Vishnu's Podcast | Podcast on RSS.com

Vishnu's Podcast

Vishnu's Podcast

by Vishnu Mohandas

Entrepreneurship Technology

Vishnu's Podcast ft. Mo Bitar - Founder of Standard Notes [Part 2]

Mo Bitar, Founder of Standard Notes, returns for Part 2 of his conversation with Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente — diving deeper into building privacy-first products, his burnout from privacy, life after Proton, and the lessons learned along the way. Listen as they talk about startup struggles, the mental toll of building in public, and why Mo believes the future of privacy needs a different path. Mo Bitar – https://mough.xyz | https://x.com/atmoio Conquer – https://conquer.dev/ Ente – https://ente.com/

Vishnu's Podcast ft. Mo Bitar - Founder of Standard Notes [Part 1]

Mo Bitar, Founder, Standard Notes talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on building Standard Notes, selling to Proton, and why he left Proton. Part 2 coming soon. Mo Bitar - https://x.com/moughxyz Conquer - https://conquer.dev/ Ente - https://ente.com

Free Search is a Trap | Kagi's CEO Vlad on Building a New Internet

Vladimir Prelovac, founder of Kagi, joins Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente, to unpack the story behind a search engine built on trust, not ads. Vlad explains why “free” search is a trap, how Big Tech’s incentives distort information, and what pushed him to build Kagi — a paid, privacy-first alternative. They dig into the origin of Kagi, the browser built by one engineer, the vision for an independent ecosystem, and why incentives matter more than features. If you care about privacy, the future of the web, or the mindset behind mission-driven products, this one’s worth your time. ⸻ Chapters 00:00 Start 00:25 Intro 01:00 Why build Kagi? 03:50 Early days of Kagi 06:08 Public Benefit Corporation 10:17 Paying for Search 15:00 Orion Browser 20:52 Vlad’s origin story 24:46 Childhood memories 28:52 Kagi’s dependency on Yandex 32:05 The future of Kagi 35:37 Kagi Mail 39:00 Doing “too many” things 48:25 What makes Vlad optimistic ⸻ Kagi: https://kagi.com/ Vlad: https://x.com/vladquant Discount for Kagi: https://ente.com/friends Discount for Ente: https://kagi.com/specials

Techlore on Privacy, Surveillance and Optimism | Vishnu’s Podcast

Henry Fisher of Techlore talks to Vishnu about privacy, surveillance, and the future of the internet. They discuss why it’s never too late to leave Big Tech, how age verification and online surveillance are reshaping our lives, and why this is the best moment to take control. Henry also shares how he has personally grown up along with Techlore over a decade and his plans for the future. This is a pragmatic, optimistic conversation about fighting for a better internet without losing your sanity. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:57 Why privacy matters to Henry 02:42 How late is too late? 07:34 Techlore's origin story 11:33 Using YouTube to spread privacy 15:21 Threat modelling 18:58 Henry's threat model 22:19 Team behind Techlore 23:24 Techlore forum shut down 25:01 Techlore's business 31:30 Content consumption 34:45 Content creation 36:36 Facing the worst on the Internet 43:26 Influences on world view 45:48 Gratitude 46:50 Artificial Intelligence 57:03 Dystopia 1:03:16 Parenting 1:10:26 Improving privacy 1:14:43 Helping privacy tools 1:17:09 Compromising privacy 1:20:00 Rapid fire 1:24:18 Techlore's future 1:26:12 Henry's hope Links: Website: https://techlore.tech Twitter: https://x.com/techloreinc BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/techlore.tech YouTube: / @techlore PeerTube: https://techlore.tv Henry's talk @ Ad Filtering Dev Summit: • We Lose 73% of Revenue to Ad Blocking (AFD... Privacy Dad: https://theprivacydad.com They See Your Photos: https://theyseeyourphotos.com

Kailash Nadh on building Zerodha | Vishnu's Podcast

How do you build internet-scale financial systems without venture capital, ads, or growth-hacking? In this episode, Vishnu speaks with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha - one of the world’s largest trading platforms. They cover how Zerodha stays fully bootstrapped, remains highly profitable (USD 500 million+ in profit), and grows with zero ad spend. They dig into Zerodha’s engineering philosophy, self-hosting, open source, privacy, and why the internet feels increasingly broken. This is a grounded conversation on scale, incentives, pessimism, and building companies that last. Kailash: https://nadh.in/ Zerodha: https://zerodha.com/ FLOSS/Fund: https://floss.fund/ Ente: https://ente.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Start 00:16 FLOSS/fund 03:30 $500 million in profits 07:19 Company culture 13:04 Engineering problems 17:50 Childhood 26:36 Artificial Intelligence 28:36 Artificial General Intelligence 32:09 Venture Capital 41:21 Privacy 45:36 Climate Change 45:59 Next FOSS project 52:40 Inner peace 55:30 Learnings 1:01:20 Rapid fire 1:07:48 Social media 1:10:00 Optimism

Mozilla's Leadership Responds to Critics

Mozilla announced Firefox would become an "AI browser" - and the internet lost it. Users called it tone-deaf. Reddit threads exploded. Mozilla promised a kill switch. So I sat down with Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Mozilla) and John Dickerson (CEO, Mozilla.ai) to get answers. We talked about the AI backlash, Firefox's future, open source AI, Mozilla.ai's developer tools, small language models, on-device AI, Mozilla's $1.3 billion war chest, raising venture capital, and what their "rebel alliance" for open source actually means. 00:00 Intro 00:57 Raffi's story 03:27 John's story 06:27 Mozilla's structure 13:25 AI @ Mozilla 25:10 Firefox 28:56 Thunderbird & Mozilla VPN 30:28 Revenue models 33:55 Mozilla raising venture capital for AI 36:32 Rebel alliance 38:56 Criticism against Mozilla 41:30 "Rapid" fire 48:26 Optimism 52:08 Advice for founders 53:40 The End

⁠Vishnu's Podcast ft. Carl Dong - CEO @ ObscuraVPN | VPN, Bitcoin, Privacy & more

Carl Dong, CEO of Obscura talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on all things VPNs, Bitcoin, Privacy Tech, User Experience and a lot more. Carl Dong - https://x.com/carl_dong Obscura VPN - https://obscura.net/ Vishnu Mohandas - https://x.com/VishnuKVMD Ente - https://ente.io/ Links mentioned in the video - https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://reproducible-builds.org/