Srivats Sivanandan

I've been working on tax software for the past 5 years. This is the last year anyone will have to pay for TurboTax. You can try it yourself today: - add the Aiwyn Tax connector inside of Claude (link below) - give it access to your tax documents (W-2s, etc.) - ask Claude to prepare your tax return ...and that's it!

I’ll say the thing no one is saying: design culture is broken in lots of companies. Often design teams & designers are the most resistant to change org in the EPD triad, with highly vocal AI opponents, and little skill or interest in the art of campaigning for influence or resources. Won’t hold a number like a PM, not yelled at about timelines like engineering. While I have brought design topics to the board convo, not a single board has pressed me our design talent, strategy, or velocity. Most teams treat design like a tax they don’t want to pay, and those that *do* take a deep interest and want to invest in design get back big “get out of my figma” energy. And if you’re too precious about craft to dirty your hands with the dark art of corporate politics, good luck getting more headcount. If a PM or engineer can get 85% there with tailwind and a dream, you better come to the table with more than “I represent the user.” Great designers are worth more than almost anyone on the team, and I’ve worked with lots of gems, but this is 0% surprising to me.

Amazon delivered more packages than the USPS in 2025, a first. Having worked at Amazon until 2004, that's one of those things that's both stunning and doesn't surprise me at all

you shouldn't be allowed to be a VC if you haven't worked/built a startup idk why this would be controversial

There's a vast marketing industrial complex of agencies/consultants/advisors/whatever that promotes tech startups spending billions of dollars of unaccountable marketing budget. They're triggered by my anti-paid stance but here's the reality: - paid marketing is much, much worse than organic on every metric (conversion, ROI, etc) - startups work on a fast time scale and can't manage LTV/CAC correctly beyond a months timeframe - risk is asymmetric. a few bad cohorts can kill you (and btw, this has definitely happened) - the age of easy/cheap ad inventory is over. Pricing is controlled by an oligopoly, it's all being algorithmically bid up, and ROI sucks at scale - paid UA has S-curves. Early spend looks good, but plateaus and it's easy to get addicted - if your product is growing organically already, you might just be cannibalizing and pulling forward demand you'd already get anyway - high reliance on paid indicates weakness in the core product and value prop - you can't build a 100m+ DAU product with the majority coming from paid UA (it's just obv math) - going majority paid UA makes it 10x harder to raise VC capital down the line. For all the reasons on this list the main benefit of paid is simple: your agency/consultant/whatever spends money, some numbers go up, and you feel like you're doing something. It's simple to understand, you can apply it to every type of product, and every big co does it right? Billions of dollars swap hands just based on this dynamic. But for startups I argue it's the growth lever of last resort, since it's the most commoditized form of distribution -- you should try to exhaust your other ideas, invest deeper in your product, and grow based on whats unique in the ways that only your startup can grow. That way your channels are as defensible as possible, built around your killer value prop After all one day, you hit your CAC ceiling, your channel saturates, or worse, your competitors just do the same, copying your distribution strategy, dragging the whole industry into a prisoner's dilemma. When that happens, it's hard to incubate a bunch of new 0-1 channels to save your forecasts. The temptation is just to stretch payback periods, buy more, and ride it out. That's a dark path...

2/ I'll never build a report again. Rippling AI will quickly build any report or analysis instantly - including some far beyond what I could build on my own. But sometimes you just want to scribble something on a whiteboard, snap a picture, and tell rippling AI to build it:

Mortgage Servicing is such an overlooked area. There's >$10T in unpaid principal balances in the residential market alone. Even at a 20 bps take rate that's a $20B opportunity waiting for a business. And, I'm not even accounting for refinancings.