039 • 23 September 2025

Contents of this Newsletter

🤷🏻

Things Every Startup WILL Go Through

⏰ : 4 min

📓

Blog Picks

⏰ : 10 min

📱

Help Us To Win An iPhone 17 Pro!

⏰ : 2 min

🗞️

Weekly AI News

⏰ : 9 min

MAIN STORY

Chaos Is the Norm for Any Startup

Recently at Quash, we half-jokingly made the TV show Silicon Valley a mandatory watch. If you haven’t seen it, the show follows Pied Piper, a scrappy team trying to launch their tech startup in the cutthroat world of Silicon Valley. They’ve got brilliant tech, they’re early movers in their space, and yet every possible thing that can go wrong, does.

At first, you’d think, well of course it’s TV, they need the drama. But if you’ve ever built something from scratch, you know it isn’t exaggerated at all. Startups really do run on chaos.

At Quash, we’ve had our share of those moments. Once, we had a demo with one of the leading companies in the fintech industry lined up, which was a big moment for us. And of course, that was the day our demo didn’t work. It’s almost a rite of passage: the bigger the moment, the higher the chance of something breaking. Although this is the case for even the largest tech companies because we saw how meta’s live demo went last week.

Then there are the micro-product shifts. We started with Quash Report and Automate, but then the more time we spent building it, something didn’t add up. The conclusion that scripts don’t scale forced us to rethink our foundation and double down on Mahoraga, our current execution engine. Every shift like this is a product decision but it also means pulling the whole team into alignment, which is often the harder part.

Hiring hasn’t been any easier. The job market is upside down right now with plenty of openings, but people are still struggling to land the right roles. For startups, it’s even tougher. You don’t just evaluate skills; you have to measure something harder to define: startup fit. Will this person thrive in an environment where nothing is certain, where speed matters more than structure? Even after weeks of evaluation, there’s no guarantee they’ll actually join.

And of course, competition never sleeps. We’ve had legacy companies roll out exact same features just a month after we released the tool. Things like this happen but it also validates that we’re building in the right direction.

On top of that, there’s distribution. LinkedIn might feel like an endless feed of hollow thought-leadership posts, but as founders, we don’t get the luxury of ignoring it. Distribution is as important as the product itself, and building that presence is non-negotiable. It might feel awkward or forced at times, but it’s part of the playbook now.

For any B2B SaaS startup, staying connected to the ecosystem in San Francisco and California is almost a requirement. But the recent fines on the H-1B visa and logistical hurdles make it harder than ever to build those connections. You feel the pull to be there, even if it’s not simple to pull off.

All of this happens while the market keeps shifting. In AI especially, every week brings some breakthrough that makes you rethink the ground you’re standing on. The pace doesn’t slow down, no matter how far along you are.

One of the best ways I’ve ever heard it described is something our CEO, Ayush said: launching a startup is like starting a religion. And in a country like India, we know exactly how big a deal that is. You’re building a product, but you’re also building belief!

So yes, chaos is the norm. It’s not something you outgrow but it's how startups operate. But chaos doesn’t just mean struggling. For us, it also means figuring things out, making tough calls, and finding clarity in the middle of everything. Every week we come out of it a little sharper, a little clearer on where we’re headed. There are numerous moments of breakthrough, often when you least expect them, and those moments give meaning to the inevitable chaos.

And if you’re out there building something of your own, or working inside a startup right now, we get it. We see your hustle and we respect it. No matter what happens, we move.

Check out our Recent Blogs

TEAM

We’re Hiring And If You Help Us, You Win An iPhone 17 Pro!

We are looking for two key roles: Applied AI Engineer and Electron Engineer.

If you know someone who’d be a great fit, refer them our way and if they get hired, you win iPhone 17 Pro.

This is open to all, the reward kicks in after your candidate completes one month with us, and only the first referrer counts. Just send us a quick email with the subject line: Referral – [Name | Role], and once the conditions are met, the iPhone is yours

What If QA Was As Simple As Making Coffee?

This is a sneak peak into our Execution Engine: Mahoraga.

News

This Week in AI

xAI Rolls Out Grok 4 Fast for Lower Cost, High Speed
Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok 4 Fast, a streamlined version of Grok 4 designed for enterprise and consumer use, that integrates both “reasoning” and “non-reasoning” capabilities into a single model. It uses about 40% fewer “thinking tokens” than Grok 4 while keeping benchmark accuracy nearly the same, offers a 2-million token context window for handling large inputs, and starts at a low base price for small workloads.

Notion Rolls Out Agents for Data Analysis & Automation
Notion has introduced its first AI agents that use a user’s Notion pages and databases as context to automatically generate notes, competitor reports, and feedback pages, as well as create or update databases. The agents can run multi-step tasks lasting up to 20 minutes over hundreds of pages, remember user preferences from a profile page, and will soon support triggers or schedules and a template library to make setup easier.

Google Unveils AP2 to Enable Secure Agent-Led Payments

Google has announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol built with over 60 partners (banks, merchants, payments firms, etc.) to allow AI agents to initiate and complete transactions on behalf of users, while ensuring trust and security. AP2 introduces cryptographically signed “mandates” that capture a user’s intent, and link that intent all the way through to payment—so merchants can validate intent, users are protected, and there’s a clear audit trail. It supports wide payment types (cards, bank transfers, stablecoins, etc.) and aims to become a standard framework for agentic commerce across platforms.

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