Vishnu's Podcast

Vishnu's Podcast ft. Mo Bitar - Founder of Standard Notes [Part 2]

Fri, 08 May 2026 14:30:00 GMT

Mo Bitar, Founder of Standard Notes, returns for Part 2 of his conversation with Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente — diving deeper into building privacy-first products, his burnout from privacy, life after Proton, and the lessons learned along the way.

Listen as they talk about startup struggles, the mental toll of building in public, and why Mo believes the future of privacy needs a different path.

Mo Bitar – https://mough.xyz | https://x.com/atmoio

Conquer – https://conquer.dev/

Ente – https://ente.com/

Vishnu's Podcast ft. Mo Bitar - Founder of Standard Notes [Part 1]

Fri, 01 May 2026 14:30:00 GMT

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/moughxyz

Conquer - https://conquer.dev/

Ente - https://ente.com

Free Search is a Trap | Kagi's CEO Vlad on Building a New Internet

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:30:00 GMT

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.

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Chapters

00:00 Start

00:25 Intro

01:00 Why build Kagi?

03:50 Early days of Kagi

06:08 Public Benefit Corporation

10:17 Paying for Search

15:00 Orion Browser

20:52 Vlad’s origin story

24:46 Childhood memories

28:52 Kagi’s dependency on Yandex

32:05 The future of Kagi

35:37 Kagi Mail

39:00 Doing “too many” things

48:25 What makes Vlad optimistic

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Kagi: https://kagi.com/

Vlad: https://x.com/vladquant

Discount for Kagi: https://ente.com/friends

Discount for Ente: https://kagi.com/specials

Techlore on Privacy, Surveillance and Optimism | Vishnu’s Podcast

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:14:00 GMT

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 Intro

00:57 Why privacy matters to Henry

02:42 How late is too late?

07:34 Techlore's origin story

11:33 Using YouTube to spread privacy

15:21 Threat modelling

18:58 Henry's threat model

22:19 Team behind Techlore

23:24 Techlore forum shut down

25:01 Techlore's business

31:30 Content consumption

34:45 Content creation

36:36 Facing the worst on the Internet

43:26 Influences on world view

45:48 Gratitude

46:50 Artificial Intelligence

57:03 Dystopia

1:03:16 Parenting

1:10:26 Improving privacy

1:14:43 Helping privacy tools

1:17:09 Compromising privacy

1:20:00 Rapid fire

1:24:18 Techlore's future

1:26:12 Henry's hope

Links:

Website: https://techlore.tech

Twitter: https://x.com/techloreinc

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/techlore.tech

YouTube: / @techlore

PeerTube: https://techlore.tv

Henry's talk @ Ad Filtering Dev Summit: • We Lose 73% of Revenue to Ad Blocking (AFD...

Privacy Dad: https://theprivacydad.com

They See Your Photos: https://theyseeyourphotos.com

Kailash Nadh on building Zerodha | Vishnu's Podcast

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:11:08 GMT

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 Start

00:16 FLOSS/fund

03:30 $500 million in profits

07:19 Company culture

13:04 Engineering problems

17:50 Childhood

26:36 Artificial Intelligence

28:36 Artificial General Intelligence

32:09 Venture Capital

41:21 Privacy

45:36 Climate Change

45:59 Next FOSS project

52:40 Inner peace

55:30 Learnings

1:01:20 Rapid fire

1:07:48 Social media

1:10:00 Optimism

Mozilla's Leadership Responds to Critics

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:22:24 GMT

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 Intro

00:57 Raffi's story

03:27 John's story

06:27 Mozilla's structure

13:25 AI @ Mozilla

25:10 Firefox

28:56 Thunderbird & Mozilla VPN

30:28 Revenue models

33:55 Mozilla raising venture capital for AI

36:32 Rebel alliance

38:56 Criticism against Mozilla

41:30 "Rapid" fire