21; ex founding team @manicule (yc p26); previously @buttondown @biocomputeinc; BITS Goa
Goa, India
Joined December 2018
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late to announcing this but:
I joined @manicule 2 months ago as a founding engineer!
Manicule is an AI-native technical docs agency for dev tools. $150K+ ARR, team of 5 cracked people.
And last week, we got into YC P26!
Kunal Mishra retweeted
India is for bullies.
India is where everything gets stress-tested. A road gets tested by trucks, bikes, cows and people walking against traffic at the same time. A software product built for tidy users gets tested by unfathomable edge cases. An entrepreneur's bold bet gets tested by a market that changes its mind every few months, and lots of trolls who have nothing to do with the product. People get tested too.
Lately, what comes out is anger.
Well-to-do NRIs who live in Singapore fly in for a visit for a happy wedding and get shot over a parking issue. That happened a few days ago. These are people who live calm, orderly lives somewhere else. A few days here and they're in a street fight in front of a liquor store. That tells you more about the street than about them.
Take a car out on any road. Three cows walk onto your path. A child comes running out of nowhere. Someone is driving straight at you on the wrong side. Every few seconds the road asks you to react to some or the other thing.
The anger is a response to unpredictability. When nothing around you behaves the way it should, being defensive is the only sensible choice. Being quick and hard to push around becomes a survival skill.
I've written and read a lot about how the rich in India spend their money isolating themselves from the poor. From the outside it looks like snobbery. Underneath, it's an attempt to buy predictability. If the country won't give you a stable environment, you build a smaller one and put a gate on it.
But the gate needs a guard, and the house still runs on maids and delivery boys. The isolation depends on the working class, and that's where the low trust shows most.
Rich households don't pay their security guards, delivery boys or part-time maids enough. They don't trust them, and they don't talk to them in a polite tone. They're ruthless with them because they expect ruthlessness back. Pay someone what they deserve and you start assuming they'll cheat you eventually. The other side feels all of it and plays the same game.
I see and hear these stories every single day. An owner treats his staff well, and in exchange he gets taken advantage of. Every story like that teaches one more employer to be harder next time. Low trust and low income have built a society that hurts the people inside it first, on both sides of the gate.
So there's no space for politeness. Politeness only works when you can predict how the other person will respond. Take that away and the polite person is simply the one who loses first.
India is a country of bullies. There's no other way to survive here.
Kunal Mishra retweeted
Shipped a small thing today: Quire, an invoice maker.
backstory: every time I finished a project I'd open some template or design one, fight the formatting for 20 minutes, and send something that looked nothing like the work it was billing for. Then came the fun part, the "just following up!" emails :)'
So I spent a while building the version I actually wanted.
A few things I like about how it turned out:
- no sign-up, just open it and start
- looks clean, like you actually meant it
- client gets a link, not some random pdf
- they can add the due date to their calendar
- you know the second they open it
- qr code on it so paying takes like 5 sec
- they tap "I've paid" when it's done
- forgets? it nudges them for you, stops once they pay
It's early and surely has rough edges. Would love to hear what breaks.
dark mode is all nice for scrolling and watching but when you're doing something that needs your attention (for eg, writing), you go light mode.
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this is bad for indie blogs monetised by ads and affiliate links. but a big opportunity for them to migrate to being an influential piece of content in an important Google AI Overview answer and then selling that recommendation to sponsors.
biggest difference in AI SEO vs SEO is that you have to think less about direct content traffic from google and more about using that content to influence AI overviews and chatgpt to recommend you.
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some p interesting stats on code review economics:
> avg inference cost/review: $0.77
> median review time: 1m32s
> p99 review time: 4m41s.
> avg reviews/PR: 2.7
> cost split: 43% cache writes, 34% cache reads, 23% output tokens.
When our AI code reviewer's cost per run doubled, we dug into the token usage to find out why. Learn how we used prompt caching and intelligent model routing to slash our inference bill by 68% while speeding up reviews. cfl.re/4isj2NU
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who’s working on the general problem of making ai write better? any products or research i should check out?
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Kunal Mishra retweeted
for a long time it felt like the world was fully optimized against you
you go to buy something, you get a bunch of ads and upsells and micro optimizations to get you to spend more
you go to consume some specific content and the algo puts in things that are hard to ignore and designed to get you to spend more time
agents are the first time i've felt like maybe things can go in a different direction. send your robot into that mess and it can ignore it all and do your task
i'm not naive, this is going to be an insane battle with entrenched interests doing their best to fight it
but there's a small chance that in the end we can finally be free of this (until the next new problem)
we complained about expensive CI but have you guys looked at ai code review prices?
~$0.5/review seems small but multiply that by software factory scales, multiple reviews per PR and now stacked PRs
and unlike CI or AI costs, this is usually not subsidized by startup credits.
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do you guys ever feel like your own writing have started sounding like AI slop now? like a little bit?
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in all ai coding agent apps, why can my agent not open a new thread by itself? sure they can spawn subagents but why not a new session altogether?! whats the reasoning behind whoever designed this?
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Kunal Mishra retweeted
personal agents, the end of friction, economic consequences of finally getting around to it
Kunal Mishra retweeted
We killed our $50k monthly rev. docs business after YC and went back to $0. Now we're on track to cross $1M ARR with @manicule.
Here's why we did it.
For context, we started by writing technical docs for devtools companies. AI was making it much faster to write decent documentation. We kept improving our process and shipping pages faster, but eventually customers asked an uncomfortable question:
"What is the ultimate ROI you're bringing?"
When a founder's paying a $15K invoice, saying "it builds a brand" is not enough.
We needed to tie our work to business OUTCOMES.
I thought about it, and the ultimate problem we were solving was helping founders grow their business by making people/agents choose them. That's a bigger problem and requires more ownership - we need to do docs, SEO/AEO, off-page brand building, etc.
Essentially, customers needed AgentRel, or Agent Relations.
So, we expanded what we take responsibility for.
We help companies:
- Understand why buyers aren't finding you
- Build a strategy to fix that
- Create good technical content that influences revenue
- Do original research
- Build mentions
- Create good technical docs
- Be recommended by AI
And it's going great! It's a harder business to build, automate, and scale, but if it were easy, anyone could have done it.
I think the entire services industry will face some version of this. AI-native services have to own the business outcome, and that's also the moat. Software is a commodity, but bringing results isn't.
Kunal Mishra retweeted
Today we’re launching WonderSearch (YC F26)
Search millions of unstructured documents without pre-embedding the corpus. With comparable/better retrieval recall than embedding-based search.
WonderSearch searches at query time:
> No corpus-wide embedding step.
> No vector index to maintain.
> More compute only when needed.
> Pay per search intead of embeddings you may never use.
Go from raw data to useful answers in seconds.
Link + FAQ below (+ free launch credits!) ↓
i want to know what usage uptick cf tunnels must have gotten. thats probably a v good indicator of roughly how many people have a remote dev machine
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Kunal Mishra retweeted
while the 0.4% UPI MDR debate is on, you should look at where that charge goes:
a single UPI transaction can involve upto 4 separate banks alongside the 2 apps and NPCI itself.
you -> gpay -> axis (gpay’s bank) -> sbi (your bank) -> npci -> icici (receiver’s app’s bank) -> hdfc (receiver’s bank) -> paytm (receiver’s app) -> receiver
here:
sender’s bank gets 0.16%
receiver’s app’s bank gets 0.12%
sender’s upi app gets 0.08%
sender’s app’s bank gets 0.04%
this system of payment apps having their own banks involved in the transaction doesnt happen for visa/mc.
btw Axis is the biggest bank provider for payment apps:
while the 0.4% UPI MDR debate is on, you should look at where that charge goes:
a single UPI transaction can involve upto 4 separate banks alongside the 2 apps and NPCI itself.
you -> gpay -> axis (gpay’s bank) -> sbi (your bank) -> npci -> icici (receiver’s app’s bank) -> hdfc (receiver’s bank) -> paytm (receiver’s app) -> receiver
here:
sender’s bank gets 0.16%
receiver’s app’s bank gets 0.12%
sender’s upi app gets 0.08%
sender’s app’s bank gets 0.04%
this system of payment apps having their own banks involved in the transaction doesnt happen for visa/mc.
btw Axis is the biggest bank provider for payment apps:
with people moving to running background agents from their phone, the browser company could have gotten their big come back by making a browser that syncs very well with a mobile app
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i have been on ios 27 private beta for >1 month now and the only new thing it does, that i can actually use it for, is “set alarms in 15 min intervals between 6 and 9am”
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