le finding opportunities across the markets. The way we evolved, like we started our journey by building an on-chain community back in like 2020. InnerCircle started by just like a group of friends who enjoyed building things together. It was like a group of five people, just like kept on building things on the internet and started seeing like interesting outcomes happening to us. It could be like job opportunities or like VCs approaching us for what we are building. We sold a few products. So as we started doing this, what happened is that a lot of our friends and people outside our small whatever group that you call it, it started as a Discord group by friends. And a lot of others have started asking, okay, how do I become part of this? You know, what are you guys doing? How do we like take a part of it? And that's when we started slowly evolving into a larger community where we used to pick like top 30 people across India and then take them to Dharamshala, host like a 10-day itinerary of like, hey, pick an idea, go from zero to one, help you acquire users, is what we started doing to build a tight network, what we have today, because the group of friends that ended up doing this is that if we have seen this journey happening to us, we build products ourselves, and then started seeing all these outcomes happening to us. And then we enjoy doing these programs for early stage founders who could also see similar outcomes happening for themselves. So that led to, you know, starting this community. We've been doing this for last four years. And over the years, a lot of cycles started happening, right? Like started as an on-chain cycle. And when now there's our AI cycle, and the kind of people that we started attracting is spanned to like multiple domains. And then now it became like a large community across all domains. We have people who are building active projects on on-chain, AI hardware, and like multiple other stuff.

Dhruv Sharma: Akhil, I love the line you guys use, which is a cracked home for cracked builders. Tell us a little bit about life inside the home. You know, what's the culture like? What rituals do you guys have? What's the whole experience like?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, we're still putting it together. But like what we where we started is that we have like a single telegram group that still exists, which is for the larger public community. And, and the vibe here is that people come here for what what we call must-see and, and then end up discovering, okay, interesting people building interesting stuff. And let's say, so the programs that we ended up running, created outcomes for people in terms of them quitting jobs, moving to Bangalore, or them finding their co-founders to build something. Or, you know, I have an idea, I put it, I put this idea on the group, and then someone, someone who's like, want to help them, they've reached out to them. So all of these happen in the group, while people just come here for like for fun conversation on daily basis.

Utsav Somani: And why do people come to you? Like, I mean, building community is hard, but also keeping them together is even harder. So is there a filter? How do you monetize this? Is it via grants? Do people pay for access? Like, give us a lay of the land.

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, so, so it's, it's, it's fully bootstrapped. We've like not gated, gated in terms of who you who come in into the community, but not gated by like paying for some access or whatnot, like, like how I said, right? It started by just a group of friends. And then we started inviting, initially, like people who vouch others, right? Like, hey, you're a friend of mine. And then you vouch this person, that will be having a similar builder energy, and would be willing to like help others on all that. And then we started adding similar people who will be invited. And, and now, it's gated by Hey, if you want to join the community, you should be building something actively. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: And like, what's the more tangible proposition for the builders? Okay, like, I mean, can they expect funding out of it? Do they get, you know, a credit stack or package that they won't get anywhere else? Talk to us a little bit about talk to us.

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah. So what, what we have managed to put together, like over the years is that we built a large network of three pillars, which is hey, community, capital and distribution. While the capital part is currently which is like, hey, intros to larger accelerators, or intros to VCs in our network or intros to like, would probably like write an angel check for you, where the community comes in where, hey, we're built like a large, like, we are almost like 10,000 plus active builders across the world, not just India. So for any founder, the value prop coming into inner circle as a community is that hey, if you're building something actively, you have these three things, which is you get to find your first 100 users for either beta testing or just like finding your initial audience to test your thesis, right through the community, because the community has people who are you like, technically, you're like, probably like willing to try experiment with a lot of these technical products. And distribution is what something what we have managed to put together with a bunch of experiments ourselves is that these channels across Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, where we run these experiments that ended up helping us build some sort of following across a lot of verticals that people usually like end up building. So you building any consumer app could like tap into this, as having the space here, you could like find founders in the same journey, where the feedback is much actionable, right? Compared to any community that ends up starting, if you don't curate, like, every community and let's get started by curating people, right? But over time, it gets bloated, the feedback that you would have received on day one might not be the same on like, day 100 is what we're still optimizing for, hey, if you bring like, people who are in the same journey, and relate to what you're building, the feedback loops are always like stronger, and so that you find it useful.

Utsav Somani: And there are a few other hacker houses slash community, which are assembling in Bangalore as well, right? We've seen, we've seen local host, on the show as well. And there's, I believe, Basecamp as well. Yeah, SPC as well. So many others in this space, where I think the lowest common denominator is either intention to build or already building right now. So what is one metric that you actively measure? Is it number of projects that come out of your community? Is it monthly active members? Or is it something else?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, so there are a bunch of accelerators, hacker houses, right? And I feel like there should be more spaces like these in Bangalore. Our thesis is that, hey, people think as of as the acceleration and growth, if you're building something serious, where Bangalore still has the same talent density, but just looks scattered across places, right? What we're trying to optimize is for the number of, you know, increasing the talent density in like one single room curated by us. And we do run these programs. I think currently we're running something called build something wonderful, which is targeted to like solo founders, people have done things before, ended up taking a new shot at like, starting something useful. So our metric is that, hey, how can we like, bring these people across, starting with Bangalore, and build like a high talent density room in like one place. That's what we are optimizing for. And then you kind of leverage whatever you have built through, it could be community, it could be the distribution that we built, it could be access to the partners that we ended up bringing together, is what you could leverage.

Utsav Somani: And you want to highlight maybe some of the recent projects that you're most excited by coming out of it?

Akhil (InnerCircle): I think one got just launched yesterday. Everyone should check it out. Like Vaishnavi from our cohort launched Maya, which is a companion for parents, which is like, hey, most of our parents end up struggling with like basic tech stuff, right? Like my mom calls me saying, hey, how do I pay the electricity bill? Like, how do I do online shopping? It's a companion that hangs out, you know, guides them on whatever they ask in their own regional language, hey, please do this, do that. So this was built from our one of our members from the program that we built. And then she's like starting actively. I think she found her first 100 waitlists directly from the community that could like, onboard from like day one.

Dhruv Sharma: Interesting. Akhil, you know, very often when people start building communities and networks, you obviously want to bring together like minded people. The flip side, though, is that like minded people are also more susceptible to group think and, you know, it ends up being like an echo chamber. Those are the terms people generally use. So how do you how do you, you know, how do you guard against that? There's another question I have, which is like, you know, in a community, there's always this tension between people who are giving and taking and doing a combination of the two. So how have you designed the community in such a way that, you know, one group think is not a real concern and people are, you know, giving as much as they're taking?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, totally. I think this is like one of the strongest belief system that I, I built in a circle or just like I built my entire career around, which is so I took like a lot of my career was like super nonlinear. I started as a designer, done product, done community, all that stuff. And when, when I was designer, I always wanted to build products myself, right? This was like way back when I started actually building things and saw this as like an opportunity. So I was part of communities myself, where I ended up meeting all like my co founders, the early in a circle group, where I think one thing that happened to me is that when when you start out in a community, a lot of people are like super extractive in terms of hey, what is in for me from day one, which, which, which where where I've can I give you first, which is like, offer, if I'm a designer, can I help you like, you know, put together your landing page or like, without like being selfless, right? Hey, I offered my help for I think every single you're saying give before you take, I think that's give as much as you can.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Create more than you consume. Like I think those are golden principles for good life.

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah. And also I think where I'm coming at is that if you if you end up giving a lot, when when your time comes in, you you would see amazing things happening together because people will show up. Yeah. I think that's the thesis or I'm building in a circle. It's just like how to read these people and like have these rituals in place where people always think giving first and then good things started happening for us.

Dhruv Sharma: And the other one was around group things. So, you know, having community members share tough but constructive feedback with each other.

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, I think this this is where just bringing people on the same journey helps, right? What what I've seen happening across Bangalore is that hey, there are very early communities that are like little later founders stage communities, right? The day you mix these two is when you would face these problems of not being able to like share constructive feedback or whatever, right? I think if you end up like bringing who are in the same journey, I think any feedback is just helps them move the needle.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. But in terms of like guiding principles for the community, I also run offline, which is a community for slightly scaled up. I mean, two and a half years and we've still not figured out the science, but I think it's a evolving journey where we're also learning so much new because end of the day, it's a service business where it's high touch where you eventually want the organism which is the community to scale and run and sustain itself, but you still have to nurture it. But do you have guiding principles for inner circle? Or do you have some other mechanism which is sort of guiding this community?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah, having no structure is what the mechanism is that just have fun numbers. Yeah, it's a 10,000 across all platforms, but we have like a dedicated community that hangs around in telegram, which is around I think 2500. So every time you see this, this, there's a lot of fun chatter that happens often. And, and when like someone will start like a conversation that like CEOs building something, and the conversations like goes on to, you know, pretty intense, right? So I think just having that fun while you're doing this is is the structure like we don't have any structure.

Utsav Somani: I mean, that's kudos. I mean, speaks a lot about the community itself. But can you tell me a little bit more about the physical space? Like how do you sustain that? How do you pay for it? Is it grants? Membership fees? Like what's the?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah. So while we while we started doing these fellowships that I was talking about, when we used to take people, and good things are coming happening to them. And one day we realized, okay, why don't we take a shot at just building the space ourselves. And in a circle runs agency on the site, like we used to have a service thing for last four years, if this is our full bet in terms of investing all that into taking the space and trying to build that tight cohort as is, which is currently a we opened up the space, we've started like adding exclusive access to starting with our program founders, who can like come work from here. And, and any any interesting founder building either solo or early stage could like come and use the space.

Dhruv Sharma: Okay, I think you should have an interesting story to tell us about this thing called Y Combinator, but with a W.

Akhil (InnerCircle): Yeah. So it's a, it's a pretty interesting thing. So me and my friend Priyanshu, like who runs AI weekends. So we are like two communities. We were trying to do a campaign together. And one day we saw Y Combinator ended up rejecting almost 90 people who have applied, right? I think it was like, first come first services, even I myself got rejected. And overnight, we thought, okay, why don't we just do a top 1% rejected event. And we saw quickly we saw Y Combinator domain being available. And we bought it, put together a small note and tweeted with with no plan in place, right? And overnight, the tweet blew up. And I think we have, like we got four days before the deadline. Now we need to do something. Right. And we ended up taking a small auditorium in HSR, I think filled up like 300 people. Overnight, we got like stand up comedian, Shah Rukh Khan to open, got like bunch of these interesting teams from who got rejected for YC, put together a small panel of founders, VCs and did a roast tech roast instead of the entire event, which ended up doing well than the actual YC event.

Utsav Somani: They always have wondered about these tech roast events, like I'm sometimes divided on them, like are they positive? Should they happen? Give me your rationale behind this on why something like this should happen and any backlash that you faced for it?

Akhil (InnerCircle): No, I don't think like, they've got like much greater response than backlash. I think in the in the world of lot of just very serious stuff, what people would enjoy is just if you have a very like fun formats, and that could also have like some actionable for founders, whatever, like I'm speaking about the tech sort of formats, right? I think a lot of a lot of best folks are also planning. If you see the mafia format, these stuff, I think some fun setup with actionable is what's working. And then I think these things would happen quite often, especially in Bangalore.

Dhruv Sharma: But I can, there's this, I mean, related question is, every few months, there's a debate, and then it's mostly an online debate about some exclusive event or gathering somewhere and people wanting to go there. And for some reason, they can't make it. So I mean, yeah, like, you've been on both sides, as you and have you developed a thought process around, because even from the organizers perspective, right, sometimes space is a real issue. Sometimes they genuinely want to, you know, keep it very selective. But when you're climbing up the ladder in any ecosystem, you want to have, you know, you want to have as much surface area as you possibly can. So how should people think about?

Akhil (InnerCircle): Are you asking me why people are like projecting?

Dhruv Sharma: Well, no, I'm just saying, like, maybe there's no right answer either. Maybe everyone just has some subjective thoughts. I'm curious, what are your subjective thoughts?

Akhil (InnerCircle): I think, like, my thoughts are that just like, do do things and then people will like, things will unlock for you automatically. Like, I would like focus on just like, building things and building useful stuff. You can at this point, like, the building public or Twitter as an ecosystem is just open enough to, you know, use any interesting product that you have built. Like, you could like build your own audience through that. And like, when you have like good things to talk about, like, I think things will unlock by themselves and you don't have to like wait for an even person to accept you for that. Yeah, it's how I usually go about just like sit at home, build interesting stuff, go and talk about it, people like invite you.

Utsav Somani: Love it. Actually, I had a follow up question. But I think that's a good note to end this show on. And thank you so much for coming on our show. Wishing you and all the best.

Akhil (InnerCircle): See you guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Dhruv Sharma: All the best of you. Thank you for coming. Yes.

Utsav Somani: All right, so it's you and me Friday. Let's do some heavy stuff. Lord Sam happened has happened in the world of startup news. Of course, there's Travis Kalanick all over my feed again. 1.7 by 16z. Did you see some of his interviews? I think he went on a press tour, right? A 16z podcast, the new media course. And then he did TVPN again.

Dhruv Sharma: This is atoms, right? Like this is Travis's own odyssey in a sense. So he's in a revenge.

Utsav Somani: Have you seen the odyssey, by the way? I did it. So yeah. What's the feedback? What's the review?

Dhruv Sharma: The feedback is it's fantastic. I've been recommending it to everyone. I didn't even go to an IMAX. I don't know why people are even complaining about kiss screen. It's a great quote.

Utsav Somani: That's literally what the entire Twitter timeline is complaining about 70 mm what it looks like in a regular screen. I don't think it looks that bad. Also, I'm going for it on Sunday.

Dhruv Sharma: Don't worry. They show you know, you do to see like, all of the footage, but it's it's really nice. And then yeah, what it was it totally worth it.

Utsav Somani: Elon Musk didn't have a field day. So I think Elon Musk wants to make the air version of odyssey when putting 100 million behind Mel Gibson, I think, or at least on Twitter is Elon doesn't have the same political views as Nolan. But he gets so I'm looking forward to it will probably like give you my feedback or review on Monday, but I'm sure like I mean, reading whatever I'm reading online, I think it's phenomenal. But coming back to the world of AI OpenAI says its own model escape to test environment and reached hugging face production systems break it down for me.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, like models going rogue or displaying bad behavior. So I think I read the story somewhere OpenAI was the story goes that OpenAI was trying to test a model, I think one of the frontier models right now and then another model that's still in the works. And it was in a sandbox environment and it had to meet a certain eval. And somehow the model, you know, figured out a loophole and exploit and it first discovered and exploited a zero day vulnerability in the sandbox to break out of it and go fetch something it needed to meet the eval from hugging face, which is quite simply, it's like the GitHub for AI. And put it breached, you know, it breached the sandbox, it broke into another system. And that sparked a very interesting debate. I think there's a there's a very nice tweet in it by by read often, absolutely, which he talks about, you know, the the idea of asymmetry in cyber, you know, situations like this.

Utsav Somani: And I think, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's comparing apples to apples, right? Because some side might have more powerful tooling versus less, I mean, strong defense. So I think they'll need equal sort of tooling to like match up because I think with these AI tools becoming so powerful, all of these phishing attacks will become extremely, extremely, exactly, a new and different in in ways that the existing tooling might not be able to capably handle. And that's where people were also worried about Fable and my thoughts coming out because all the banks, including the RBI in India, did meet up, discuss what they would do in the off case that my thoughts was released to the public in a different format without any guardrails. And we had somebody from I mean, the founder of Sarthak of mitigator mitigator as well on the show to come and discuss this, I think, so that's a good segment that you can catch up on. Jack Dorsey is in the again, he's launched buzz, which is a free open source workspace where humans and agents will share the room. Currently, we use Slack, it's going to look like Slack and GitHub out of baby. And it's basically this open source tool where he says that we're coming to a future where agents are going to not work for you, but going to work beside you. So I think this is his attempt under block, which is a company behind Square, cash app, title, and a bunch of other things to take a shot at this future. Yeah. Have you tried this out? I'm not yet. Probably not for us at this point of time. And something that I think people have been probably reading on Twitter is network school in Malaysia. I think there's a lot going on there as well. But I think we've had Balaji was the first guest on our show. And network school, of course, is a thesis that he's validated. And now he's trying to port this to Kazakhstan. And that shows you the strength of the community. And of course, the network that Balaji has assembled, where he's able to sign these big deals with sovereigns very, very quickly. Still an MOU phase, but I expect this to move very, very quickly. Hope this resolves soon.

Dhruv Sharma: Even dropped in Delhi. There was a picture of him with the Delhi chief minister as well. Delhi chief minister as well.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Satellite campus of the network school might just come up in Delhi. Who knows?

Utsav Somani: He actually put up a video of AeroCity, I think, I believe, where I think he's taking a video. So it would be pretty cool if a node of network school actually comes up in AeroCity. I think that might be nice. Yeah. All right. I think that's it from us. We'll see you on Monday. Have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for joining us. Bye.