it’s still 2024. Looking at you, Claude.

Not too long ago I decided to lean into art I find inspiring to reference my writing - even if it’s about technology and AI. The deeper I build, the more I desire comprehension of what I can’t articulate.

Visual credits: Artist Refik Anadol’s Inner Portrait (this project creates beautiful AI Data paintings from biological and neurobiological data of travellers experiencing a new culture for the first time) Shivers.

And thus every debate speech of mine, even for topics I didn’t agree with (politically or morally), I began with breaking things down to their definition.

This is a long-winded way of saying that’s where I learnt first principle thinking and today, that’s how I’m going to lean into what I want to write about: Speed and Coherence in AI Companies.

What’s Speed (hello 7th grade physics): Speed is a scalar quantity measuring the rate at which an object covers distance per unit of time, indicating how fast an object moves without regard to direction.

What’s Coherence: The quality of being logical and consistent.

What’s an AI Company: A company that specializes in developing and implementing machine learning, analytics, and automation solutions for various industries.

So what really is speed and coherence in AI companies and why does it matter?

When a business exists to optimize and automate faster than humans can, it needs to prove its quality constantly. And it needs to do it fast - AI is growing exponentially faster than the internet did. The credibility of these companies rests on showing up consistently, with accountability.

The kicker: Speed is survival, coherence is credibility. And when you’re fighting change you can’t control, most companies only get to pick one.

Here’s what that looks like:

A founder I spoke with recently - let’s call him J - runs a top-tier AI company. They move fast. Really fast. That speed is part of their edge, part of what makes them exciting.

Last week, J and his marketing lead saw a trend taking off on Twitter. They got excited, created content around it, shipped it same day. Great, right? Except three days earlier, they’d made a strategic decision about their positioning that this new content completely contradicted.

J realized it afterward. The content performed fine. Maybe even well. But it created what he called “brand shame” - that feeling when what you put out doesn’t match what you said you’re building.

This isn’t a one-off. And it’s mostly structural.

So what do people do?

They add more tools. Social listening platforms. Content calendars. Analytics dashboards. Sentiment trackers. Something to help them move faster, make decisions quicker, keep up with the pace.

But more tools doesn’t create coherence. It creates more information.

Most tools today either help you generate content at scale or analyze existing content. They close the wrong gap. The gap isn’t knowing what happened, it is knowing what to do next given what you said mattered before - in context to what you see happening in your landscape.

The decisions we make live in our heads, in slack threads, in meeting notes - everything that gets buried when the ‘right’ time arrives to use it. So when something exciting happens there’s nothing that says: “Hey, this doesn’t align with what you decided was important last week.”

What does coherence require?

Coherence requires context that moves beyond an individual’s memory. It needs a holistic purview of what works, why it works and what form of clarity and understanding is needed to go from A to B.

Coherence in marketing looks like the coming together of not just who exists in your brand’s landscape, but understanding:
- why they talk the way they do
- how it relates to their customers and yours, and an overlap
- why a person picks a product over another
- the sentiment of the market
- socio-economic trends that impact your business
- and occasionally, knowing your founder’s taste preferences.

What separates the good from the great (Lovable comes pretty close to doing this incredibly well) is the ability to bring this level of intention to every piece of content you put out — on a team level. Unsustainable and sort of impossible at scale.

What’s shifting in 2026?

It’s the second accepted wisdom that software is not a differentiator anymore. Each of my pieces extensively cover why the equity of a brand matters now more than ever — and it’s because there’s nothing else that will help you sell a product for a longer duration while giving you grace even when you go through pivots.

We’re all using AI and with it coming into the consumer space even more deeply, it’s left the tech echo-chamber. For the first time in enterprise, the lifespan of founder-led sales, has shortened.

The goal has become moving coherently at speed. The companies that figure this out will compound; the ones that don't will just be fast and forgettable.

What this means?

A tectonic shift in how we present ourselves.

For founders: That looks like recognising that while speed matters, coherence at scale from day 0 matters even more. It looks like an early recognition of the truth that our businesses are not us - and that even though we bring them into being - they will need to take on a shape of their own much sooner.

For industries: Context synthesis and intelligence is the next infrastructure layer. You can’t afford individualistic decision making on static documentation.

And for me: This is why we're building Engram. Because I've raised brands, I believe in their power to change how people think and act. The life work is to bring this together with technology to as many companies as possible. So when brand intelligence is debated in the future, the definition will read as: speed + coherence + meaningful design.

Obviously, 8-year-old me wasn’t looking at it from the lens of business or product, but recognizing preference for one thing over another made me very aware of how things made me feel.

(And those who’ve known me for decades know that I have very big feelings about the most mundane things in life. It’s my secret weapon.)

Which is where and how I fell in love with anything that would evoke feelings—whether it was fashion, design, movies, music, ads, art, television, books, writing. I got lost in all kinds of worlds that connected with something within me in ways inexplicable. The more I felt inward, the more I realized people around me experienced the same for other things.

As I grew older and came closer to understanding what a career is, the underlying manifestation of wanting to do things that made people feel continued to stay alive. And today, as I build in technology, I carry that same desire—layered with sensibilities on business, people, industries (…and increasing shareholder value!)

I’ve been watching the Making of the Eras Tour this week, which inspired me to write this piece. The world of being a creative has always inspired the business sensibility in me, because brands are the business of feelings.

I have a deep respect and appreciation for the entire universe Taylor Swift has created on things that go beyond her music. You don’t even have to be a Swiftie to recognize the genius behind her empire and the rolling impact everything she does has.

She’s so deliberate about tracking what lands. She doesn’t just perform. She builds micro-stories and context from every era. She picks cultural moments depending on which country she’s playing in. She synthesizes fan reactions. It’s calculated artistry that comes from SO much data and social listening.

Watching the making of is a masterclass in business, a great founder, and an incredible brand that will definitely stand the test of time.

We live in an age where technology is driving so many of our decisions, and our jobs are intertwining with our passions in a way like never before. You could wake up one morning and decide to build a business, and AI will get you 70% there.

In a world where we all can and are becoming founders, what are we doing about how we’re remembered?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about—as these companies grow, these founders are not stuck at the ‘making’ stage; they’re stuck at the ‘mattering’ point. And mattering requires something most people think they can skip: understanding culture. Culture, as infrastructure.

You might be building a CRM, but your users are people who listen to Charli XCX, who have opinions about A24 films, who feel something when they see a certain shade of purple.

Even the most utilitarian software lives inside a cultural moment. The companies that understand this—that track what’s resonating, what’s shifting, what their audience is paying attention to—build brands that feel alive. And the ones that don’t are just another tool in a sea of tools.

This is where brand intelligence comes in. Brand intelligence—the synthesized understanding of culture, taste, and preference that compounds over time. Not brand guidelines nor aesthetics.

It’s what made 8-year-old Shagun pick Barbie. What makes someone choose between Slack or Discord. The accumulated context about why things resonate is our gateway to bringing delight and nuance to our businesses and products.

Intelligence is taste, with a side of pattern recognition, decision-making matrices, data and trend maps, human behavior analysis, and understanding the brain of an ecosystem. AI cannot replace taste, but it CAN synthesize the rest.

And that’s exactly what I intend to spend the next many years of my life building.

Engram is my attempt at solving this: a brand intelligence platform that captures taste, synthesizes culture, and compounds context over time—so it doesn't disappear when people leave.

I spent the first decade of my career learning everything I could about art, design, brands, and business. The next decade is going to be dedicated to building technology around that learning.

So the next set of businesses selling CRM to people who were once Barbie-collecting 8-year-olds will know what delights to add to their product experience, even if just for unserious kicks!

Part II is my attempt to answer that.

These are field notes on what seems to be working in AI communities right now—not prescriptive advice, but observations from running community for an AI fund, building events, and learning from people like Annie Warner at .

So, here’s what seems to be working!

1. Communities Are About People and Their Curiosity

We need to realize that communities are about people and their curiosity to get information. We all like to be in the inner circle. We all like to know.

The best way to do that is to ensure that people are able to feed into that curiosity with intent but also genuinity.

What does that look like for an AI startup? What’s the next build going to look like? What’s the next problem you’re solving? Whether it’s a feature, a platform extension, maybe a pivot.

Getting some hint into that helps people reimagine—curiosity feeds into imagination, and you’re essentially doing more than just telling them about a product.

Test it: Share one behind-the-scenes update this week (a feature in progress, a problem you’re stuck on, a decision you’re wrestling with) and ask your community: “What would you do?”

2. Build Around What Feels Natural

Build around what feels natural and mirror your personality—or give it shape and let it roll.

It’s really important to recognize this. It’s all right if you are not the most extroverted extrovert out there who can run community, but you have to also recognize that building around what feels natural to you—if you don’t have resources—or giving it to somebody who can emulate and understand your end goal and letting them roll with it, matters.

You are the conductor, not the orchestra.

Test it: Identify one community activity that drains you. Either delegate it or kill it. Double down on what feels natural to your energy.

3. Have One Foot In, One Foot Out (When It Comes to Creative Control)

Have one foot in the door, one foot out of the door when it comes to creative control. I know it is really hard to let go, but oftentimes having things take shape and form is the best way to let community build.

Annie told me something interesting during the conversation we had: they don’t have tons of rules in their Slack, but they’re ruthlessly stringent about self-promotion.

Most channels are completely free from it, which means folks don’t feel like they’re just in a channel where people drop their own LinkedIn stuff all the time.

That single constraint creates psychological safety. People show up to genuinely help, not to pitch.

For AI communities, this is crucial. Your early members are likely building their own startups or side projects. If every conversation becomes a disguised sales pitch, trust evaporates.

Test it: Pick ONE behavior you want to eliminate from your community. Enforce it consistently for 30 days and watch if the quality of conversation changes.

4. Build Experiences and Put Effort In

People want to see you work hard. It’s literally like a romantic relationship.

They want:

• In-person experiences

• Online experiences

• Something unique, something exclusive, something curated—the whole spectrum

And the truth is you have to identify what that balance looks like for you as a founder and as a business.

The best communities figure out their channels. Email brings people back. Slack or Discord facilitates real-time help and async discussion. In-person events create high-touch, curated experiences. Each serves a different function.

The communities that feel most alive aren’t the ones with the most channels or members. They’re the ones where every interaction feels intentional. Quality over quantity—turn down partnerships and growth opportunities if they don’t hit your bar.

Small gestures compound too. Physical mugs for custom emojis. Handwritten notes. Small tokens that cost $15 but signal: We see you. We appreciate the tiny things you do to make this place feel like ours.

Test it: Pick one small behavior you want to encourage (intro posts, helping others, creative contributions). Reward it with something tiny but personal and see if that behavior increases.

5. Don’t Control the Narrative—Shape-Shift Around a Theme

The reason I say this is because most AI companies and most businesses believe that if you’re investing in something, you need to control the narrative. The truth is you cannot keep controlling all narratives—because then there is no voice. It’s just an agenda, like a corporate deck.

So you have to build around a theme.

If you’re an AI company that is, say, building the infra layer for cybersecurity and you’re running evals, you need to ensure that your community theme isn’t just about your product.

Maybe it’s linked to a broader problem that people are often struggling with or the biggest problem that you want to solve in your line of business. Or it could be something as technical as a research paper-driven discussion, or even a mental model for thinking about the space.

For instance, Anthropic’s community isn’t just “here’s Claude”. It’s “here’s how we think about AI safety and alignment.” The theme is bigger than the product, which gives people room to engage beyond just feature requests.

Set the initial conditions, then let emergence happen. The best communities surprise you. If yours doesn’t, you’re holding too tight.

Test it: Identify the bigger theme your product sits within. Start one conversation around the theme, not your product, and see if it unlocks different kinds of participation.

6. Run Tiny Experiments (And Run Many of Them)

And the last bit is run tiny experiments. I am a big, big believer of ‘s work. And ever since I started reading Tiny Experiments, I have been running them in literally all aspects of my life (Definitely counterintuitive to what the book suggests - but I’m a little excitable about these things. Whoop.)

What I’ve learned from the book is that it allows you to not overthink. It allows you to test something and then decide if it’s working for you or not. You don’t have to commit. You don’t have to get married. People are going to move on if something doesn’t work.

And the beauty of building in AI today is that the world is really forgiving. We are all trying very hard. And we’re all trying to make it. And we understand that things are so new—you cannot know what’s best unless you do it repeatedly.

A good filter: Will this help us grow? And can we execute it at our quality bar? If the answer to both isn’t yes, don’t do it.

When I look at startups today, we’re in the best place to experiment. So try something. If it works, great. Scale it. If it doesn’t work, move on to the next thing.

Test it: Pick one thing you’ve been “thinking about doing” for your community. Run it as a one-time experiment this week and decide after: scale or kill?

The Meta Observation

I realize that while we talk about the future of technology and an emulation of human behavior run purely by artificial intelligence, and how agentic systems are taking away jobs and there is this whole high-noise high-signal thesis in the world around us, we also have to acknowledge that AI is a way of life. We cannot ignore it.

We cannot pretend like it’s not going to exist and shape-shift our jobs and our personal lives for the foreseeable future.

So when I look at community, I really believe that it’s an opportunity to synthesize people. An opportunity to (in real-time) synthesize our existing existentialism, our need for belonging and our dependency on technology — especially when technology will be doing things before we can even think them.

That predictive nature of what we are building through code is going to need a balance of the unpredictive nature of human behavior and human nurturing.

And that’s what communities in AI represent: They’re microcosms of what we’re all building toward. Technology that feels less like extraction and more like collaboration. Products that grow with us, not at us.

The startups that understand community isn’t a feature - it’s a moat - will be the ones still here in five years.

So yes, start that Discord. Launch that WhatsApp group. Host that first awkward meet up where only three people show up.

Because the ones who do show up are not there for the free swag or the LinkedIn post. They’re there because they want to be part of something that hasn’t been built yet.

And that’s the entire point.

Companies fed you content that matched some part of your ‘vibe’, ‘aura’ whatever you’d like to call it—and the active ones engaged with you 1:1 in DMs. They didn’t build whole platforms around keeping you excited.

But these last few years have seen such a massive shift in how we build communities and what that means for startups today. And the evolution of every social media platform’s product strategy stands testament to that change.

There’s a quiet transformation where belonging, not merely broadcasting, has become the new status symbol.

To understand this, let’s go to the basics.

What People Actually Want

People want to be nurtured into being sold to—by a business.

Allow me to explain that. People want effort and they want it consistently. They want their time and money investment to matter beyond just a working product or service.

They want to be seen

They want to matter

They want to belong

And this is where traditional businesses suffer the most.

Traditional vs. New-Age Companies

Traditional businesses behave and believe that by virtue of being an institution, they are far superior compared to mere individuals. They reach a point where they believe small tier engagements don’t support their business objectives. Which might’ve been true a few years ago—but not in the age of AI.

• Take Nike’s Run Club. Nike doesn’t need brand building—they’re Nike. But they’ve built run clubs worldwide because one-on-one nurturing propels what people already love. It’s not about selling shoes; it’s about belonging.

• IBM Watson for Oncology. They built a product for doctors rather than with them, treating oncologists as customers to market to rather than a community to co-create with. The product failed in part because there was no genuine ecosystem.

• Compare that to Hugging Face - they built a community of researchers and builders who want to contribute because they feel ownership. The community isn’t an add-on; it’s the business model.

And now, when you think about new-age companies, they tend to build with you.

Their ego is not with their customer as much as with the industry because the industry is young and new and you’re in a race anyway. The last thing you want to do is fight with the guy who’s giving you water.

This is why newer companies find it easier to build communities. Companies like Gamma, Cursor, Linear have been built by ecosystems that believe in what they’re doing. Users feel seen because founders genuinely get their pain — there’s a strong sense of “they get it.”

Why I Think This Shift Is Happening

Before we get to the patterns, it’s really important to recognize that in a world where we’re constantly online, there is this constant need to be validated, to validate, and to feel like we’re belonging.

Sounds familiar, right?

Think about human evolution. We are a collective species. We are, in some way, going back to our basics - even as we race toward AGI. The shift is coming from this very inherent human trait.

Research on belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) confirms what community builders know intuitively: humans are wired for connection and in the age of AI, that wiring is firing harder than ever.

Here’s how it’s showing up.

1. We’ve Become More Isolated and Individualistic

Our family sizes have gone nuclear. We have traveled and moved and displaced across the world, so our sense of home is very different. We believe in building inner worlds rather than building outer worlds, so to speak. And when we do that, the idea of our outer world is beginning to evolve as well.

So in this isolation and individualism, we realize that we want what’s closest to our cultural becoming — even if you’re actually selling workflow automations.

The idea is not “I want to know what’s in your mind about a workflow automation entirely” as much as it’s about: How are you and I similar if our baseline interest or excitement is a workflow automation?

2. We Believe We Can Make a Difference in Businesses

And there are reasons for this. The world has become more entrepreneurial. There are more founders. The pandemic has given birth to more businesses, and therefore there is a better sensibility of what makes a business and what thrives for a business.

And this allows us to believe that we are instrumental in the change and in the growth trajectory of businesses around us.

And hence, you know, we don’t want to be children of consequence. We want to be in the driver’s seat or at least the GPS map in some capacity to help businesses run and grow.

A great example of this is Chronicle’s community. Every day people talk about features they want, bugs that they’ve reported, and every day the founders relentlessly work towards making those changes.

Similarly, if you’ve ever seen Emergent’s Discord, you will notice there are people in the community who self-volunteer to solve bugs, help other people and really truly enable the community. Prettyyy sure they’re not on payroll!

3. We Actually, Surprisingly, Care

One would assume that there is a saturation, but the truth is we’ve created this whole mindshare on what matters.

Exclusivity + curiosity + validation = belonging
And communities are designed to deliver exactly that.

If you look at any independent community — whether it’s only about AI builders and founders or if it is about freelancers — you’ll realize that communities are now beginning to be designed for all aspects of our insecurities and our need to belong.

These are the strongest signals that each community sort of fosters for us.

So what does this actually look like in practice?

I’ve been running community for an AI-focused fund for the past few months. I’ve been assimilating information through our events, watching founders experiment, and talking to people like Annie Warner who runs ’s community (my favorite ever, might I add).

And the patterns in what’s working and what’s not are beginning to emerge. There’s a whole Part II of field notes sitting neatly in my ‘to-edit’ folder on what I’m noticing works in communities for AI startups.

More on that next week.

The world tells us that all we have at the end of the day is ourselves. It feeds us the idea that we’re the only people we need to keep happy. That even if we have loved ones, colleagues, family — our happiness is fated by how well we keep ourselves content.

The more years I live by myself, the more I yearn for people, community, love. I’m a generally happy person. I have bad days, moody days, but for the most part, I’m truly content.

As someone who spent the better part of the last year in a long-distance relationship, I really had no choice but to develop an internal compass that kept me going, and I can safely say I really enjoy my own company.

But the more I think about life and how people define empowerment in solitude, I find myself disagreeing. Truth is, it’s not empowering. It’s safe. It’s predictable. It’s easy because you know what to expect from yourself on even your worst day.

I used to believe that solitude was the end goal. That if I were able to master being alone, there’d be this life prize at the end of it. “Winner @ Strong Independent Person.” Perhaps back then, that felt true. But truthfully, I was just afraid of needing people who might disappoint me.

(News flash: They do disappoint you, but you still live, and the good ones usually come around.)

It’s like keeping people at arm’s length protects you from the impact of the textures of others’ personalities. And it works, sometimes.

When you’re tired, overwhelmed, emotionally drained — it works. I spent a whole year underground, and while it worked, the past two months of my life shone light on a new truth: it was a temporary cop-out.

Sometimes, when I come home now, the silence is deafening. I taught myself to love solitude. I taught myself to love me. But what I miss cherishing is the messiness of being witnessed.

I had been so afraid of being disappointed by friends, family, and partners that I felt holding back was the only way I’d be okay. But for the first time, I realise leaning into vulnerability and new friendships is doing more for me in this chapter.

I truly cannot pick between being alone and being surrounded by people I love. I find myself thriving in both, and suffering in both — depending on the day. But the aspect of fear is the one that sticks through this.

There’s fear in being alone. And sometimes, I believe, you don’t need to punish yourself with that fear just because it’s safe. It’s hard to be with people. If you know anything about me personally, you’d know how much my life mirrors that reality. But of late, I fear losing people I love the most — more than I fear being impacted by the colors of their good and bad days.

And it’s hard to draw balance. To learn what those boundaries look like. To realise that each time I think I have relationships figured out — I really don’t.

But I guess that’s what all kinds of love — self, romantic, platonic, familial — really is about. Recognising that there’s strength in vulnerability.

That people and relationships are messy no matter how sorted they are. And that we’re all really just craving the same things out of life.

That love, of any kind, is built on the courage to keep trying. That people who fight for you and root for you are worth fighting back for. And that as much as life feels short, it is also long.

The rest, in-between, too, shall pass.

Footnote: I can only fathom how I’ve disappointed people who love me. How they’ve felt the same way. Everything is a two way street. This is also just one perspective. 

This gave me a lot of time to muse (a delight for an over-thinker, if you ask me). It also gave me an opportunity to find deeper resonance in conversations with people.

In no particular order, some interesting learnings, conversations and ~vibes that stayed with me:

• The best thing a great ecosystem can offer is time and perspective. Everything else comes after. If you go into a conversation with an expected takeaway, you’re possibly shutting yourself out to deeper connection.

• I’ve been reading Anne Laure Lee Cunff’s book ‘Tiny Experiments’ and while I’m only halfway through, I’ve taken so much from it:

  • Curiosity should be a life metric. It helps take the edge off the pressure of performance and makes you learn better, fail smarter.

  • Taking a couple of field notes in a day makes you aware of how you feel - what energises you, what stresses you. It’s been a great way for me to move my energy towards work, people and conversations that help me thrive. The awareness eases anxiety and is a quick tiny nod to acknowledging your feelings.

• A common thread in my conversations with my female friends has been an encouragement to build a life and not just a career. From founders to journalists to engineers - women who’ve built lives world over - all had the same version of ambition. This was the perfect October hug, if you ask me.

• An early morning conversation with Radhika Nair on what makes a good story and saying when you have something to say matters took me back to journalism 101 from university. Also reminded me why I love the communication/media industry. The discipline to not lose objectivity when there’s so much noise is truly a gift.

• A realisation that buying peace and standing your ground can coexist. The world often teaches you to either rebel or submit, but tactical difference feels more sustainable and more grounded.

• Noticing that anger teaches you the most about yourself. I’ve been observing what makes me angry because it shows me what I care about the most. Not new realisations, but I care about consistency, confrontation and common sense.

• And lastly, planning a party, hosting people you love and going over-the-top on cocktail experiments are the perfect tiny moments of whimsy in an otherwise mundane life. Even better when you have a dear friend who indulges you.

Funnily, the deeper entrenched I get in the startup and tech ecosystem, the more I find myself thinking about meaning and purpose. I know, very humanities student of me.

I find myself in conversations about first principles, the design of attention, what actually builds lasting impressions and not just digital scale. It’s great in a way because it enables building better technology and eventually better companies.

The more I learn about people and the world around me, the more I internalise I don’t know a lot. Although the internet cringed - Rebekah Neumann was onto something when she said she wants to be a student of life for life. Then again, I’d probably agree with anything Anne Hathaway says.

Anyway, onto November - which, let’s be honest, is basically Christmas!

The best way to draw patterns is to look at how people within an industry, at different stages in their career, have navigated this chaos into something intentional and meaningful.

That’s exactly what we did during our last panel discussion at Women in Product India: a deep dive into The AI Product Manager Hiring Playbook (which I was grateful to moderate!) featuring three enterprising women at very different stages of their careers.

The more I spoke to them, the more I found myself decoding a deeper, more human aspect of the hiring playbook — one that doesn’t show up in prep docs or interview notes.

1. Adaptation

If there was one thing all three agreed on, it was that AI has flattened the shelf life of expertise.

Gunjan spoke about how you can’t treat learning as an event anymore — it’s a loop. Every few months, a new model or framework changes how product work gets done, and she’s learned to build “micro-learning sprints” into her week just to stay current.

Bhavika shared how that meant even hiring managers are adapting. “We’re no longer looking for ten years of experience,” she said, “we’re looking for ten proof points of curiosity.”

And Rachna, who recently transitioned into a PM role from a different domain, put it best: “Half my prep was just unlearning how to present myself. Earlier it was about expertise. Now, it’s about agility.”

Adaptation, in that sense, wasn’t just about new tools. It was about constantly re-shaping how you see yourself in a shifting landscape.

2. Evaluation

We also spoke about how evaluation — both of candidates and companies — has completely changed shape.

Gunjan noted that hiring loops are getting shorter, faster, and sharper. We all agreed that AI moves too quickly for three-month processes. If you’re ready, you can be onboarded within weeks.

Bhavika added a layer from the hiring side: “It’s less about whether you know every metric, more about how you approach ambiguity.”

That line stayed with me — because it echoed something I’ve noticed across the board: everyone’s testing for how you think, not what you know.

Rachna brought in the other side, the candidate’s view by talking about how she’s started evaluating the process itself: “If the interview feels chaotic, that’s often a preview of what the work will feel like.”

That’s such a powerful reframing: evaluation runs both ways.

3. Agency

The most underrated part of any hiring story is agency. Knowing when to say no.

Rachna talked about turning down offers that didn’t feel right: “Sometimes the culture didn’t match. Sometimes, I just didn’t feel heard in the process.”

Gunjan nodded at that, adding that she now pays attention to how companies make decisions in the interview: If it’s all gut and no structure, that tells you how they’ll build products too.

Bhavika summed it up beautifully: Having a life story for your career is a good anchor on what path to take and not to.

That conversation reminded me that saying no is also a strategy — one that requires self-awareness and patience, especially in a market that glorifies speed.

What struck me most was how little of this conversation was actually about AI. It was about adaptability, discernment, and the kind of quiet confidence that comes from learning in public.

It was also a note that for anyone building in product, the hiring playbook is rarely linear — it’s layered with personal growth, resilience, and the ability to navigate uncertainty with grace.

Moderating this session reminded me that the best guides aren’t written by experts, they’re written in real time by people figuring it out together. And that’s the honest story of women in product right now: not about keeping up with AI, but about shaping what it means to build with it.

Grateful to Swati Awasthi and Women in Product India for always enabling the best conversations and building such a phenomenal women-led community. It’s with intention we change the world for ourselves.

Truth is, founders aren’t their businesses. And businesses cannot be their founders. The sooner we accept this, the easier it gets to evaluate each aspect.

The sheer range of conversations I’ve had in the past 2 weeks has only reinforced that belief. And made me realise: investing in the right business and founder is a mathematical art — some numbers, some data, and lots of intuition.

From those interactions, three signals have stood out repeatedly.

1. Distribution

A favourite-to-refer ‘moat’ in the X world is not just a trope. Building and owning distribution has become a core deciding factor in which businesses survive. And I don’t mean social media followers or newsletter subscribers — I mean the actual number of decision makers you have tactical influence over. A founder who can’t repeatedly put their product into the hands of real buyers — not just rack up Twitter clout — has no moat.

This forces a deeper look: what industry are founders building in, and who actually buys their product?

• Horizontal plays demand breadth — an instinct for how thousands of users behave at scale, and the ability to simplify for non-technical customers.

• Vertical plays demand depth — domain authority so strong it commands trust. You either have it yourself, or you build a team that makes you an expert.

2. Design

Aesthetics matter, but design that endures is how you design systems — and how you design your life. This one is my personal favourite because I’ve seen how a well-designed system sets the tone for performance, output, and culture. Your team is the FIRST PR manager of your business. If your systems are chaotic, they’ll mirror chaos to customers and investors. If your systems are intentional, they’ll mirror clarity.

Designing your life, simply put, is how you live as a founder, employee, investor. Burnout, lack of discipline, or personal instability eventually bleed into the business. How you design your habits is how you design your company’s runway.

I was recently in conversation with a founder who’s been around the SaaS-to-AI block for 15 years. He knows exactly what it takes to succeed, and what it takes to sacrifice. In a time when AI building is full of anxious pivots, there’s a certain strength in slow, intentional, non-glamorous business building.

3. Dexterity

Literally and figuratively. Getting your hands dirty and being deft yourself is a strong signal for someone who won’t shirk responsibility when things get hard. I’ve seen founders who blame markets, teams, or timing the moment things go south — even at early stages. Others get stuck in ruts, chasing perfection as if polish will take them from 0 to 1.

Dexterity is about the opposite: quick wit, forward motion, and resilience. It’s trading perfection for progress, and knowing when to tighten the screws later.

In business, a lot sounds woo-woo — and some of it is. But the foundations stay.

Distribution scales reach. Design scales trust. Dexterity scales resilience. The logical track only gets you to the start line. The marathon after is faith that when it gets hard, you’ll remember your basics.

From being nonchalant about poker to trying to understand why it sticks, I’ve gone down quite the rabbit hole today. How do zero-sum games show up in everyday life? Do we believe in binary outcomes or do we just crave the simplicity of them when reality feels too complex to hold?

“Chill Shagun, it’s just a strategy game.”
Sure, but hear me out.

I was reading a piece this morning about hustle as the enemy and rest as the antidote. Parts of it resonated. But I also found myself heavily disagreeing. Being driven to achieve things that matter to you, and putting sustained effort into them, isn’t a bad thing. It’s a choice. What matters is how well it’s designed, not how loudly it’s defended or rejected.

I may be unpopular in saying this: The hustle culture narrative has become so vibe-forward, that it hardly recognises cause and effect. As if slowing down alone could fix what accountability never confronted.

It’s like this to me.

Poker is binary. You win or you lose. But ambition isn’t. It evolves, shape shifts, stumbles, recovers. Still, we apply binary logic to ambition all the time. Especially when it fails. Who’s to blame? Who burned out? Who should’ve known better? In the absence of context and culture, failure becomes a verdict, not a data point.

The decisions that lead to burn out, the systems that we build, the roles we play are all dynamic. Writing an elegy to slowness or glamorising fastidious detachment, is naive. It isn’t accountability, it’s an aesthetic.

It’s like the comments section of Paul Graham’s tweets. One half idolises the hacker-founder archetype; the other half calls it toxic. Nobody stops to ask what system that founder was in, or what tradeoffs were made. It’s amusing how we want clean cause and effect, a villain and a victim. But work and ambition are rarely that neat.

This perspective could apply to all the posts that cancel people being politically-centric, but I definitely do not want to go there.

Similarly, take a look at founders and their mix bag of redeeming qualities and skills. We celebrate them when they’re in motion - scaling, sprinting, selling. But the moment they pause, question, or lose pace, they become a cautionary tale. The assets they once were are now overqualified liabilities. Admiration and insecurity are the complexities of the human mind that will continue to keep us in push and pull.

Which is why blame feels like the real zero-sum. There’s always a loss status to assign. Which is also why accountability on the other hand, becomes a necessity. It’s a principle that accounts for what systems reward and people excuse.

The only thing we can do in relationships, love, work and society is take accountability for our role in the outcome. And whether the outcomes are net positive or zero, we can’t always make circumstance take the fall.

As a person who consumed everything early 2000s pop culture had to offer, I was ready to die on the bridge that I’m meant to be a New Yorker. Growing up in India, we saw more of the East Coast fantasy on television, in magazines. And as I went on to study advertising and design - New York kept being this mysterious, magnetic pull at the back of my mind. Somewhere it still is, and someday I’ll come around to fulfilling it. I segue.

Much like the person who introduced this city to me, San Francisco wasn’t on my bingo card. And much like the person, I found myself falling in love in a way I’d never experienced before.

My tryst with moving cities is that I like to find a place that resonates with my internal world - not just who I am, but who I want to be. I believe that if a city continues to keep you curious and sparked, you’re in the right place. The very fabric of our being is to constantly evolve and grow - and the more places I visit and live in - the more I realise that it’s a conscious effort of people as a collective.

Which is why I love SF.

It’s not just the tech or capitalistic wonders that the city offers, but the people and sense of community I’ve grown to love. You can be anybody and you’ll still find yourself fitting in. People welcome curiosity, they welcome conversation and they welcome ideas.

Last month, I wrote a cold email to Bob Buckter aka Dr Color - the man responsible for beautifying over 25,000 Victorians across the United States. Overnight, I found myself shadowing a man with an eccentric 56 year career in art and design. To observe someone who can look at a building, tell you when it was built, describe the material of the interiors and the purpose they served across decades all while playing the role of servicing a client half their age, was life changing.

Never did I think I’d find myself on a job in Berkley helping a community centre for therapists decide what to paint their buildings to make the spaces more welcoming and warm. I guess I will always be a ‘Student of Color’ now.

This created another shift within me.

San Francisco showed me that cities matter, neighbourhoods matter and the vanity of neighbourhoods in cities, matter. It’s not just the function of clean roads or safety. It’s so much more about spirit, personality and identity.

It’s difficult to ignore when something in your mind has unlocked, even if you can’t articulate it yet. But I know for a fact that I’ll never see the world around me in the same way. I’ve found a new home within myself and a quiet confidence that making a difference beyond my ‘self’ matters even more to me. How that translates, only time will tell.

Until then, San Francisco, I love you.

I went against everything I believed in: consistency, stability, clarity for the future, and always having a game plan.

The biggest question I had was:

Would I be able to sit still with nothing to do and be okay with that?

I had made my career my whole identity and it was gruesome to watch myself struggle.

When you finally let go of everything, you realise it’s even harder to find something new to grasp onto. But I tried that too.

Many different ‘somethings’. Whether they came in the form of projects or building something new or just toying around with stray scenarios of “I can do this and this and this”.

Maybe years from now, I’ll look back at this period of uncertainty - just one year in a (hopefully) long, colourful life - and feel something else. But right now, I’m still in it and I finally see a sliver.

It’s hard to explain an intangible with so much vagueness but I now know when a fog is lifting. I finally feel a lot more peaceful.

Grateful, even - for having made it through something that pushed me to grow in the most uncomfortable and unflattering ways.

I’ve never cried harder than I have in the past year (and I’m a CRIER) but I’ve also never laughed harder. I eat better, sleep better, think better of myself and of the world around me.

Not having something to do gave me the space to confront my own biases — to sit with my inner dialogue without hiding behind the excuse of “my job depends on this.”

I’ve learnt to give people more grace. And myself, too. Most importantly, I’ve learnt to separate judgement from opinion.

There’s so much that happens beneath our surface as human beings that we rarely stop to question ourselves or the people around us. It’s a privilege I promise myself to never take for granted.

In a world of faux, self-inflicted constraints and sprints to achieve goals, the real hurdles really are our inner demons.

I’m currently very sold on Figma Slides, which in my opinion, is the best since Google Slides’ OG supremacy.

Before I get into testing Chronicle, here’s what I think matters most when you’re making decks:

1. Optionality to design

2. Optionality to collaborate

3. Templates (you can never have enough)

4. Shareability (and export formats)

In my experience, the most common use cases for presentations in creative teams are work showcases and campaign presentations. So that’s the lens I brought into testing Chronicle.

P.S. I used the free trial - some features may unlock in the paid version.

Introducing: Chronicle

“Cursor for Slides” / Intelligent Presentations

"Impactful stories, made effortlessly."

Chronicle is positioned as an intelligent product that helps you structure and design impactful presentations through a prompt-led workflow. It takes in your intent, builds a narrative structure, and creates a clean, ready-to-share deck - all in a matter of minutes.

In simpler terms:

Define what your deck needs and watch it be built in minutes.

First Impressions

👀 Website & Positioning

I liked the simplicity of the website - no fluff. But it leaned too simple. I wanted to know more about what Chronicle actually does or how it differs from the others. There’s a fine line where too little information stops being clean and starts becoming unconvincing and I think Chronicle crosses that line.

The ‘workflow’ features highlighted don’t reflect the true strength of the product, which is its adaptability and flexibility. The layout switches are seamless, the level of customization is just right, and the idea of first sketching a skeleton before design kicks in? Hugely underrated.

The only creative nitpick: the design language felt a bit too safe for a product that’s otherwise pushing on the future of storytelling. But that’s the brand designer in me — not necessarily a dealbreaker.

🔥 What Got Me Excited: The Speed

Anyone who has ever made a presentation knows it’s a time consuming process - especially if you’re meticulous and design-obsessed. I loved how fast Chronicle works and thinks. From a single prompt to a fully built presentation, it took me under 15 minutes to have something that looked presentable and clear enough to send across.

Which is mind blowing.

I loved the skeleton before the build. It was a quick overview with just enough creative flair that wasn’t cringe. I’m sure with better prompting and contextual knowledge, Chronicle would be able to adapt a tone of voice and design style.

While I don’t think it’s quite there for creative teams, here’s where I do see Chronicle adding value:

• Quick internal presentations: Especially when you want something clean, structured, and articulate — and not visuals just dumped across slides (anyone who has seen internal agency presentations knows exactly what I’m talking about here)

• Product/Work Showcases for Specific Sales Pitches: Great for pulling together a lean deck to send to a specific customer or investor. You’d still need your mockups ready, but Chronicle handles the scaffolding well.

🤝 The Tool’s EQ

EQ in products comes through when they own who they’re for and sell the hell out of it. Chronicle, in my opinion, is still figuring that out. It doesn’t yet speak with the kind of clarity or confidence that tells a user, “this was built for you.”

For instance, take Figma Slides - it knows it’s for designers. It’s fast, minimal, and designed to let you throw together a deck without fighting the tool or overthinking the design.

Then there’s Canva, which leans fully into flair. Canva decks are about visual expression, colour, personality. It speaks to people who want their presentations to feel creative.

Chronicle sits somewhere between the two.

It has the bones of a serious design tool and the promise of speed - but the brand language, tone, and interface don’t quite commit. Right now, it feels like it’s trying to serve multiple archetypes without fully choosing one.

If I had to place it, I’d say it leans more toward internal tooling for tech teams > clean, efficient, and meant to get the job done.

🧐 What Makes Me Pause

Much like my experience with Twelve Labs, I find myself pausing at the positioning.

In an age where AI tools claim to be for “everyone,” too few are willing to commit to someone. Even in the uncertainty of early-stage, a working hypothesis on who your product is for is better than hedging for mass appeal.

Yes, integrations and speed are technical wins but users still want to know if something was built for them. If you’re building a workflow tool, help me see how I can fit it into mine. People rarely invest interest, time or money in something that doesn’t feel like it would cater to them.

This makes me more convinced that early-stage branding matters more than ever — even if you pivot. Especially if you pivot.

❌ Lastly, Who It’s Not For

I’d say Chronicle is not for creative teams, yet. (Haha, no Meghan Markles were hurt here)

It makes perfect sense as an internal tool for tech companies where you need to put together product walkthroughs for sales pitches or for early stage founders who are new to a life of endless presentations.

💭 The TL;DR

Everything said, Chronicle’s claim of shaping the "future of storytelling" is intriguing. Maybe decks are just the first step.

More here: https://chroniclehq.com

Mayuresh Patole Tejas Gawande

AI has finally made its way into the daily vocabulary of the creative world. A few years ago, the use case of AI in creative processes was mediocre at best, but now, it comes fairly close to fitting in with how people actually work.

Honestly, I welcome it. Tech that challenges creative processes is, to me, a good thing.

But it leaves me with a question: how are the right people in the creative industry even finding these tools? Are they actually built for them? Or are they just impressive demos with narrow use cases?

Humour me, as I attempt to do something about it. Each month, I’ll pick a few tools, playtest them, and write about whether they actually hold up - based on how real teams work. If you have suggestions for tools I should try next, feel free to DM me or drop an email on shagun@thundercat.io

Note: Goes without saying, but everything above is a personal take, not a verdict. These are observations from the outside, shaped by my experience of being a founder and an operator.

Honestly, I welcome it. Tech that challenges creative processes is, to me, a good thing.

But it leaves me with a question: how are the right people in the creative industry even finding these tools? Are they actually built for them? Or are they just impressive demos with narrow use cases?

Humour me, as I attempt to do something about it.

Each month, I’ll pick a few tools, playtest them, and write about whether they actually hold up - based on how real teams work.

First up: TwelveLabs

“AI for deep video understanding” / Video Intelligence Platform

Twelve Labs has built what looks like a powerful encoder model and video-native language model that can parse hours of footage and pull key moments, actions, audio cues, and visual references through plain prompts.

In simpler terms:

If you’ve ever had to log timestamps when editing a massive shoot, this might just become your new best friend.

👀 First Impressions: Website & Positioning

If I weren’t already familiar with the AI product space, I’d be confused. The communication style edges on being a little whimsical and slightly vague. You have to dig a little to understand what the tool actually does - but despite that, I enjoyed the story they were trying to build into.

There’s a confidence in the way they present their technical edge, which feels honest. But if I were a creative director or editor landing on this site, I’m not sure I’d stick around long enough to find out.

🔥What Got Me Excited: The Demo Experience

Twelve makes it ridiculously easy to actually demo the product. The playground created for testing is expansive and it doesn’t take more than 5 mins to figure out the value a product like this would have in a creative agency - especially if you deal with a lot of video content.

It doesn’t overwhelm and the UI is clean enough for even non-technical users.

At my agency, we often ran 3–4 day shoots and logging footage, timestamps were quite the meticulous nightmare - especially when master cuts were due in short timelines. It was a person’s sole job to build the video lineup and also create edits - which was a tough exercise if they didn’t have context of what really happened on the set.

I’d have happily invested in a tool like this for two main things:

• Social media campaigns: especially video ads and video content rollout. To identify footage when match cuts and vibe-edit reels are so popular, this is absolute gold.

• Product video edits: For when you have an extensive catalogue and high demand for video content on your product pages, website, ads and you need old footage to still feel new. This would’ve helped us track visual consistency without hunting through folders for “that one clip.”

(There are of course so many more use cases, but for the work I did a lot of, these two would be my most recurring use patterns)

🤝 The Tool’s EQ

Creative work is largely emotional even if repetitive and meticulous in parts. Tech stickiness is a very feeling based process in this audience set and I felt Twelve Labs was a solid 7.5/10

The marketing and website communication didn’t land as well, but when you sit to actually use the product, it’s simple. It won’t intimidate someone who thinks more visually than technically.

A creator would bite at how easy this is. And to pair this with workflow memory and style/taste memory would be game changing. For instance, if they had to make a montage video of their cooking skills over the years and pick takes based on their best performing videos only, they’d go nuts.

🧐What Makes Me Pause

With tools this early and this technical there’s always a bit of a ‘one that got away’ feeling when it comes to creative use cases. That’s the danger of vague positioning: it creates uncertainty, even when the product is solid.

For creative buyers, this creates hesitation. You can try it, but do you trust it? Do you build it into your workflow?

That’s my broader gripe with a lot of AI tools in the creative space:

When the tech is great but the ICP is fuzzy, people don’t adopt - they wait. And eventually forget.

And while the price is accessible, I’m still not sure who Twelve is really selling to. If they’re banking on early adopters, that’s a risk. Because early adopters don’t always mirror your long-term customer.

❌ Lastly, Who It’s Not For

Complex teams looking for cross-collaboration and functionality beyond parsing footage.

💭 The TL;DR

That said, right now I can see Twelve Labs being a grunt worker shovelling for you. But I can also see it landscaping and ideating very soon - if they go that direction. (hello consumer app!)

Link:

https://www.twelvelabs.io/

Note: Goes without saying, but everything above is a personal take, not a verdict. These are observations from the outside, shaped by my experience of being a founder and an operator.

I’ve been a creative generalist my entire career. I’ve invested time in learning different forms of expression; whether it’s art, writing, photography, direction, video, designing, interiors, you name it. The shoulder of my life’s work has been that I’ve always had a vision of what I want my work to reproduce. I’ve studied psychology, history, culture, people, behaviour, trends, products - to build in detail everything my mind perceives of the world around me. I’ve picked layers of emotions, moods, vibes and arguments from what I’ve learnt and unlearnt. In all my work ever done, I’ve looked at life such.

And the ability for people like me to build what we envision comes from collaborating with those who’ve invested their life’s work in honing a craft. As a layman would say, specialists.

We’ve been bred to live in a world where we co-exist meaningfully with specialists, technologists, tools and ecosystems that come together to help us draw our minds out. Which is what my personal definition of creativity has grown to mean.

What OpenAI’s image model has brought into the world is not a "blatant ripoff of art", but an enablement for people like me to better express our ideas. I can agree on the murkiness of art ethics, but I also believe that a for-profit company building an intelligent product that trains on data isn’t trying to personally target any artist’s life work. It’s a demonstration of accessibility and possibility, not an attack on creative effort and expression.

(That said, people building wrappers around Studio Ghibli’s work specifically are just trying to make a quick buck because they can. And I hope this allows a better conversation around licensing in the world of art.)

But here’s the thing I’ve been trying to sit with:

I understand the outrage. I really do. For many artists, this isn’t just about style. It’s about years of labour, emotional investment, and the slow discipline of craft. It’s about the sacredness of process. And to see something they’ve poured themselves into show up in the form of an AI-generated image, especially one trained without consent, can feel like a violation. Like soul-work being stripped of context and turned into aesthetic wallpaper.

But here’s where I also sit on two fences: I understand that the accessibility of expression for one group will almost always come at some cost to another.

I was reading Anthropic’s research paper On the Biology of a Large Language Model just this morning, and there’s no doubt about the sheer artistry of a hundred-some specialists that goes into creating the technology we use today.

The counter argument of outrage feels reductive to their labour, specialisation and life’s work - which perhaps mirrors the same effort an artist takes to build their craft.

The virality of an expression cannot undo the decades of work and the thousands of people behind the scenes building a different form of expression. Yes, it’s capitalistic - but that’s what “for profit” means. Outraging on social media, the very same means we stand against, makes us all hypocrites, right?

This gatekept moral high ground definitely irks me, personally.

As someone who has always needed collaboration and tools to bring my vision to life, GenAI doesn’t replace anyone’s craft for me. It unlocks mine. It gives shape to what would otherwise stay trapped in my mind.

And maybe that’s the discomfort we’re all circling. The world is shifting to make space for a new kind of creator and each time creativity goes through the cycle of rebirth, we protest.

I’ve grown to find malleability, with rightful credit, intention and respect, a better way to move through changing tides, as opposed to rising against it just because. This doesn’t need to diminish the specialist. But it does challenge the long-held belief that mastery over a medium is the only legitimate way to create.

I believe, as a people, we can hold both truths.

Technology throughout history has aimed to democratise access to information. From the Gutenberg Press during the Industrial Revolution, to using Webflow to build no-code websites, to the ease of creating AI agents using Gumloop —it’s all the same yarn. Don't you think?

In August last year, I was on a rather frustrated run in Cubbon Park. I had wrapped up the operations of my agency, spent downtime setting up a new home, invested in my health (mental and physical), and decided to really stop and take a look at my life.

Somewhere on this run, two things happened:

1. I realized what I wanted to do with my life and career.

2. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do any of it (I still don’t).

And the problem with someone like me is that once I have an itch, I will obsessively think about it and do whatever it takes to find all the ways to scratch it. My most redeeming and destructive quality, I’m beginning to learn.

So, today, I want to sit and write about the last eight months of my life. I’ve grown to become a private person, but I’ve also learned that I’m at my best when I share my experiences. All the greatest things in my life have come from (a little) oversharing, so here goes.

Pivoting Work, Unlearning and Change

I’ve built an entire ‘brand’ around being the person who loves building brands. Design, marketing, startups, taste, aesthetics—the whole thing has long been associated with who I am. It’s true, I do love all of those things, but somewhere along the way, that passion x profession became a box I didn’t realize I wanted to step out of. That run I spoke of was a pivotal moment in stepping out of this box.

In the last few months, I’ve unlearned everything I knew. I’ve questioned the industry I was a part of, the way work is done, and, more importantly, what kind of change I see myself being a part of.

And somewhere in this process, I fell deeper in love with tech and building tech products. An industry I always saw from the outside looking in has become meaningful to me as a moat of change in the world I come from.

I’ve spent more hours talking to technical folks than I have to creative people. I’ve spent hours reading, learning, building, and really sitting with the truth that this industry, like every other, can only bring change if people from both worlds come together. And that’s been the guiding point for what work looks like now.

Broadly, it’s building tech products for the creative industry. But deeply, it’s about bringing change to an industry that has spent decades being told, ‘this is just how things are.’

The thing with a career pivot is that it’s confusing. You’re in your 30s with a whole career behind you, and then, one morning, you wake up and realize this isn’t it. I have found myself feeling like I don’t know anything at all—and truthfully, that’s been liberating in so many ways. It’s given me a chance to be deeply curious, ask really stupid questions, listen better, and not bring my past experience in as a bias.

That said, it’s also been really scary. I still have a life, expenses, and expectations of how I think I should be. To be so aware, so afraid, and so excited all at once has been… humbling and very raw.

(And this is where I will take a moment to thank my partner, who has stood by all of this like a freaking rock. It’s not easy to live with someone who is existential, I know.)

Founder mode, amirite?

The thread tying together all the work I’ve done so far, and all the work I intend to do in the future, comes down to this: I want to build a great company and help as many founders as I can, in the way I know best.

As vague or generic as that sounds, it has become a guiding light. On dark days of uncertainty and terrible mental health, I keep coming back to just how much I love building cool things and helping people. And that gives me peace because no matter how long it takes or what path it manifests through, things will add up and make sense.

Which brings me to Part II: Life, Relationships, and Self

On a 30-hour-delayed-flight trek to SF a few weeks ago, I was thinking about a postcard my childhood friend wrote to me. She was sitting by the bank of a river, musing about how she associated me with a city I’ve been obsessed with since I was 10. She’s known about my love affair with that place more deeply than anybody else in my life has, and she was the first person to call out how it was more about my inner self than it was about a ‘city.’

I thought about it because, over the last few years, I had resigned myself to believing that my life was going to look a certain way. Sad to think like that in your late 20s, but after a divorce, an overhaul of toxic friends, and the end of unhelpful habits, I can say I lived and learned.

Now, life looks like a rewrite and redesign of all the dreams I once felt were too big for me to have. I find this incredibly vulnerable to write, but I feel the need to because, even as an ambitious person, there are voices that convince you you’re not worthy of dreaming big. This isn’t an idealistic self-help book—this is just reality. I’ve learned that we go back and forth multiple times to realize what the 'right' kind of progress looks like—not just ‘progress’ for the sake of it.

A lot of this mind work has been the result of embracing being alone and learning to love my own company in ways I can’t describe. It’s the most empowered I’ve ever felt because it’s one thing no one can ever take away from me. As a young woman, that’s the best gift I’ve given myself. (Deleting Instagram comes a close second.)

I’ve ended a lot of pieces with a note on how I hope some of it helps someone, somewhere. But honestly, this one is for me—to remember that moving forward and change looks messy. That we’re all human, going through our own shitstorms. And that integrity and compassion are all that truly define us—in work and in life.

I’ve often mentioned how taking a ‘sabbatical’ has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life. Not because I’m averse to taking breaks, but because I genuinely love to work—almost to a fault. It’s so exciting to me that I’m aware this trait (and sentence) can make some people nauseous. Oh well.

But work, in any form, involves a lot of input-output.

There’s selling, connecting dots, networking, and all the other peripheral things that make up a business, constantly happening in the background. It’s honestly the most exhausting part of the job—and life.

So when I took this break a few months ago, it was liberating not to have to do any of that.

I’m amazed at how many man-hours just go into populating the background of professional things rather than doing the ‘work’ itself. It’s been empowering to step away from this and not feel tied to doing it all the time.

As an entrepreneur, you’re doing mental math almost all the time, about everything. Even during what would be a break or downtime, the mental work doesn’t stop, and that’s one of the most formidable and admirable things about running a business. But it also builds bias since you’re always working towards looking out for your own.

When I stopped trying to sell my business to “potential clients,” I started to look at people, businesses, and people in business very differently. Getting an opportunity to sit with an upcoming, hip local brand’s founder and really understand what makes them tick, what their challenges are, and how they perceive the world around them and their experiences was interesting. Earlier, I might have found loopholes and jumped into ‘fix-it’ mode, but this time, I simply listened and asked questions—with no agenda beyond the conversation.

Similarly, I had a long call with a person who offers services very similar to what we did at TSS, and I have to say, it was one of the most empathetic conversations I’ve had. The service industry itself is so ridden with constant competition that being able to sit with founders and honestly share challenges, growth, observations, and business anecdotes is difficult. It’s not anyone’s fault, per se, just the way this industry tends to work.

However, the biggest shift in my perspective has been around gatekeeping.

I’ve never understood it in the past, almost to a naive extent, and always judged people for ‘not wanting to share authentically’ because I assumed, why would one try to take down another for no reason?

While that ‘takedown’ may not have been my personal intention, I’ve come to understand that not everyone operates with kindness. Some see business not as a collaborative community effort but as a competition to be won. I can’t comment on the latter, but this experience did show me a lot more about the kind of entrepreneur I want to be.

My perspective now isn’t rooted in doe-eyed idealism, but I’m more attuned to understanding why people behave the way they do—without judgment. Recognizing intent isn’t all that bad, after all. Will it change how I behave in the future? Not at all. In fact I’m keen on sharing more deeply than I used to because paying it forward is the only way.

As I now work towards building my second company (yes, yay and oh no in equal measure) I feel more confident in my ‘entrepreneurship style’ and less unsure of whether I should be like somebody else.

Honestly, these things sound great when you read them in a business book, but it’s a very different kind of rootedness that one experiences when they learn it firsthand.

And somewhere, I think that was my biggest sabbatical takeaway.

While I enjoyed the time to think, read, and focus on wellness and family, I truly leaned into what the looking glass was showing me. Industries will expand and dissolve. Tech and companies will come and go. People will shift in and out of our lives. While we can’t predict everything, understanding who we inherently are a little better is timeless. As you grow in career and life, understanding your person-hood benchmark becomes the only important thing.

Being an entrepreneur was my dream. Building a career in design and advertising was also a dream. I knew very early on that running a business excited me, perhaps because I saw my grandfather, father, and mother do so growing up, or perhaps I just really liked asking "why" endlessly. Maybe it was a little bit of both.

From the books I read to the content I consumed, everything felt like a stepping stone to what became The Satori Studio. On the outside, yes, it was (yet another) branding and marketing agency, but to me, it has always been an expression of my version of business, people, and design.

I’ve spent the last 12 years closely observing people across the companies I’ve worked at—learning how they made decisions, built teams, interacted with clients, and picked themselves up from what they thought was a failure. The best part of it all was that most of them were phenomenal women.

From being given a truly hands-on experience with everything that went into working on large brands as a boutique design studio by Shitu Anand Patil (I have yet to meet someone with an attention to detail like hers and Gautam Patil!) to learning how thoughtfully Falguni Nayar made decisions on everything for Nykaa Beauty (which I remember she called her baby!), I’ve had the good fortune to learn from some of the best women in the industry.

I built my career to work with brands and agencies, both small and large, so when I started my own company, I knew enough of all ends of the spectrum.

- To quote my father: Before you become watercooler talk, be a part of watercooler talk. The best founders always know how people think. -

All these learnings, lessons, and a million mistakes went into what eventually gave form to The Satori Studio. The goal as a business was to work with niche startups, young founders, and new companies to help them get a well-rounded perspective on everything they needed to succeed.

We extensively tested products, conducted market studies, worked relentlessly on creating a design identity that would be comparable to award-winning international brands, helped with operations, team building—you name it—because we believed that a business was always more than a trending reel or Instagram ad.

For some companies, our ethos landed, and we worked with them for years. For others, we hope they took away something good (at the very least). Some businesses were outright awful, and well, that was just another day we moved on from.

What is the point of all this?

The point is, we worked hard and we worked smart. I can confidently say that every single woman who has worked at TSS has taught me something, and every lesson, awful day, and failure has made me realize just how much I love building a business.

Which brings me to part 2—so, what’s next?

Two months ago, I decided to move on from building The Satori Studio to taking a break and exploring more about myself. I turn 30 this month, and it made me realize how I’ve spent the better part of my 20s hustling. I wanted to take a moment to look back and reflect. Feel grateful for what got me here and think about what’s next.

I have a wealth of knowledge and experience in building brands—from strategy to design, in creating marketing campaigns that make sense, in researching and testing products across categories, and in helping founders with all kinds of decisions.

In the past 12 years, I’ve worked on 100+ brands (I have a list!), of which 70+ were under the TSS label. As a young, woman-run, bootstrapped business, we made a revenue of INR 2-2.5 crores in 3.5 years with an ecosystem of more than 20-30 people across seniority and job functions that we directly onboarded. Every person, every client, and every vendor was a direct result of the ecosystem of people that built TSS.

Comparably, these may not be large numbers, but to me, they were a lot more.

I am now at a point where I want to take all of this and pass it forward. I want to learn more from different people and build differently. So if there’s a business, founder, fund, or group of people with an idea that you think could benefit from someone like me, I’d love to be connected.

And lastly, the Oscar speech part—

Everything to this point has not been without a tip of the hat to my folks Sandeep Ohri - That Strategy Guy Rtn. Aria Ohri and younger brother Arjun Ohri for being relentless with their support, advice, and days of tough love. To my partner and friends (both present and past) who’ve understood and held space for me. And above all, to team members, clients, and vendor partners who’ve become dear friends along the way. (And of course, my dogs, therapist, and plants—living and plenty dead—come in here too). I’m grateful beyond words and hope that someday I can pass on this kindness you’ve shown me.

I know this sounds like I’m retiring, but a little PDA never hurt.

So yes, I put this out for the internet to do what it does best and help a girl find her next best thing! For more, you can find me on:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/shagunohri

X/Twitter: https://x.com/shagunohri

Email: shagunohri07@gmail.com

Or running in Cubbon Park, petting every dog I see.

--

In the extensive list of thank yous to the people who worked alongside TSS, some tags (in no particular order)

Sonali Attavar Maniti Shah Nimisha Ramesh Kumar Magdaline Abiegale Zoya John Rashmin Kour Arora Danushi Ramana Vaishnavi Rajan Poorvi Athani Prishita Shivhare Upahar Biswas Ameen, Jayant Rao, Sanjana Bhatt Kshitij Ladia