Regarding current scenario w/Claude

You hey bro i want to really talk to you robustly and honestly i dont want any kind of sugar coating or like and all but i want to really like tell you few things about whats going in my mind today is 14th of june last year i basically completed my like internship at merlin ai in bangalore i basically done with my internship on august basically the entire august month then i was like unemployed from september itself from then till now i am still unemployed i havent got any job offers or anything basically why is it because i am looking for remote opportunities only i was mainly like looking for remote opportunities and also let me like give you a brief about what have i like done throughout these months so in september uh till august i was like entirely engaged on merlin then from september itself i like started from september i started like learning gen ai stuffs and also entire september went there and in october like in the from the is uh last week of september to first week of october i like started working on one of my projects which is agentic chat then in between october we me and my basically family uh went for a like weekly location sorry weekly vacation to jagannath puri and after i came back i kind of like finished the entire project till the october end from november i basically started a bit of applying for remote jobs and all so i got a few like interview calls and all but actually couldn't like cracked it somewhat like let me tell you more briefly about it the first company which I somehow like cracked or got a call from was ERP AI which is I guess uh Bangalore based or somewhere based so yeah they were like offering a remote job but the thing was that when I hopped down the interview the interview was going good or I would say okay-ish but for whatever reason maybe they might have found me like lack of knowledge or something even though the interview was going a little good they basically rejected me it's okay no problem then I stepped on to like Steens something I don't know I don't actually remember the name of the another startup that I like hopped into I cold mailed the founder and the founder was very more like very happy with my uh male pattern and then he like reached out to me and then we had an interview like like a chitchat type type of not a proper interview uh he liked my overall like personality and all everything and then he asked me for my project whatever I built so I gave him the agentic chat link and all for testing and all so he liked it and then told her HR to like set a meeting up for interview or something but that HR never said or fix the interview i like mailed them two three times even i mailed the founder as well but I didn't got any like reply back moving on then I gave another interview I don't remember the company but it was remote and yeah but the role was like front-end developer but it was ok I basically they're dead interview was the first interview where I actually like like stumbled we basically their interview in that interview I was rejected mainly for my communication and so they they were like kiwi have very strict communication policy and also that was the main reason that they rejected me and then after that these these all like interviews happened in the number itself and after data I got like selected for a few interviews but they were like mostly on site for example Ellen pay which is a YC company they were like I got like their mail for interview to schedule an interview but it was like bangalore-based so I was not in the state of mind to like move again to Bangalore because of my own person reasons because of my health reasons and also that I don't have anyone in Bangalore as well I have to like live alone and also there is one emotional angle as well so apart from this in the same time my house was getting renovated as well so there was a lot of like as we may know the construction work was going on in the house and then the November like went through like this and then December on December the construction was in much more was much more like getting like done basically it was like much more construction in the work so I was not able to like completely focus on applying even if I applied in the December and some interview would have fixed I won't we have I won't be getting the time or like basically a quite environment to like give interview so the entire December I wasn't able to like do some sort of basically I didn't apply much in December but instead I was like just I basically time passed I couldn't do anything I then throughout the December I thought that we should now like build another more complex and more robust project apart from GenTik chat then from January is I applied a little few just only in the January then I like started working on my project Edward and then from January to March I barely applied because I was entirely engaged on building my project Edward then from the Edward the Edward project basically took a mid of the March and also like creating videos of it like demo videos and all like it somewhat took the entire March as well so so January to March took the entire basically took my entire time on working on Edward and then from April from April I mainly like set and started robustly applying for jobs in April I guess I got one call interview opportunity from some code mate I guess called mate a I some company there as well I I was not like selected because I guess me I mean the interview was going a little good but I mean basically I was rejected I won't give any excuse I knew I mean I understood why I was rejected so I worked on it as well and then I like continue applied for remote jobs from well-found from LinkedIn cold mailing cold messaging whatever in whatever quantity as getting because if you know I have a very strict filtration by which is ninety to ninety-five percent of the companies are already filtered out and the rest of the five percent leave and the rest of the 5% companies that i have to like look on them and which one suits me and then i have to like send catered mail to them so it's a very like long long process and very like less amount of companies I am spared with so from April May and June I still have not got any single proper call from any company even though sometimes i really go really my moral is very down sometimes and I feel very demotivated sometimes in such time i feel like what do i do here I am not getting any remote jobs or some sort of things but in such times I basically what I do i just open companies which I see are good or I mean everything is great the work is great the product is great the team might be great but the only thing if the company is like on site in Bengaluru or Hyderabad whatever for the sake of my like mental health or what do I say to cater it basically I just apply even though I don't have any intention to actually go and do on-site jobs but I just apply similarly I applied I might have applied to some of the companies as I already shared like Allen Pay and there is one super living AI they also got rich basically they also reach out to me with a for an on-site interview with not non-site interview but basically the parole would be basically the job would be on all sides so I didn't actually interviewed at all because what would be the point if the role is already on site so in May not in May but in June sorry in May actually in 2026 me I got a mail from Amazon actually Amazon India that I was shortlisted for their engineer HD one role and they gave me some kind of assessment to do so I did it and then after two weeks or three weeks I got another another mail that I have passed the online assessment and now they are like asking me to fill up survey form or something to move or move ahead but the problem is you may I mean basically Amazon maybe or actually it is a very big tech company but the problem is I don't really feel like going there because of course it's on site and if you I'll attach my resume and my website and portfolio and my projects and everything you might you can analyze it and you can get the vibe of my work basically I like to work in startups not in companies where the work is so much delegated that you don't get to do lot of things that's the issue so basically hope you understand what's my current mental state is and help me what should I do I am basically kind of lost portfolio (check recursively for more info): https://shubhojeet.com

Claude

Couldn't fetch the portfolio - looks like the server's down. But your resume is right here and I have enough context. Let me give you what you asked for: no sugar coating.

First thing: this is not a skills problem.

Looking at what you built — Edward's streaming state machine parser, the preview routing layer, the LangGraph agent with HITL and semantic caching — that's not junior work. That's the kind of thing most "2-3 year experienced" engineers can't actually do. The problem isn't what you can build. So let's set that aside.

The Honest Diagnosis

1. Your filter is the real bottleneck, not your candidacy

You said it yourself — 90-95% filtered out immediately. That's not careful targeting, that's making your addressable market so small that even perfect execution can't generate enough shots. Remote-first Indian startups at Seed-Series B that are hiring for 0-2 year roles right now? That's maybe 15-20 companies total at any given time. And ALL of them are getting hammered with applicants.

You're not losing interviews because you're not good enough. You're barely getting interviews because the field you're playing on is tiny.

2. Your job search has actually been sporadic

Let's be honest about the timeline:

• Sept-Oct: building Agentic Chat
• Nov: actually applying
• Dec: construction, couldn't focus, mostly did nothing
• Jan-March: building Edward
• April-June: back to applying again

That's roughly 3 months of active job hunting across 9 months. The time building projects wasn't wasted — Edward is a real asset — but you can't be surprised that output is proportional to input. The search has been start-stop, not sustained.

3. Stop applying to on-site roles

You said this yourself: "I just apply even though I don't have any intention to actually go and do on-site jobs." That's hurting you, not helping. Every rejection from Allen Pay or SuperLiving AI adds to your psychological tally of "I'm not getting anything" when you were never actually competing. It's fake noise. Kill it completely.

4. The communication rejection was a real signal

One company explicitly called out communication. In text — cold emails, DMs, written applications — you're clearly effective, because you've gotten calls. But verbal under interview pressure is different. Your natural mode is casual Hinglish, which is fine normally, but when you're nervous it might be coming across as uncertain or muddled. This is fixable but it needs deliberate practice, not just more interviews.

5. You're ignoring an entire market

US and EU early-stage companies hiring Indian engineers remotely. This is a complete blind spot in your search. YC-backed AI startups, European SaaS companies, US infrastructure companies — many of them hire full-stack AI engineers in India. They pay in dollars. They're small teams where you'd own things. And your specific skill set — LLM orchestration, agentic systems, full-stack production infrastructure — is exactly what they're hiring for right now.

You've been fishing in one pond when there's a bigger one right next to it.

6. Twitter/X founder outreach is your best channel and you've probably deprioritized it

From what you've described, most of your recent effort has been Wellfound, LinkedIn, cold email. But your track record says X DMs to founders work better for you. Are you doing that with the same intensity right now? If not, why?

The Amazon Situation Specifically

Finish the interview process. I know you don't want to work there — valid, and it's not the kind of work you'd thrive in. But here's what you're missing:

Having an Amazon offer changes how founders perceive you. You go from "guy looking for a startup job" to "guy Amazon wanted who chose startups." That's a fundamentally different negotiating position. It also gives you something concrete to say in every future conversation: "I had an Amazon offer but I specifically want to be somewhere I can own the product." That narrative is powerful.

And you got through their OA. Most people don't. That's not nothing — that's signal that you can clear competitive technical bars. Use it. There's no downside to at least finishing the process.

What I'd Actually Do

1. Kill every on-site application immediately. Not negotiable. Stop the fake applications.
2. Open the US/EU market. Spend one focused week identifying 15 companies: AI startups on YC's Work at a Startup board, EU companies with remote-India roles, US infra/AI companies. Edward is a perfect portfolio piece for this audience — you built something that's at the quality level of a US product.
3. Finish Amazon. Get the offer or the interview reps. Either is worth something.
4. Get back on Twitter/X with real intensity. Find 10 founders of AI-adjacent startups this week. Send actual thoughtful DMs, not copy-paste. You've done this before and you know how.
5. Do 5 mock interviews out loud. Record them. Watch them back. Don't do the mock in your head or on paper — actually say the words out loud, into a camera. You'll immediately see what the interviewer sees. Fix what's coming across as uncertain.
6. One freelance project under Pragnyaa. Solves three problems simultaneously: income, resume gap, and keeps you sharp. You could even reach out to founders who turned you down for full-time and offer a 2-week paid engagement on a specific problem. Some of them will say yes.

One real question

Are you genuinely 100% unable to relocate, or is it more "I strongly prefer not to, but if the role was perfect and the company was great, there might be a version of it I could make work"?

The answer changes the strategy significantly. If it's truly off the table permanently — health, family, full stop — then the US/EU remote market becomes the primary play and that's where almost all energy should go. If there's any flexibility for the right situation, that opens Indian on-site companies back up as a possible play where you apply selectively and honestly.

No wrong answer, just want to give you the right advice for your actual situation.

You

If you are asking me if I am 100% unable to relocate, or is it more that I strongly prefer not to, but if the role was perfect and the company was great, there might be a version of it I could make work. Basically, bro, the thing is I know there are more and more opportunities on site and all whatever, but let me tell you something. When I was in Bangalore, when I was actually working at Marlin AI in Bangalore, the time I was in the office and working, it was a very great time. I really enjoyed my time in the office and working with people and all, but when I used to come back to my room, I really used to feel very, what do I say, I didn't have anyone to talk to or like my personal life was very much going hell. I mean, of course I used to talk to my parents two or three times a day in the morning and in the night as well before sleep and all, but, bro, try to understand, living with your parents or living with someone you really love and care about and just talking on a video call or call doesn't actually, it's not like that. That's the main reason I'm basically looking for remote. The job we do as software engineers, the job is, I mean, we should be able to do it remotely. We can do it from anywhere, absolutely, so that's also what eats at me. If the job is so much that we can do work from anywhere, with the same potential, then why do I have to compromise my entire family, my entire loved ones? That's the main thing why I actually need and am really looking for remote. You are telling me to apply to the U.S. or Europe remote market or something. From where do I? The problem is, whenever I try to even reach out or see or check any remote jobs from U.S.-level people and all, of course there is also one communication issue that would be there. I'm not a proper, I can't actually speak fluently in English. I can speak, the other person might also understand properly, but it won't be absolutely fluent, like a proper chatterbox time type of thing, no. Plus I normally see that they hire mostly remotely in foreign selects for the specific areas, not everywhere. The majority of them don't actually hire everywhere remotely, do they?

Claude

Okay, first: the relocation answer is completely valid and you should stop second-guessing it. Loneliness is a real cost. Coming back to an empty room every night, no one physically present, talking to your parents over video call - that's not "I miss home a little." That's a genuine mental health drain that compounds over time and eventually affects your work too. You experienced it directly. You know. Own that constraint without guilt, and stop entertaining on-site applications at all. Done.

Now let me push back on the US/EU concerns, because I think you're wrong about both of them.

On the English fluency thing

You're comparing yourself to the wrong bar. You're imagining what you'd need to be: fluent, chatterbox, zero-accent, super confident in English verbal communication. That's not the bar for technical engineering roles at US startups.

Think about who actually works at these companies remotely. Eastern European engineers, Brazilian engineers, Indian engineers in huge numbers. None of them are "chatterbox" English speakers. The actual bar is:

• Can you write clearly in async? (Slack, Notion, PRs, Loom recordings) — yes, clearly, your written English is strong
• Can you communicate technically in meetings? — probably yes with some polish
• Are you understandable? — yes

The people hiring you are hiring you for what you can build, not for how you talk. Your concern about "I can't speak fluent English like a proper chatterbox" is you filtering yourself out for a bar that doesn't exist for your role. A US founder at a 5-person AI startup does not care if you sound like a native speaker. They care if you ship and communicate clearly.

The real thing that needs work is the verbal interview confidence — which we already identified as something to practice. But that's a completely different problem from "my English isn't fluent enough for US companies."

On "they mostly don't hire everywhere remotely"

You're partially right and using it as a full stop when it should be a filter.

You're right that "Remote" on most US job boards means Remote-US. That's true. But you're wrong that international remote doesn't exist at meaningful scale. Here's what's actually happening:

The filtered market is real and large. Companies use Employer of Record services (Deel, Remote.com, Rippling Global) that make hiring someone in India as simple as hiring someone in Texas. This has become extremely common in the last 3 years, especially at early-stage AI startups that are lean and don't want to deal with in-house HR overhead. Many of them explicitly post "Remote - Worldwide" or "we use Deel for global hiring."

YC companies lean more globally. Not all, but many YC-backed startups actively recruit globally for engineering. The "Work at a Startup" board at ycombinator.com/jobs lets you filter for Remote. A meaningful chunk of those companies will consider India.

Arc.dev and Contra exist specifically for this. Arc.dev's entire model is matching Indian (and other international) engineers with US companies. The company knows they're hiring someone in India. It's the product. Same with Contra and similar platforms.

Twitter/X outreach to US founders bypasses the job board geography problem entirely. This is huge and you're missing it. When you DM a US founder directly and they see your Edward project and your background, they're evaluating YOU, not a resume in a system that auto-filters by geography. Many founders who would have their recruiter filter out "India" on a job board will happily say yes when they find a specific person they like. This is the single most effective way to crack the geography barrier and it plays entirely to your strength — written communication, which you're clearly good at.

The actual path into this market for you

Given your constraints (remote only, India-based, communication strength is written), here's what makes sense:

Start with Arc.dev or Contra. These are built for exactly your situation. Apply, get vetted, get matched. Companies on these platforms already know they're hiring internationally. No geography surprise.

YC Work at a Startup board. Filter by Remote. Target AI/infra companies. Send DMs on Twitter to the founders directly after you find interesting ones — don't just apply through the board.

Twitter/X outreach to US founders. Find 10 AI startup founders this week. Not to ask for a job — to share something valuable. Comment on their tweets, share a thought about something they built, then DM. When they check your profile and see Edward, that's your foot in the door. Written communication, your strength.

Freelance first. This is the lowest barrier to entering the US remote market. One contract project through Contra or a cold outreach deal removes the "we don't know if this international remote thing will work" concern for a company. You do good work for 4 weeks, they know you communicate and deliver. Converting to full-time becomes a much easier conversation.

One thing I want you to actually sit with: you've been operating from a mental model where the US/EU remote market is basically inaccessible to you because of English and geography. That model is wrong, and it's been cutting off a huge part of your addressable market. The Indian remote-first startup pool is genuinely tiny. The US/international remote engineering pool is 10-20x bigger. And your Edward project is way more interesting to a US AI founder than to an Indian B2C startup hiring their first engineer.

What specific thing is stopping you from spending 2 hours this week just browsing Arc.dev and the YC jobs board to see what's actually there?

You

Also, please tell me honestly: will this almost one-year gap now affect me? I am telling you genuinely, I was not fucking around at all throughout this one year. I was really like I am right now as well, really learning things that the market is grabbing on to and adapting to. I try to learn them, build something around them, and keep myself updated. Of course, I don't have anything to write or compensate in the resume as work experience or something for whatever they are going for the last one year. How much would it actually affect me? Already, because of my constraints, the companies are in a very small number, and if everyone starts asking me what I was doing in the last one year and all, how would I actually convince them that I was not getting hired because of my fault? What do I say? I mean, how do I basically think of it? The situation was not something I was expecting, actually.

Claude

Honest answer: yes, it will affect you with some companies. No, it's not as damaging as you're fearing. Let me break down both parts properly.

How much it actually hurts

The places where it WILL cost you:

Large companies with rigid HR filters (think: anything with an ATS and a recruiter who has 200 applications to screen) may auto-deprioritize gaps above a threshold. Some Indian product companies at Series B+ have started doing this too. That's real, and you can't fully avoid it.

The places where it WON'T really matter:

Early-stage startups — which is exactly your target — mostly don't give a damn about employment gaps in the way you're fearing. Why? Because founders at Seed/Series A are evaluating "can this person build things and do they have taste?" not "were they employed 100% of the time?" They're often talking to you directly, not through an HR filter. They look at Edward and either get it or they don't. The gap is a footnote.

US remote companies (which we discussed) are even more project-portfolio-focused. They genuinely care about what's live, what you built, and whether you can communicate about it.

The cold reality: Your gap will cause some auto-rejections that you'll never even know about. It won't prevent you from getting hired. Those are different things. Don't conflate them.

The "is it my fault" question

Stop using that frame entirely. It's the wrong question and it's messing with how you'll talk about this.

"Fault" implies you owe someone a justification. You don't. You made a deliberate choice to target remote-only roles for real personal reasons, that choice narrowed the market significantly, and the market is structured in a way that makes remote Indian startup jobs scarce. That's not a personal failure — it's a constraint with real consequences that you accepted.

The problem with "it wasn't my fault" framing is that when you say that to an interviewer (even implicitly, through nervous over-explaining), it sounds defensive. Defensive = uncertainty. Uncertainty = doubt. That's the actual risk.

The thing to internalise: you don't need to convince anyone that you weren't slacking. You need to show them what you were doing. Those are completely different conversations.

What you were actually doing (which is genuinely strong)

Let's be clear about what the gap contains:

• Built Agentic Chat — multi-modal LangGraph agent, RAG infrastructure, Composio integrations, semantic caching, the whole thing. Live and working.
• Built Edward — prompt-to-production platform with a custom streaming state machine parser, job queues, Docker sandboxes, preview routing, reconnect resilience. This is not a beginner project.
• Studied AI/LLM tooling and agentic systems at a time when the market was moving fast in exactly that direction.
• Ran all of this under Pragnyaa (your self-founded org).

That's not a gap. That's a builder period. The distinction matters enormously in how you narrate it.

The actual narrative — what to say

Don't think of this as "explaining the gap." Think of it as answering: "What have you been doing?"

When someone asks you about the past year, say this (adapt in your own voice, don't script it):

"After [previous role], I specifically targeted remote roles for personal reasons — I have family I'm not willing to move away from, and given that this work can be done from anywhere, I made that a hard constraint. That significantly narrowed the pool. In the meantime, I used the time to build two projects: Edward, a prompt-to-production platform where I built the entire orchestration layer from scratch — the streaming parser, job queuing, sandbox isolation, preview routing — and Agentic Chat, a multi-modal LangGraph agent with RAG and external tool integrations. Both are live. I've been learning in the direction the market is moving — agentic systems, LLM orchestration, production AI infrastructure — and building things that actually run."

That's it. Clean, factual, unapologetic, something concrete to point to.

Notice what you're NOT doing in that version:

• Not apologizing
• Not saying "unfortunately" or "the market was tough"
• Not over-explaining or getting defensive
• Not framing it as misfortune

You're just stating what happened and what you built. Confidence in the telling is half the battle.

One thing to actually fix on your resume

Right now the gap might show up as dead space between Merlin ending and "now." Make sure Pragnyaa is listed as an active entry covering this entire period with Edward and Agentic Chat under it as outputs. Not as an excuse — as the factual record of what you were doing. It's not fabrication. Pragnyaa is real, the projects are real, the work is real. You just need to represent it clearly.

The honest bottom line

The gap will filter you out from some rigid, high-volume hiring pipelines. You were going to struggle with those anyway because they also tend to be larger companies or on-site roles. Your actual targets — early-stage startups, direct founder conversations, US remote companies via Arc/Contra/Twitter outreach — are all places where the gap matters much less than what you built.

The one thing that WOULD make the gap genuinely damaging is if you go into interviews nervous and over-apologetic about it. That transfers. If you walk in knowing exactly what you built and why you made the choices you made, the gap becomes context rather than a red flag.

You were building real things. Say that, mean it, point to it. That's the whole move.

You

How can I religiously find my kind of early-stage startups which pay well? Really good job, really good work, and really good product: how can I find that? I mean, I can, of course, try to find, but it's really hard because it's too much of a mix.

Claude

The real problem here isn't where to look — it's that job boards are a fundamentally broken discovery mechanism for what you want. They're built for volume, so everything gets mixed in together: hundred-person companies calling themselves startups, agencies pretending to be product companies, serious builders next to CRUD factories. The mix isn't accidental, it's structural.

So the answer isn't finding a better job board. It's building a discovery system that uses higher-quality signals upstream of job boards entirely.

First: Make "your kind of company" concrete enough to actually filter

You said good work, good product, good pay. Let's make each of those specific enough to be filterable in practice.

Good product has a reliable gut check: use it for 10 minutes before reading anything else about the company. If you come out with thoughts — things that impressed you, things you'd improve, ideas it triggered — that's a good product. Not "this is useful" (mediocre things can be useful), but that specific feeling of "someone thought hard here." If you feel nothing after 10 minutes, close the tab. You'll interview badly for a company whose product doesn't move you.

Red flag example: An "AI-powered HR tool" that's a ChatGPT wrapper with a form on top. You'll feel it in 2 minutes. Green flag example: Something like Linear or Raycast — you immediately feel the design decisions even before you know who built it.

Good work is really about ownership and technical depth. The most reliable signal is the job description itself — not the tech stack list, but what they're actually asking you to solve. "Build our AI orchestration layer" is good. "Must know React, Node, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, Redis" is bad — it means they don't know what they want and they're looking for someone to figure it out for them. Also: small engineering teams (under 10 engineers) give you more ownership per person. An engineering blog is a strong signal — companies that write publicly about how they build things are usually proud of how they do it.

Good pay for your level (remote, India, ~1.5 years experience):

• Indian Seed startup: 10–18 LPA, often scrappy
• Indian Series A: 15–25 LPA, typically the sweet spot
• Indian Series B: 22–35 LPA
• US remote via EOR (Deel, Remote.com): $40,000–70,000/year, which is roughly 33–58 LPA at current rates — meaningfully higher

The biggest signal for good pay is a recent funding announcement. A company that closed their Series A 3 months ago has a hiring budget right now. A company that raised 3 years ago and is "growing sustainably" may be paying lean salaries.

The discovery pipeline — highest signal to lowest

VC portfolio browsing (highest signal, most underused)

The logic is simple: if a VC put money into a company, the product cleared a vetting bar, they have capital to hire, and they're in a growth phase where engineering matters. You're not starting from zero — you're starting from "already vetted."

Go to these portfolio pages directly and browse company by company:

For Indian startups, the ones worth your time are Blume Ventures (blume.vc — they fund a lot of AI and developer-adjacent companies), Elevation Capital, Accel India, Peak XV (Sequoia India), and Better Capital (most seed-stage of the group — you'll find companies before they're on anyone's radar).

For US remote opportunities: Y Combinator's company directory at ycombinator.com/companies is the best single resource. Filter by industry, look at recent batches (W24, S24, W25). A lot of these companies are 5–15 people and actively hire international engineers, especially for AI-adjacent roles.

The process: portfolio page, company by company, click anything where the description sounds interesting, use the product, LinkedIn the team. You'll eliminate 80% in under 2 minutes. The ones that survive 2 minutes get 10 more.

Recent funding news (high signal)

Freshly funded companies are actively building their teams. A company that announced a $4M seed round 2 months ago needs engineers right now.

For Indian startups, YourStory and Inc42 cover rounds that TechCrunch ignores — they're worth bookmarking and checking weekly. For global companies, Twitter search "seed funding AI" or "series A remote hiring" filtered to last 30 days surfaces things no job board will show you.

Twitter/X passive discovery

Follow the right people and the stream does the work. Indian VC partners tweet about new investments. AI startup founders post jobs directly — when a founder tweets "we're hiring," there's no recruiter or HR filter between you and them. Reply thoughtfully, DM with your work. The one tweet cost them nothing and the right reply from you costs you 5 minutes. This is entirely asymmetric in your favor.

Job boards as confirmation, not discovery

Wellfound and LinkedIn are useful, but treat them as a secondary layer. When you find a company through VC portfolios or funding news, check if they have a Wellfound listing for additional context. Don't let the job board be the starting point — the starting point should be a company you already have a reason to care about.

Evaluating a company once you find it (20–25 minutes)

Use the product first (10 min). Already said this but it deserves repeating as step one. If it's B2B with no public access, find founder-made demos on Twitter or YouTube — not the polished marketing video, but the scrappy "here's what we built" kind.

LinkedIn the founding team (5 min). Two things matter: have they built anything before (second-time founders are statistically better at company building), and is the technical founder actually technical (a former PM who's "building AI" is a different situation than a former senior engineer who started something).

Read the JD like a technical document (5 min). The quality of thinking in the JD reflects the quality of thinking in the company. Vague JDs from technical companies are a red flag — they don't know what they want. Specific JDs that describe actual hard problems tell you the team has thought seriously about the work.

Quick gut check. Would you be excited to talk about this product in an interview? Can you explain what you'd work on and feel proud? If not, don't apply.

On pay — how to find out before wasting three rounds

Most startups don't put salary in the JD. Ask in the first call, not at the end: "Before we go further, what's the budget for this role?" At a startup with a founder-led hiring process, this is a completely normal question. If they get weird about it or dodge it, that's information too. Levels.fyi doesn't have all Indian startups but has some, and the US companies on it with remote breakdowns are useful benchmarks for what US remote work actually pays.

The alternative view worth sitting with

There's a counterintuitive approach that works in parallel with everything above: building a reputation that makes companies come to you.

Every time you write publicly about something you actually built — a Twitter thread about how you built Edward's streaming state machine parser, a blog post about production LangGraph patterns you discovered from Agentic Chat — you're creating a pull mechanism. Founders building AI products read this stuff. They DM the people who write it. When that happens, you bypass every filter: job board, geography, experience bar. The founder already knows you can think and communicate before they ever talk to you.

One genuinely useful technical post about something you built is worth 50 cold applications. This isn't instead of the systematic search — it's what happens in parallel, and it compounds over time in a way cold applications don't.

Exercise — don't let this be passive reading

Go to Blume Ventures' portfolio page and Y Combinator's company directory (filter: AI, recent batches). Pick 5 from each that seem interesting just from the description.

For each of the 10, answer these 3 questions honestly:

After using or watching the product for 10 minutes — does it make you feel anything? After checking the founding team on LinkedIn — do these seem like people you'd trust to build something serious? Is there a JD that describes real work rather than a tech stack list?

Then come back and tell me which ones survived all three filters and which ones got cut at which step. I want to see your actual output — what passed, what failed, and why you made each call. That'll tell us whether the framework is working the way it should, and we can sharpen it from there.