Ajay Y.

Now, I’m back in the founder seat, focusing on building a vertical AI SaaS startup. I will be building this venture in public, sharing my experiences and insights on growth and revenue strategies along the way.

In 2021, I co-founded Simplified, an AI-driven platform designed to support SMB marketing teams with content creation, distribution, and collaboration in one place. We raised over $14M from Khosla Ventures and Craft, scaled to over 17 million users.

I began my entrepreneurial journey as a solo founder, building a marketplace in New York to help people find roommates. This venture raised over $20M in capital, grew to over 5 million users, and reached profitability.

Co-Founder

// 100,000

10 months.
90% happened in 1 month.

9 months felt quiet.
then it wasn’t.

lesson:
keep showing up.
help people.
trust the compounding.

thank you for being here.

Ajay Yadav

Building @ Otto AI | Prev. co-founder @ Simplified AI (20M+ Users), backed by Khosla & Craft Ventures

graphical user interface, text, application

Your production LLM stack is one incident away from chaos.

The real problem is not which model to use.

It is operating LLMs at scale across teams with cost spikes, provider instability, prompt drift, and compliance requirements.

The new Portkey video captures this perfectly.
A boardroom calmly presenting updates while the office is literally on fire.

Portkey is the control layer between your app and every LLM provider, with observability, routing, guardrails, cost tracking, governance, and compliance in one place.

Signals that this is already production infrastructure:
•⁠ ⁠2T+ tokens processed
•⁠ ⁠650+ organizations
•⁠ ⁠1,600+ models behind a unified API
•⁠ ⁠Gartner Cool Vendor 2025 for LLM Observability
•⁠ ⁠10,200+ GitHub stars for the open-source AI Gateway
•⁠ ⁠SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR

Tagging Portkey, plus @1rohitagarwal and @ayush92garg

What hurts most in your LLM stack right now?
Reliability, cost visibility, evals, prompt changes, or governance?

Everyone told me Substack is one of the hardest platforms to grow.

You need to write consistently, send weekly newsletters, be a great writer, or spend money.

I did none of that.

No weekly cadence. Almost no posts. Zero dollars spent.

I also stepped away from the easier channels. I paused LinkedIn. Stopped chasing Twitter.

Because I wanted to test something specific.

If you truly understand growth mechanics, can you crack a platform people call hard without being a career writer?

It took 10 months.

For a long time, it was flat. Quiet. Nothing to point at.

Then the curve bent.

Now it is around 5,000 subscribers. Fully organic.

The lesson is not “write more.”

Platforms are not the game. Distribution is.

If you want the exact playbook I used, comment Substack and I will share it.

—

Aj
Building Otto AI, bookkeeping and taxes for creators

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Hi, meet Sakshi. She is currently helping Ms. Ananya Birla (daughter of Shri Kumar Mangalam Birla) at Aditya Birla Group build businesses. If you are looking for collaboration, please reach out to me at sakshi.jain@adityabirla.com.

Before this, she was working at Antler (VC). Her day-in-day-out job was to help founders problem-solve business roadblocks and help them raise their next round of fundraising. She also spent a portion of her time analysing which companies should Antler invest in. 

Previously, she worked closely with founders of multiple startups to help them build, iterate, reiterate, scale and fund-raise (early stage to Series B).

She has done her MBA from Masters Union, Gurgaon. She also comes from a CA and CFA background.

On a personal front, she loves travelling and has been to over 50 villages that don’t exist on the maps yet. She has completed 10+ high-altitude treks in the Himalayas, completed over 35k+ kms of roadtrips across continents and countries. She is also a certified Scuba Diver, Snowboarder, Surfer and Trekker. Anything adventure- hit me up :)

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The Battle

Ajay Y.

Sakshi Jain

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The Battle

Ajay Y.

Sakshi Jain

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ajay Y.'s LinkedIn Performance

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