Varun Mohan

In fast-moving AI markets, companies must be willing to disrupt their own successful products to stay ahead.

"We should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of ex..."

Value in AI is shifting from infrastructure to the application layer where unique user experiences and workflows are built.

"Where is the layer that you can actually differentiate on? And we believe the application layer is a very, very deep layer to go out and differentiate on. What are the number of ways we can build bett..."

AI increases the ROI of engineering, encouraging companies with high 'technology ceilings' to invest even more in talent.

"If AI is writing over 90% of the code... the ROI of building technology has actually gone up. This actually means you hire more. The best thing to do is just get your hands dirty with all of these pro..."

When using AI agents for coding, incremental changes are safer and easier to verify than massive refactors.

"Start by making smaller changes. If there's a very large directory, don't go out and make it refactor the entire directory because then if it's wrong, it's going to basically it destroy 20 files."

Modern technical interviews should allow AI tools but focus on evaluating the candidate's first-principles thinking and problem-solving process.

"We are okay with people using the tools because I think one of the worst things is like, if someone comes here and doesn't like using these tools... we do want to see how they think on their feet and..."

Hire only when the team is genuinely 'underwater' to maintain a lean, high-output culture.

"I want the company to almost be like this dehydrated entity. Every hire is like a little bit of water, and we only go back and hire someone when we're back to being dehydrated."

Over-hiring leads to manufactured work and internal politics as employees seek to prove their impact.

"We only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function... I actually think this is a feature. When you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird..."

In highly competitive fields, 'working smart' is a baseline; the differentiator is combining intelligence with high effort.

"One of the biggest dog whistles I hear is, when I ask people how hard are you willing to work, some people actually ultimately say, 'Hey, I work very smart.' And I basically ask them a question, 'If w..."

The speed of re-evaluating wrong hypotheses is more important than being right initially.

"I wish I had... this idea of just being okay with being wrong faster. I always think about things on when we make decisions... I wish we had made the decision to do this a couple months earlier... re-..."

Startup success is driven by extreme excellence in one critical area rather than average performance across many.

"You don't win by doing 10 things well. You win by doing one thing really well and maybe you fail nine things. This is the thing that I've told the company, 'This is very different than school,' right?..."

Even for highly technical products, enterprise adoption requires a robust, human-led sales motion.

"We hired our VP of sales over a year ago actually. And the go-to-market team is now over 80 people inside the company... if you want to sell to the Fortune 500, it is very hard to do that purely by sw..."