Raj Kunkolienkar

The Ghosts We Inherit: India's 'New Money' Story My mother reuses tea leaves until the water runs clear. My friend's father keeps a wooden box in his closet, with carefully folded bills arranged by denomination. Another's maintains a small diary tracking every household expense down to the last rupee. These aren't quirks – they're battle scars from a generation that survived on less. We are their children. We carry their financial trauma in our wallets, even as we tap them against sleek payment terminals at craft coffee shops.

I don’t think it helps us or the business to be black and white about it. The principle is that the potential of the business should neither be starved or killed by capital, though. Use capital as a tool for rapid experimentation beyond what biz cashflows + personal capital and time infusion allow for. At the same time, wouldn’t want to let the business model of the said capital control the destiny of the business. Forces all kinds of indiscipline and errors you’d not make otherwise. Great businesses have been built with all kinds of capital configurations, over all time horizons. Time for us to find our style in the era of AI leverage :)

@kunksed @paperplane_club Would you raise funds this time? What’s the deciding factor or state or mind?

Last 6 months have been wild. AMA anything about career pivoting to becoming a product builder and trying to build a three person remote company (@paperplane_club)

@rohitpradipjain Yes, good for everyone involved!

@kunksed A good sign!

I stopped using the likes of Replit / Lovable / Emergent months ago but their numbers still seem to be climbing. Every time these conditions are true (I no longer use Perplexity, Notion, n8n…), it only means that these tools have found love lower down the technical pyramid.

@myprasanna @vorfluxai @Rippling Congratulations! My agents are currently going around in circles building out an efficient room matcher to map what suppliers send me into my canonical inventory. Would love to give this a spin!

Launching @vorfluxai : The autopilot for software engineering. I was prev co-founder / CTO of @Rippling ($10B) and #1 coder in India. Vorflux is my high octane Ferrari. Every AI coding tool still makes you fly the plane. That's the copilot model: you stay in the seat, approving every turn. The models quietly got good enough to fly the whole route, but the tools never caught up. So we built the autopilot. @vorfluxai raised a $15M seed by @ycombinator @peakxvpartners @alliancedao @parkerconrad @jake_zeller @balajis @nivi @metakovan @lmrankhan @nikitabase @0xrwu @ayushjaiswal @mattshumer_ @eshamanideep @sreeramkannan @dvcoolster @nusimow @TeddySolomon11 @ashtoncofer @rvivek etc Drop your biggest engineering bottleneck below. I'll reply with how I'd attack it with Vorflux, and hand you $200 in free credits to bang out your backlog. Our full thesis 🧵👇

@NirantK @paperplane_club well regulated, sir!

@kunksed @paperplane_club how's the josh?

@vrarora1 @paperplane_club Given how the monthly caps on multipliers are panning out, it’s a shitshow. Our advice is to book flights and max out monthly points because there’s not much room for savings there otherwise.

@kunksed Makes sense, thanks. If 90% of your base is Infinia worthy, they care less about checkout offers and more about this: 10x to 12x earning on hotel spends, points that later book flights. The net cost can further reduce after checkout. Also worth exploring: card tie ups with bonus accelerated earn exclusive to your platform. Discounts pull deal hunters. Extra multipliers lock in the Infinia crowd you already have.

@sleepybroke @paperplane_club by talking to customers till you figure out the magic words and value pipelines that make them take out their wallets and hand it to you. Gotta say that you can’t do it by talking to Claude.

@kunksed @paperplane_club How do you validate your idea/find pmf

@sk8rboi054 @paperplane_club I got no secret sauce. Effort and dedication is scarce. Just do it, day in day out.

@kunksed @paperplane_club What would be your advice to a VC analyst with no prior operating experience who is looking to transition into an operator role, particularly- finding the right role, reaching out to relevant people, and demonstrating proof of work (or navigating the lack thereof)

@sagarkamat @paperplane_club Yes. Starting a family is increasingly an act of rebellion, would like to work towards a world that’s kinder towards families. Starting with vacations because that’s one of the only sacred spaces left for connection.

@kunksed @paperplane_club Are you guys gonna continue down this vertical?

@sairajsk They already exist (drop from cloudflare, vercel, netlify) / other smaller MCPs. But I believe consumers want a one stop shop that just does it for them. Rather than them having to maintain some config / env files

@kunksed I imagine someone will design a skill or an MCP to have a one click deployable web app on CC/Codex/Antigravity/Cursor sometime soon.

@fadnavismehul @paperplane_club Yeah, I probably lose a day a week to shit that doesn’t contribute to revenue in the short term. But that used to be 2-3 days before. I’m guessing that obsessive focus on building for what customers want helps.

@kunksed @paperplane_club How do you manage to keep focus on the product to be built ? I've noticed that I tend to get sucked into rabbit holes cause building anything is so easy now

@vrarora1 @paperplane_club Assuming you are asking about stacking offers at checkout and not travelling through point redemptions. 90% of our member base is probably Infinia worthy (most already have one). Card offers on international hotels are hard to come by.

@kunksed @paperplane_club Question from a credit card optimizer. Travel is where card rewards people like me extract the most value. Will your pricing survive a user who stacks card rewards on top of platform offers? Or is that stacking exactly what you have to close using your platform ?

@chaitanyarshah It does, it does. But that’s voodoo territory for most people who’d probably hire an agency otherwise.

@kunksed Found cc handles web fairly easily (supabase/vercel/ghub). Maybe app is a different ballgame.

@sanketnadhani @paperplane_club Top of mind…. 1) They say travel is a cutthroat market when it comes to pricing but a great price alone doesn’t solve for trust. Especially for the high value transactions we process. 2) Hotel tech / ops is archaic. Tech + Ops plumbing has to deal with stochastic systems.

@kunksed @paperplane_club What’s been the hardest part about building paperplane club?

@aakancvedi @paperplane_club no, @bizaditya and @erinviegas :)

@kunksed @paperplane_club three person company includes twins and wife?

@chaitanyarshah What’s your time worth? Especially when it goes down into figuring out DB and site provisioning, git, auth and a hundred other things that add to the overheads?

@kunksed Just built something on emergent and its costed me Rs2.5K so far. And I’m 70% through. Would have been free within the sub in cc. Better user experience for sure but it’s hurting me!

@ujjawalasthana npx install anupama-cli

My mother watches anupama and then she watches the analysis of anupama episodes on youtube. Proper time waste. I am going to install remote codex on her phone and ask her to build.

@kunksed hey farmer, can you reply to my urgent slack message please?

hello friends, keep winning!

@vedicakant Pradhan Mantri Pimple to Dimple Yojna

Sorry, but the only signal this sends is that the Indian government still hasn't kicked its habit of involving itself in things that shouldn't be its business.