log(bika.sh)

The Cost of Deciding

Bikash Dash — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:58:17 GMT

Quick context, because this moved fast.

On September 15, TypeSafe came out of stealth with Jev: a model that never writes a word. It reads a situation, answers a typed question, and hands you a probability. Two weeks later OpenAI announced a Decisions API doing the same thing. Two days after that, Cloudflare and AWS shipped open-weight versions under Apache 2.0, one of them small enough to run on a laptop.

Four shops. Three weeks. Two closed, two open.

Kahneman called the fast, automatic half of thinking System 1. The snap judgment before you have words for it. This is System 1 for machines.

What got cheap

Not intelligence. Judgment.

Here's the difference. Until this month, asking an AI "is this change safe?" meant making a big model write a paragraph first. A second or two. A few cents. And a confident tone with no real probability behind it.

So you asked rarely. At the end. Once.

Now a typed verdict with a confidence number costs $0.00004 at Jev's list price. On open weights running on your own GPU, it rounds to zero. Latency is tens to a few hundred milliseconds. Fast enough to sit inside the request, not after it.

When a decision costs that, you stop rationing it. You ask a thousand times inside one workflow instead of once at the end. That's the whole unlock.

What I built

I didn't read about this. I built one.

I trained a small classifier on Modal, pulled the weights down, and wired it into the harness around my coding agents. It answers one question, thousands of times a day: is this change safe to let through? The first verdict came back before I'd finished reading the diff.

I'd assumed training the model was the hard part. It was the easy fifth.

The hard part started the next morning:

What happens when it's unsure? I chose fail closed. The agent stops and asks.
Where does each verdict go? An audit log: what was asked, what was answered, how sure it was. A decision you can't replay is a decision you can't defend.
How do I know it's right? I ended up building a CLI and a labelling UI just to go through its calls by hand and feed the misses back in.
How does it know what matters in this codebase? That's the harness, feeding it context before it decides.

Four problems. None of them in the model. All of them took longer than the model.

The catch

Here's the part nobody puts on the slide. Cheap decisions don't remove the hard work. They move it.

A wrong decision that is cheap and fast is just a wrong decision at scale.

The first month's numbers back this up. Anthropic made a classifier gate the default in Claude Code in August, and their own write-up says it still misses 17% of risky actions in their test set. An independent test found Jev's confidence scores well off out of the box, and nearly perfect after someone refit them on real data. Nobody ships that refit. And the first public failure wasn't a model failure at all: a trading tool wired a decision model in as a gate and let trades through whenever the model was unsure or the account ran out of credits. Fail open. Never backtested.

The model did exactly what it was asked. The scaffolding was the bug.

Why open matters

If deciding is about to happen at that volume inside everything, the judgment layer becomes the most important code you run. You don't want to rent your conscience from a closed vendor.

Neither closed model lets you fine-tune on your own data today. The open ones shipped weights, a training recipe, and a way to fine-tune on your own traffic where it already lives. Within days Ollama added an endpoint for decision models. That's a standard forming, not a product.

Not ideology. Leverage. When the thing making the calls is inspectable, you can see why it decided, fix it when it's wrong, and run it where your data lives. No regulator requires open weights. They require logs, oversight and the ability to explain. Inspectable is just the cheapest way to get all three.

I run engineering at a regulated fintech. I've spent years being asked, after the fact, to show which decision fired and why. That's the only reason I noticed where the hard part was.

Where I land

Optimistic. Not naive.

The magic is real. Decisions got cheap this month, and cheap decisions rewire what software can do. But the upside doesn't fall out of the model. It falls out of the discipline underneath it.

Try one thing this week. Take one expensive human check you make today and turn it into a cheap automated one that runs every time instead of sometimes. Then watch what it frees you to attempt next.

The models keep getting the headlines. The scaffolding keeps getting the results. I know which one I'd rather be building.

So: can you still stand behind every decision your systems make, once they fire a thousand times a minute?

If you can, this era belongs to you.

Your AI Remembers You. It Just Won’t Let You Leave.

Bikash Dash — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:02:11 GMT

"The palest ink is more reliable than the sharpest memory."

I switched my main model last month. The new one is smarter, faster, better at code. It is also a complete stranger.

Two years of corrections, preferences, half-dead side projects, my allergy to em dashes. All of it intact, sitting in the old vendor's database, doing nothing for me. Not deleted. Held.

So I spent a Tuesday evening re-introducing myself to a machine, pasting old preferences into a fresh chat like a man moving houses with grocery bags. My friends got one onboarding, a decade ago. My models need one every quarter.

The account you didn't know you opened

Every correction you make is a deposit. Every preference, every "no, like this", every project explained from scratch. Compounding daily, into an account you cannot withdraw from.

Ideas travel light. Context doesn't. That accumulated context, how you think, what you have tried, what you are quietly building, is becoming one of the most valuable things you own online.

Except you don't own it. You produce it. I put out music on the side, so this part is not an abstraction for me. Every artist who signed young learns it the same way: you made the record, the label keeps the masters.

Here is the tell. In June, Apple reportedly swapped the brain behind Siri for a custom Gemini and most users never noticed. Swapping the model is now a migration ticket. The models are becoming interchangeable. What they know about you is not. Memory is the moat now, and it is not your moat.

Import doors and export doors

Look at how memory shipped. OpenAI's April 2025 update let ChatGPT reference your entire chat history. Claude's memory hit the free tier this March. Gemini's personalization threads through everything Google touches.

Now try leaving. ChatGPT hands you a one-time file of stored facts. No API, nothing you can automate, nothing that rebuilds you somewhere else. Anthropic, meanwhile, published a helpful prompt for pulling your memories out of ChatGPT and into Claude. Wide import doors, stiff export doors, and nobody is embarrassed about it.

This is not a conspiracy. It is retention strategy. I have sat in enough roadmap meetings to know how the word "churn" gets said. Somewhere between "outage" and "audit".

I work in the sequel

I run engineering at Spare, an open banking company regulated across West Asia . Strip away the LinkedIn language and my job is moving people's financial data, with their consent, between institutions that spent fifty years making sure it could not move.

Your bank data used to sit exactly where your AI memory sits today.

Before regulation, fintechs did something that sounds illegal now: they asked for your bank password, logged in as you, and scraped your balance off the HTML. Everyone hated it. It worked, because the banks offered no other door.

Then the rulebooks arrived. The UK ordered its nine biggest banks to open their APIs. When the deadline landed in January 2018, around three were ready. Saudi's central bank launched its framework in late 2022, Bahrain earlier, and the UAE's open finance regulation went live last July with participation mandatory.

I have watched consent screens evolve from a legal fig leaf into the actual product. So let me say it plainly: your bank data did not get freed by innovation. It got freed by regulation. Banks did not grow a conscience. Hoarding became illegal.

The rulebook is warming up, slowly

The AI version of this fight has started, quietly. GDPR's portability right covers data you provided, not what a system inferred about you, and with AI memory the inference is the whole point. The EU's Data Act, live since September, is a closer fit: switching, configurations and functional continuity become things a provider must support. Inside the current DMA review, people are arguing generative AI platforms belong in that regime too.

I would be bluffing if I sold you a clean parallel, though. Open banking was slow: six years after the UK forced the doors open, roughly one in seven digitally active consumers used it, and only 22 percent had heard the term. Brazil moved five times faster. And memory is messier than a bank statement: a balance is a fact, a memory is an inference, flavored by the model that formed it. There is no central bank of AI.

So no, Brussels is not liberating your chat history next quarter. These debates move slowly, then all at once, usually as a 400 page PDF with your compliance deadline inside. I have read enough of them to say that with a straight face.

What needs building

I have gone all-in on AI at work. I am just refusing to go all-in on any single vendor's memory of me. But personal workarounds are what screen scraping was: hacks that prove the demand. The real fix was never individual. It was rails.

The principle is simple. Your copy should be the source of truth. The vendor's should be a cache. Everything worth working on follows from it:

A right to the inference. Today's portability law covers what you typed, not what the system learned about you. With memory, the learning is the asset. Close that gap and the rest gets easier.
APIs, not ZIP files. A one-time download button is not portability. Banking's lesson was continuous, machine-readable access under the user's consent. The DMA already demands this of gatekeepers. Memory deserves the same bar.
A common language for memory. Bank data moved only after the industry agreed on shared API standards. Until memory has a common format, every export is a message in a bottle: it leaves, and nothing on the other shore can read it.
A referee and consent rails. UK open banking worked because a funded body wrote the standard and graded the banks. India, where I grew up, went further with data-blind consent managers who move permissions, not data. Memory needs both an OBIE and an Account Aggregator moment.

And whoever builds these rails has to get custody right, because a portable memory of you is also a stealable one. Encryption is not a feature here. It is the precondition.

You are doing free work right now, making someone's product smarter about you. I do it too, daily and willingly. I just keep asking the question I ask at every table before the cards come out: if the most valuable thing being built here is a record of how I think, why does the house hold the only copy?

Your context is your masters. Own your masters.

The Review Pane Is Theater

Bikash Dash — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:00:42 GMT

We handed AI agents commit access and kept a code review process built for humans. It is theater now, and most teams know it and approve anyway.

I did not work that out from a whiteboard. I worked it out making music.

I produce music under the name RCRSN . Last week I put out two videos, Saudade and Golden Haze, off an EP called Slow Gold. I made them to test one thing: how easy is this now?

The sound: rap grit over hazy lounge-jazz, tablas underneath, a Brazilian funk swing carrying it. Golden-hour music. Saudade and marigold.

I made the videos the way I made the music. Alone, in Cowork, prompting AI tools until the frames stitched into something that looked like a real shoot. A few hours each. No crew, no set, no budget.

They came out good. They live on my Instagram, under rcrsn music. That was the whole release.

I expected easy. I didn't expect what it quietly deleted.

The hard part was always making the thing. Booking the room, owning the gear, being the one person who could. That just got cheap. What's left is taste: knowing whether the thing is any good.

Here is what nobody tells you about cheap. When something floods, it loses more than its price. It loses its thrill. A skill everyone suddenly has is a skill nobody is impressed by. Whatever becomes abundant, dulls. But the worth doesn't vanish. It moves. The moment a thing goes from rare to everywhere, value jumps to whatever sits beside it that is still scarce. Copies are free now. What can't be copied is the only thing left worth paying for.

I watched it happen to my music in a night. Software is watching it happen to code.

For seventy years, writing software was the expensive part. Then the machines learned to do it. Databricks just crossed the line where agents write more code on its platform than people do. Infinite code, on tap. And we did something strange with the flood: we ran it straight into a process built for a trickle.

Here is how software still ships. Someone writes code, opens a pull request. A second person opens the review pane, reads the diff, decides whether to trust it. That ritual was built for one situation: a human wrote this, and another human has to understand it before it goes live.

That situation is gone. The ritual isn't.

An agent writes two thousand lines before your coffee is cold. You can't read two thousand lines with the care they need, so you skim, you scroll, you approve. The queue is long and the agent sounds certain. The review pane, the thing meant to keep bad code out, has become a rubber stamp. We are pretending to review work no one is reading.

The old escape hatch is gone too. When a person wrote something confusing, you could pull them aside, ask why, watch their face. An agent hands you a confident reason on the spot, invented whole, no flicker of doubt. The confidence is free. The doubt is yours.

So here is the flag I will plant. The pull request and the review pane are relics. We strapped a jet engine to a horse-drawn carriage and act surprised it is shaking apart. The whole lifecycle rests on one assumption: that making code is the hard, scarce step. That is now false, and everything downstream is breaking in slow motion.

The fix is not a better diff viewer. It is the move manufacturing made a century ago: you do not inspect quality in at the end of the line. By then there is too much of it and it is too late. You build the checking into the line itself, upstream, until bad output never gets far enough to catch.

For software, that flips the lifecycle on its head. Verification stops being the last gate before merge and becomes the spine. The review pane stops being a wall of diff you pretend to read and becomes something you actually trust: tests you would bet money on, properties the code cannot violate, provenance you can trace, checks that return in seconds instead of a queue that rots for three days. The merge gate becomes the real decision, and what stands there is a check you believe, not a tired human skimming for green.

That rewrites the best job in engineering. The senior engineer's value used to be I read your code. It is becoming I built the gate that decides what ships. You stop reading the output and start building the thing that reads it for you, at a scale no human can match.

I have spent this year rebuilding my team's pipeline around exactly this. Less writing, more deciding. Fewer people staring at diffs, more judgment baked into the gates, so the diffs mostly check themselves. It is unglamorous, and it is the whole game.

Which brings me back to Slow Gold.

Each took a night, and the night was never the valuable part. I used to think it was. The value was the ear that knew which take was golden hour and which was just noise. Same ear, different room. In a world of infinite code, the rare thing was never the code. It is the judgment that knows which of it to believe.

Generation got cheap. Taste did not. That is the best news a builder has had in years.

So make more golden things. Just remember it was always the gold, never the making, that was the point.

The Bottleneck Moved : Code Got Cheap, Trust Didn't

Bikash Dash — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:03:29 GMT

I can write more code in a morning than I can trust in a week. Sit with that for a second — because that one gap is the whole story of where software is heading.

For seventy years, writing code was the hard part. That's why we hired engineers, built IDEs, worshipped Stack Overflow, and shipped a new framework every Tuesday. Every tool we ever made pointed at one target: make code cheaper to produce.

We hit the target. Then we blew past it.

Here's the real kicker: producing code was never the expensive part.
Being sure of it was. We just couldn't see that, because for decades the two came bundled — the engineer who wrote the function understood it for free.

That bundle is gone.

The principle underneath is simple. Every system has one real bottleneck at a time. Kill it, and the system doesn't go free — the bottleneck just moves. We spent decades grinding on generation and finally cracked it wide open with AI. The pressure didn't vanish. It relocated. And it landed squarely on verification — knowing the code does what you meant, only what you meant, and won't betray you next Tuesday.

And verification scales horribly.

A model spits out a thousand lines in seconds. Reading those thousand lines still takes you the better part of an hour — and a tired you does it badly.

Worse, the old trick for trusting code is dead. You can't pull a model aside, ask why it made a choice, and watch its face. It'll invent a confident answer on the spot. Confidence is free for the machine. The doubt is all yours.

We've run this experiment before — just not in software.

When factories made goods cheap, the winners weren't the ones who pumped out the most. They were the ones who pumped out reliably. Toyota, not whoever stamped the most metal. Deming nailed it decades ago: you can't inspect quality in at the end of the line. By then it's too late. You build it in.

The discipline that won the 20th century wasn't production. It was verification, pulled upstream until it got cheap.

Software's about to relearn that the hard way.

The next decade belongs to whoever makes trust cheap — not code. Everyone's going to have infinite code; that's table stakes now. The edge goes to whoever can stare at a mountain of generated code and know, fast, which of it to believe:

Tests you'd actually bet money on.
Types that make whole classes of bugs impossible to even write.
Provenance you can trace.
Feedback in seconds, not a review queue that rots for three days.

Verification pulled upstream until it disappears into the build itself. Same move Deming made on the factory floor.

I've got an unfair advantage seeing this, because I build in regulated fintech.

In Open Banking you're never allowed to just trust the output. Every action needs consent on record, an audit trail, a mandate proving it was allowed, a way to reconstruct exactly what happened and why. Finance figured this out a long time ago: when you're handling things that matter, verification is the product. The ledger isn't where the money lives. It's where the trust lives.

The rest of software is only now waking up to that — dragged there by a flood of code no human ever wrote.

Here's the part I love.

Generation is creativity. Verification is judgment. We just made creativity cheap. The machine will fill a blank screen better than most of us. What it can't do is tell you whether what it wrote is right — or whether it was even the right thing to build.

That's taste. That's judgment. And judgment doesn't get automated, because judgment is the thing that decides whether the automation worked.

So the scarce skill flipped. The old flex was how fast you could ship. The new flex is how cheaply you can be certain.

In a world of infinite code, the rare thing — the thing that compounds — is knowing which code to believe.

That's the bet I'm making. I've stopped chasing faster ways to generate; that race is over, and the prize is racing to zero. The whole game now is the other half — the unglamorous half we ignored the entire time it was cheap.

The bottleneck moved. Most of the industry is still optimizing the part that's already free.

The question stopped being how much you can build.

It's how much you can trust.

Breaking Free: The Fight Against Digital Censorship

Bikash Dash — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:50:29 GMT

Let's dive right in.

In the past couple of days, you've probably noticed the uproar about comedians facing a nationwide hunt. It's not just absurd—it's a symptom of a much deeper issue. While we're busy playing whack-a-mole with jokes, our digital freedoms are being eroded, bit by bit.

Here's the real kicker: this isn't just about misplaced moral outrage. It's about control. The powers that be have realized that the easiest way to keep us in line is to control what we say and hear. And what better way to do that than by silencing those who dare to point out the absurdity of it all?

Consider this:

Only 31% of the world's online population enjoys true internet freedom.
In 2025, 4.2 billion people were affected by internet censorship.
Internet blocking cost the global economy $5.5 billion in 2021.

From comedians to activists, creators to thinkers—it's the same old story. They're trying to stifle laughter because they know it's powerful. It's the antidote to all the nonsense they're peddling.

We're at a crossroads. We can continue down this path where every tweet is a potential landmine, or we can say "Enough is enough" and build something different.

That's why I'm pondering on something new. A platform that tells censorship to take a hike. We're talking decentralization, user ownership, and zero tolerance for unjust takedown requests. And guess what? We're not alone.

Platforms like Farcaster and Story Protocol are leading the way in decentralized social media and content creation. Farcaster uses a hybrid system to secure user identities on-chain while keeping posts off-chain, providing both security and scalability. Story Protocol is transforming intellectual property management by tokenizing creative works, allowing for programmable licenses and collaboration. These technologies are rapidly growing, with the decentralized social network market expected to reach $101.2 billion by 2030.

Imagine a social network where:

Your content is truly yours. A novel concept, right?
You earn directly from your content. No more platform vultures taking a cut.
The community decides what flies, not some faceless algorithm or government stooge.

This isn't just another "disruptive" startup. It's about reclaiming our digital space. Building a place where comedians can joke, activists can raise hell, and thinkers can challenge the status quo without fear.

But here's the deal: I can't do this alone. I need you.

If you're tired of seeing creators silenced, if you believe in speaking your mind, if you want an internet that's open and free—then listen up:

Reach out to me. I am building a crew of digital freedom fighters for the new internet.
Spread the word. Share this post, talk to your friends, and make some noise. Let's start a conversation about digital liberation.
Contribute your skills. Whether you're a coder, designer, writer, or just someone who cares—we need you. Join the bandwagon.

This won't be easy. We're up against big money, entrenched power, and many people who are comfortable with the status quo. But the payoff—an internet where we call the shots—is worth fighting for.

As Naval Ravikant said, "The internet is the greatest liberator of human potential in history." Let's make sure it stays that way.

The future isn't a destination. It's something we're building. Right here, right now. Let's make it one where a joke doesn't land you in hot water, where creators run the show, and where digital freedom isn't just a buzzword.

This is our revolution. Our digital liberation.

Are You In?

It's Time!

Bikash Dash — Wed, 26 May 2021 14:21:10 GMT

I am a huge believer in this quote

Life is a lot like poker, you just have to figure out when to fold and when to go all-in

Before I go on with this life update, I dearly wanted to share more learnings over the last couple of years but could not due to other priorities most of the time.

Life has literally changed for me in the past few years like a bull run in the stock market. I know myself better, what I am good at and what I am not/should work on. It definitely helps in the long run to understand the foundations of your drive.

After the amazing 2 years, I am moving on from LocoNav to start a new chapter. Really thankful to the people I have worked with while solving real-life problems of transporters.

I got to build and shape an engineering team that went above and beyond to solve some unique engineering problems at scale. I learned exponentially at LocoNav for which I am truly grateful.

A huge thanks and shoutout to all the awesome folks I got to work with and collaborate with while building this amazing product and made friends/mentors for a lifetime along the way. Wish the LocoNav Family all the luck for newer heights to achieve. #mission2025🚀

Now it’s onwards to new adventures. It was always at the back of my mind to start something new, exciting, and worthwhile while having fun.

It's time to write another story

It's time to disrupt another huge market

It's time to create impact at a scale that hasn't been done before

It's time to create something worthwhile pursuing

It's time to go all-in!

I am excited to announce that Vatsal, Sparsh and I have taken the plunge to start FactoryPlus where we are revolutionizing manufacturing industries by digitizing factories.

Most of the MSME factories in India are operating without any software/tool to manage their day-to-day production operations.

With FactoryPlus, we are making factories smarter, faster, and cost-effective with our smart factory management platform. Our mission is to enable manufacturers to spend less time with manual operations and to focus more on growing their business.

FactoryPlus is a technology platform for MSME manufacturers.

We are now looking for changemakers who love the startup hustle, build things from scratch, and have ownership.

It's too early to say this but I will say this anyway, I have been building software for the better part of the last decade but never had this kind of conviction with any of my earlier projects. It's like buying into bitcoin in 2015.

If you know anyone you want to succeed in life or think they haven't got the perfect opportunity yet. Let them know there is an opportunity that will change their life. They just have to reach us at founders@factoryplus.in .

Until next time. Keep yourself safe and healthy.

Four things don't come back: The spoken word, The sped arrow, The past life, The neglected opportunity.

The Final GoodBye And The New Beginning

Bikash Dash — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 07:03:44 GMT

The Final GoodBye And The New Beginning

It’s always hard to break up with someone/something you are attached to for a long time, you put in a lot of blood and sweat, 24 hours a day you spend most of the time thinking about it, to achieve some dreams, to achieve the impossible, you drag your ass to Seek Discomfort and put your 110% towards making it work.

Isn’t it hard breaking up?

I am not the kind who takes important decisions in life lightly, I take enough time to analyze the situation and make decisions that I won’t regret later. I go all in when I believe in something ( sometimes that’s a problem ). Some might say I am a gambler, not denying it. When you find something worthwhile to pursue you shouldn’t miss the opportunity, I am a true believer in this.

I did the same thing when I met Mukul and Bhaswat 3 years back. I jumped on the bandwagon to organize the largest after-school market. The first time I met them, I clearly could see their passion for solving this problem and I found my bet. Just after me, Vatsal and Nikhil also decided to pursue this problem. Honestly, I couldn’t have dreamt of Classplus’s current situation at that time.

We started our journey from a 2 BHK room in Krishna Nagar and now we are operating across 10 cities in India. My cofounders and my team believed in what we were trying to achieve, everyone on my team is passionate about the job they are responsible for.

I just wanted to say “ THANK YOU ”. When I say You, I don’t just mean the Founding Team behind Classplus, don’t just mean all the employees that decided to join making Classplus a reality, don’t just mean the investors, the clients or the amazing interns we had over the years. It’s not just the incredible family that supported our teammates during difficult times, It’s not just the competitions we had all this time. I count everyone who was/is / will be related to Classplus anyhow, making this dream come true. That’s what I mean when I say You. Thank You, Everyone. It’s been an amazing journey.

Classplus, the team, the product and the 3 years I have spent here have been incredibly special . I am proud to have taken this plunge where I could watch Classplus from a team in a room with just an idea to truly the best of team and product. I had the opportunity to be an architect, and leader of rockstar techies I think I have done my best to grow each one of you on different levels (Feedback is welcome ).

While solving this hard problem I have learned a lot ( especially in managerial skills ) while still getting my hands dirty on the code. I have learned from each one of my team. So I have taken upon few months until I get back on track.

Sorry to everyone who I let down by taking this decision, Sorry for being a disappointment for leaving you in between The Journey . You might be unsatisfied with my reasons and think of me as a selfish person but I had to do this. I couldn’t live like this anymore. I apologize for leaving the boat in the middle of the river. I can’t be the captain anymore (for the time being).

THE END

Thus I am saying Goodbye to my Classplus Family with an equal amount of sadness, excitement and apprehension. The company is witnessing exponential growth of the fantastic product, and the amazing team we have, the future you are going to witness will be incredible whether I am there or not. I am going to miss the team: I’ve learned more from the team in the last three years than in any other role I’ve ever been. I am going to miss annoying you all with my terrible jokes. Here’s to what the future holds. I wish you all the success in the world.

THE BEGINNING

“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety. ” — Abraham Maslow

What we’ve accomplished is amazing- but I’m exhausted, I am a disappointment for my family in which I am going to achieve some improvements in the next couple of months.

I might take a few consults to manage my expenses in this Me Time. Not sure at this time but I might take on some Engineering Manager Roles once I am satisfied with my inner-self / ready.

It might be difficult for me to pursue bigger problems now but I will try, Forever.

Good Bye And Thanks…

Bikash

Working at a Start Up

Bikash Dash — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 07:06:35 GMT

Working At A Start Up : The Pain & Gain

Today ( 1st July 2014) was my 30th day at VoiceTree Technology and I just wanted to share my experience at this start up via this post. It’s my first post in Medium so if you find any mistakes please excuse.

Boring Personal Stuff!! (Self Exaggeration :P)

Before telling my experience about VoiceTree let me tell give an intro about myself. I am an average CS grad from Bhubaneswar whose Twitter bio says- “An Avid Dreamer, Die Hard Googler and An Entrepreneur by Heart”. I was a self proclaimed geek at my college always into hackathons ,workshops and seminars etc. As all the guys from Bhubaneswar I also took courses from Hyderabad. Participated in Yahoo Summer School 2013 ,Both of the AngelHack Seasons at Hyderabad and was an active member of Hydroid- the Android User Group of Hyderabad . I was studying in Bhubaneswar but literraly living in Hyderabad. Freedom of Ideas always was and always will be my passion towards working in a start up. So , in college level I tried to run different startups from them three were blogs , one was custom apparel and one was web services start up. Obviously all of them were failures otherwise I won’t be working in VoiceTree as Associate Software Developer. So I decided I will work in a start up that would be very cool. Big Players like Infosys and TCS came and went from campus and I was rejected in the first round because I was not giving enough attention to the process. After most of my friends got placed I was very depressed and decided to follow the path of my seniors in the job hunt to Bangalore.

Job Hunt was a pain in the back for me. From food of south india to the large queues infront of MNCs , everything except climate was unbearable for me. Everyday It was a process of going through every job sites , giving so many telephonic interviews via HasJob and not getting selected was very depressing and hectic. Then one day my cousin Sanjog bhaiya pinged me in Facebook about my current situation and told me to drop the resume at this awesome company called “VoiceTree Technology”. I just researched about the company as we job seekers do :P , felt great . Then I gave my interview and got selected as an associated software developer. Got call letter to join within a week. I bid adieu to Bangalore and travelled to Rajdhani on first of this july. Let me tell you VoiceTree has a product called myoperator which is the JARVIS of cloud telephony. It manages your every call automatically. My primary role at VT is to develop myOperator and CODAC for which I have to learn Asterisk . I had a fair idea about PHP , HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery but I had no idea about what the heck is this “Asterisk”.

Working at Start Up

The Pain & Gain in working in a bootstrapped venture

I heard a lots of good things from my brother , Sanjog bhaiya So, expectations were at peak. I was at cloud 9 for getting a chance to work what I love to do!!

Before getting deeper into the post I wanna introduce the founder of VoiceTree , Ankit Jain , A BIT Mesra CS grad who started this company to feel the gap in the market in 2010. A typical entrepreneur who believed in himself and his team.

1st day at office was a great feeling which is indescribable , but I will try to explain. One of the reason I love to work at start up to learn the managerial skills from founder. I met Ankit Sir at the first day of my joining and he explained me how things work here and my role in the company.

That was a very memorable day for me at VoiceTree . Oh you don’t care! Ok ok I am getting towards pros and cons at a start up just bear with me.

Pros-

Work Culture- Open Mindedness, Informal Atmosphere , Flat Hierarchies , Creative Energy, Get S#1T Done Attitude .
Flexibility/Freedom- Setting own goals, flexibility on variety of roles/tasks. One day I am setting up a PRI , another day writing a cron.
Steep Learning Curve- Learning by Doing, No one will teach you by holding your hands someone will be there to guide but you have to handle your errors on your own . Google and StackOverflow are your only friend :D
Responsibility /Accountability/Impact- Working with Founders , making impactful decisions.
Opportunities -If you do amazing work the entire company and all of its customers will benefit from it. And you’ll be loved for it.
Transparency -You’ll get to see how the company grows, why certain decisions were made, and how the company reacts to competitors and business plan changes. All of this will teach you about business and prepare you to do your own startup one day.
Being a part of Bigger than You — A start brings the bigger version of you , You have to write code , design , manage the network , publish blog. You’re like an one man Army. You are at the verge of making this product the next big thing , something meaningful and something different And the excitement is amazingly powerful.

Cons-

Low Compensation- The financial incentives are less compared to the big players in the market.
Uncertainty / Instability- Job Insecurity , not knowing the future of the business holds.
Risks — A startup is risky because you’re building something from nothing. You’re doing something ridiculously hard because you believe in it and want nothing more than to see it succeed. And by the way, if you’re a good engineer you’ll have zero issue finding another job.

Above was the summary for a person who is looking forward to a job at a start up , now moving towards my experience at VoiceTree.

Working With Voicetree

As any other Start Up VoiceTree Inherits all of start up features I mentioned in above . Working at VT is Fun. Work culture is awesome , perks are good . Everyone is friendly here , You define your working hours . VT have bean bags :P , which i personally love to sit on . The constant guidance is one of the finest things about VT. They respect about “ Freedom of Ideas” . And what not from Pizza party to silly treats , everyone tries to achive the single dream . In the last month I learned much more than 4 years in my engineering career.

If you’re planning to join VT then mark my word , it will be a hell of experience for you .

This was my first experience in sharing something from ,my personal life. I am debutant mediumer. Please let me know if anything wrong you find here.

Signing off by writing the lyrics from Hall of the fame by the script-

“ Yeah, you can be the greatest ,You can be the best You can be the King Kong banging on your chest

You can beat the world ,You can beat the war You can talk to God, go banging on his door

You can throw your hands up You can beat the clock You can move a mountain You can break rocks You can be a master Don’t wait for luck Dedicate yourself and you gon’ find yourself

Standing in the hall of fame And the world’s gonna know your name ‘Cause you burn with the brightest flame And the world’s gonna know your name And you’ll be on the walls of the hall of fame ”

Good Bye!! ☺