Vishnu's Podcast

Mo Bitar, Founder, Standard Notes talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on building Standard Notes, selling to Proton, and why he left Proton.Part 2 coming soon.Mo Bitar - https://x.com/moughxyzConquer - https://conquer.dev/Ente - https://ente.com

Vladimir Prelovac, founder of Kagi, joins Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente, to unpack the story behind a search engine built on trust, not ads.Vlad explains why “free” search is a trap, how Big Tech’s incentives distort information, and what pushed him to build Kagi — a paid, privacy-first alternative.They dig into the origin of Kagi, the browser built by one engineer, the vision for an independent ecosystem, and why incentives matter more than features.If you care about privacy, the future of the web, or the mindset behind mission-driven products, this one’s worth your time.⸻Chapters00:00 Start00:25 Intro01:00 Why build Kagi?03:50 Early days of Kagi06:08 Public Benefit Corporation10:17 Paying for Search15:00 Orion Browser20:52 Vlad’s origin story24:46 Childhood memories28:52 Kagi’s dependency on Yandex32:05 The future of Kagi35:37 Kagi Mail39:00 Doing “too many” things48:25 What makes Vlad optimistic⸻Kagi: https://kagi.com/Vlad: https://x.com/vladquantDiscount for Kagi: https://ente.com/friendsDiscount for Ente: https://kagi.com/specials

Henry Fisher of Techlore talks to Vishnu about privacy, surveillance, and the future of the internet.They discuss why it’s never too late to leave Big Tech, how age verification and online surveillance are reshaping our lives, and why this is the best moment to take control. Henry also shares how he has personally grown up along with Techlore over a decade and his plans for the future.This is a pragmatic, optimistic conversation about fighting for a better internet without losing your sanity.Chapters:00:00 Intro00:57 Why privacy matters to Henry02:42 How late is too late?07:34 Techlore's origin story11:33 Using YouTube to spread privacy15:21 Threat modelling18:58 Henry's threat model22:19 Team behind Techlore23:24 Techlore forum shut down25:01 Techlore's business31:30 Content consumption34:45 Content creation36:36 Facing the worst on the Internet43:26 Influences on world view45:48 Gratitude46:50 Artificial Intelligence57:03 Dystopia1:03:16 Parenting1:10:26 Improving privacy1:14:43 Helping privacy tools1:17:09 Compromising privacy1:20:00 Rapid fire1:24:18 Techlore's future1:26:12 Henry's hopeLinks:Website: https://techlore.techTwitter: https://x.com/techloreincBlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/techlore.techYouTube: / @techlorePeerTube: https://techlore.tvHenry's talk @ Ad Filtering Dev Summit: • We Lose 73% of Revenue to Ad Blocking (AFD...Privacy Dad: https://theprivacydad.comThey See Your Photos: https://theyseeyourphotos.com

How do you build internet-scale financial systems without venture capital, ads, or growth-hacking?In this episode, Vishnu speaks with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha - one of the world’s largest trading platforms. They cover how Zerodha stays fully bootstrapped, remains highly profitable (USD 500 million+ in profit), and grows with zero ad spend.They dig into Zerodha’s engineering philosophy, self-hosting, open source, privacy, and why the internet feels increasingly broken. This is a grounded conversation on scale, incentives, pessimism, and building companies that last.Kailash: https://nadh.in/Zerodha: https://zerodha.com/FLOSS/Fund: https://floss.fund/Ente: https://ente.com/Chapters:00:00 Start00:16 FLOSS/fund03:30 $500 million in profits07:19 Company culture13:04 Engineering problems17:50 Childhood26:36 Artificial Intelligence28:36 Artificial General Intelligence32:09 Venture Capital41:21 Privacy45:36 Climate Change45:59 Next FOSS project52:40 Inner peace55:30 Learnings1:01:20 Rapid fire1:07:48 Social media1:10:00 Optimism

Mozilla announced Firefox would become an "AI browser" - and the internet lost it. Users called it tone-deaf. Reddit threads exploded. Mozilla promised a kill switch. So I sat down with Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Mozilla) and John Dickerson (CEO, Mozilla.ai) to get answers. We talked about the AI backlash, Firefox's future, open source AI, Mozilla.ai's developer tools, small language models, on-device AI, Mozilla's $1.3 billion war chest, raising venture capital, and what their "rebel alliance" for open source actually means.00:00 Intro00:57 Raffi's story03:27 John's story06:27 Mozilla's structure13:25 AI @ Mozilla25:10 Firefox28:56 Thunderbird & Mozilla VPN30:28 Revenue models33:55 Mozilla raising venture capital for AI36:32 Rebel alliance38:56 Criticism against Mozilla41:30 "Rapid" fire48:26 Optimism52:08 Advice for founders53:40 The End

Carl Dong, CEO of Obscura talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on all things VPNs, Bitcoin, Privacy Tech, User Experience and a lot more. Carl Dong - https://x.com/carl_dong Obscura VPN - https://obscura.net/ Vishnu Mohandas - https://x.com/VishnuKVMD Ente - https://ente.io/ Links mentioned in the video - https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdfhttps://reproducible-builds.org/