Saras Arya

Back in 2019 we decided me and @ashwinkshenoy decided to build @BilzoHQ(bilzo.in) the vision, the problem statement everything has evolved in the last 2 years. Today we complete 1 year of sustained revenues, here's what we learned. A thread 🧵

@rahulstuffs @viraj_sheth I love it. Keep 'em coming. Now the only goal is either have a credit card where I can convert points so that the stay is cheap or I become that the cost doesn't matter

@saras_arya @viraj_sheth Enjoy some pics of the property.

nice way to spend a sunday.

@marinebharat bhai congratulations 🎉🎉👏🏻👏🏻

@necrounreal @iNikhilsaini Well as cute as it looks it's in a dilapidated condition.I was shocked to see it actually ferries people. I wish we could create new rakes for this and modernize this so it looks like a heritage worth preserving.

@saras_arya @iNikhilsaini Yes Its the famous Kangra valley railway, long due for UNESCO heritage status like its counterparts kalka shimla railway, darjeeling railway and nilgiri railway

One day when Vande Bharat or the bullet train runs through this region, the journey will look even more breathtaking than Japan’s Mount Fuji train views. 📍Kangra Himachal Pradesh

Vimbar aur Lizol se baal dhone pad rahe hai bhai 😭😭😭

We recently built an AI assistant inside @Razorpay called Slash. It reads our entire codebase, debugs production incidents, reviews specs, writes code, reviews every single PR, answer tech queries and also raises PRs for small features. It's easily accessible through Slack. We can tag it in any Slack thread, describe the problem in English, and it gets to work. Six weeks ago, Slash handled 122 tasks in its first week. Last week it handled 14000+. Queries, analysis, bug fixes, PR reviews, test runs and work that earlier lived across scattered tools and teams can now be done with Slash right within Slack. 1000+ people used it in a single week because it got their work done faster. The whole adoption has been completely organic. The numbers from last week have been very encouraging - 14,854 tasks completed. 2,150 PRs raised, 1,152 merged, 45% of those PRs shipped with zero human rework. A payout gets stuck mid-retry during a live incident, an engineer tags Slash and within seconds, it cross-references logs with code and pinpoints a state machine bug blocking the retry-to-failed state transition. Tells the team exactly which logs to check and how to resolve the incident. With its K8s analyzer skill, Slash scanned a single namespace, right-sized all 11 workers using 48-hour P95 pod metrics, and raised the PR. One run saved $560/month. A marketing banner bug was fixed with few prompt iterations with a PR raised, merged to prod and deployed in minutes. No front-end developer touched the code. Security teams ran static security testing and remediation through Slash at org scale. Thousands of findings were purged and many more got validated autonomously. But Slash isn't just an engineering tool. Account managers now trace stuck customer payments and integration failures through Slash instead of pinging engineers on Slack. L2 product support tickets get triaged by Slash before they reach engineering. 250+ non-engineers ran thousands of sessions last week. PMs used it for research on our payments infra, customer interviews and product features sometimes raising PRs of their own. Analytics teams built SQL pipelines. 11% of all sessions came from people outside tech and product. On our company bakkar (watercooler) Slack thread, someone asked Slash jokingly to assign tasks to everyone and it responded in the same tone. It seamlessly started participating in inside jokes and conversations. The quality compounds with use. Engineers who shipped 11+ Slash PRs averaged a 63% merge rate without rework. First-timers averaged 37%. Across the org, human review comments per PR have dropped more than 40% with Slash starting to do in-depth review of every single change. We're still early. Large cross-repo refactors, fully agentic sdlc and plan mode are next. But Slash has already changed how people at Razorpay build, debug, and ship every day.

@paraschopra And it is here in almost 12 years.

I can bet my non existant moustaches that generalized AI in next 10 years.

@Viv_Krishnan @sssdefence @Uppolice @SwarajyaMag @AlishaMachani @machani_satish @abhi_bs Would you be providing ammunition or will they be purchasing from a different vendor.

Earlier this week @sssdefence closed delivery of 2000 M72 5.56x45 mm Carbines to the @Uppolice. It is an honour for us to be of service to one of India’s finest law enforcement organisations. These images are my personal favourite. Not flashy but raw in emotion. The @SwarajyaMag carried a piece on how weapons relate to us Indians. These lines from the piece have stuck with me “At an individual level, it is the dharma of a soldier to fight if necessary. At a social level, the ruler must enforce dharma and protect society. Use of weapons is seen as part of a sacred duty to protect dharma.”

A tribute to the courageous BJP Karyakartas! Even in the midst of celebrations at the Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata today on the formation of the first ever BJP Government in West Bengal, we remembered all those BJP Karyakartas who laid down their lives in the service of an ideal greater than themselves. Their sacrifice is etched forever in the journey of the Party. Their courage will remain a source of strength for all of us. @BJP4Bengal

The loss is not because they aren't able to generate profit on the SKU level. The expenses in the near term, opening new darkstores and setting up operations from scratch, will consume capital now but give returns later. The kirana store was also in loss the year it opened, but is now profitable.

Today, I went to a nearby bakery shop to fetch some eggs. It costs me ₹165 per tray (30 eggs) so roughly ₹5.5 per egg. Meanwhile - Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto, Big Basket, Licious and others are selling eggs around 50-100% expensive. Now you can argue with me about the quality of egg but that's just dumb argument since the bakery i got it from sell atleast 200-300 trays a day, get fresh supply every morning, Can you say the same about Darkstores? Even after all this - INSTAMART: 1000 CR LOSS - ΖΕΡΤΟ: 1250 CR LOSS - BLINKIT: 110 CR LOSS What are these doing wrong which normal kirana stores have figured out?

@lennysan I don't think that's new. That's always been the case. Classic Slack vs. Teams graph.

Distribution is the new moat

Seriously man!! We took all the productivity gains and started taking on more work.

अटल जी ने कहा था…

🤣🤣🤣

I work with retail brand stores, and I see this a lot. I ask the employees there, hey do you use ChatGPT/Claude, they say yes. I ask whether there is any AI in the organisation. The answer is mostly no. It's kind of personal productivity at best, and is yet to translate into org efficiency(serving customers better, etc) Organisations hate change and won't adapt unless there's a need. The need will come top down or when a competitor does something with it.

Been wondering lately that given everyone has a consultant with all the world’s knowledge in their pockets, we should be seeing efficiency rise across the board everywhere. Literally everyone can now get personalised advise on how to serve their customers better, improve quality of their outputs, cut inefficiencies and increase revenue. .. yet, this is nowhere to be seen (especially for small local businesses). Why aren’t we seeing the rate of change accelerate in the world? One possible explanation is inertia, and there’s some truth to that. But perhaps a better explanation is that perhaps advice was never a bottleneck. Maybe implementation was? Or perhaps most businesses are already in their local optima and any change is too risky for them to bear? This, of course, is theory of constraints and it explains a lot: when outputs are a result of many factors, when one factor is made efficient, what holds back output is the slowest changing factor.

Medha Patkar was able to fool an entire generation about the Narmada Dam, which irrigates 3,500 villages across 3 states and provides drinking water to millions of Indians. She was able to successfully delay the project of national importance, which escalated the cost manifold

@ku1deep I think about this a lot, kids need to start earning, start getting exposure to money very early. This culture of kids not earning till 22, 25 and in some UPSC cases even till 32 is ruining us. I am all for it. Not sure which shape or form.

I wonder if zomato or Swiggy would be open to letting kids be gig workers during summer vacation.

I think that's the wrong reading. We don't need to be the best in an advanced general AI model. Even a smaller model that's hyper-trained on our use case (Agri, Languages like Sarvam, Defence) is a much better use of resources(data centers, GPU, electricity) than a general purpose frontier model.

I strongly disagree with this. And I cannot believe how @NandanNilekani can be so short-sighted. Data and intelligence sovereignty should be a national strategic priority. Using AI models from foreign players will involve perpetually sending them all of our data, including use-case insights and user preferences.

“Taang tod doonga. 10 baje ke baad kitchen kholi toh dekh lena.” The story starts again. Same pattern. Police walk in and shut us down. Refuse to take a complaint. We employ 15 people per kitchen. Jobs now at risk because we won’t pay a bribe. Police that should protect us are hurting us. 🎥 tinyurl.com/vk-police-2704… @CPDelhi @LtGovDelhi @PMOIndia @dcp_southwest @CMODelhi @FinMinIndia

And as they say, the worst bjp govt. Is still better than the best congress govt.