Varun Pai

I’m excited to announce the launch of my new company Conscious Talent. The vision is simple. Let’s turn work into a vehicle for consciousness evolution. Three years before we sold my last company to Salesforce, I had a spiritual awakening that cracked my life open. For a while, I thought I might need to become a monk and leave business behind. But I eventually realized something surprising. Being a startup founder and facing the demands of modern life was actually the most fertile ground for self-awareness and transformation. My work wasn’t a distraction from my consciousness journey… it was the path. I wondered why there was such a disconnect between the place we spend the most time and the self awareness journey. It became obvious to me that life is much more fulfilling when personal and professional growth are integrated. And I wasn’t alone. I started sharing my journey and met other leaders on similar paths, and began to notice a pattern. These leaders weren’t just looking for fat paychecks. They longed for something more…but finding it wasn’t easy. They wanted teammates who would excel at their jobs AND were equally committed to their own inner development. They wanted to work at companies that would support the full spectrum of growth. And they wanted to work with people who could get shit done, from a place of wisdom. These types of people and opportunities exist, but they're hard to find. That’s why my wife @ztsekouras and I created Conscious Talent. Conscious Talent connects high-performing, self-aware leaders with companies who value both professional excellence and personal evolution. We help leaders find opportunities that align with their values, their gifts, and their growth paths. We partner with companies to help them find exceptional talent who also embody the emotional intelligence, depth, and self-awareness required to lead in today’s world. For too long, we've separated personal evolution from our professional lives. It’s time we collectively learn how to weave our inner and outer worlds together, as we build our careers and companies. If you’re a leader looking for aligned opportunities, join our talent network. (link in next thread) If you’re looking to hire conscious talent, reach out. (link in next thread) And if this vision resonates with you, we’d love your support in getting the word out. Tag someone who should know about us. 🙏 There’s a new way to work that’s emerging and we’re building bridges for those who are ready to walk this path. Thanks to everyone who has inspired and supported us in bringing this vision to life!

@TyHaliburton22

I attended a vibe coding hackathon recently and used the chance to build a web app (with auth, payments, deploy, etc.). I tinker but I am not a web dev by background, so besides the app, I was very interested in what it's like to vibe code a full web app today. As such, I wrote none of the code directly (Cursor+Claude/o3 did) and I don't really know how the app works, in the conventional sense that I'm used to as an engineer. The app is called MenuGen, and it is live on menugen.app. Basically I'm often confused about what all the things on a restaurant menu are - e.g. Pâté, Tagine, Cavatappi or Sweetbread (hint it's... not sweet). Enter MenuGen: you take a picture of a menu and it generates images for all the menu items and presents them in a nice list. I find it super useful to get a quick visual sense of the menu. But the more interesting part for me I thought was the exploration of vibe coding around how easy/hard it is to build and deploy a full web app today if you are not a web developer. So I wrote up the full blog post on my experience here, including some takeaways: karpathy.bearblog.dev/vibe-coding-me… Copy pasting just the TLDR: "Vibe coding menugen was exhilarating and fun escapade as a local demo, but a bit of a painful slog as a deployed, real app. Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA future. There are all these services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev/prod deployments, team and security features, rate limits, pricing tiers... Meanwhile the LLMs have slightly outdated knowledge of everything, they make subtle but critical design mistakes when you watch them closely, and sometimes they hallucinate or gaslight you about solutions. But the most interesting part to me was that I didn't even spend all that much work in the code editor itself. I spent most of it in the browser, moving between tabs and settings and configuring and gluing a monster. All of this work and state is not even accessible or manipulatable by an LLM - how are we supposed to be automating society by 2027 like this?" See the post for full detail, and maybe give MenuGen a go the next time you're at a restaurant!