Friday Hacks #282, October 10: Innovation at Startups and Shipping AI fast with Vercel
Posted on by Daren Tan
Date/Time: October 10 at 7:00pm SGT
Venue: Seminar Room 12, COM3-01-21, NUS
Sign-up Link: Sign-up here
Food 🍕 and Drinks 🧋 will be served!
1) The Bitter Lesson: Startups, AI, and the Future of Innovation
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping everything:- from how startups are built to how the world organizes itself. In this talk, explore the “bitter lesson” in AI, why many past approaches fail, and what lessons we must carry forward. Drawing on his own experience going through three Y Combinator interviews, he shares hard-won insights about resilience, mistakes, and vision. This is a talk about learning from history while building for the future.
Speaker Profile 🎙️️
Rach Pradhan is an entrepreneur, engineer, and AI researcher building the next generation of developer tools and agentic systems. He is the creator of multiple open-source projects—including Bhumi (a high-performance inference client), Satya (a validation engine faster than Pydantic), and Muonry (an AI-native coding assistant). He currently works at Menlo Research. With a background in computer science, electrical engineering and startup experience spanning multiple Y Combinator interviews to winning some of the largest hackathons in the world solo, Rach has worked at the intersection of infrastructure, AI, and product design. His current focus is on how AI will reshape startups, work, and society at large.
2) From v0 to AI Cloud: Shipping AI Fast with Vercel
In this session, Robin will dive into the architecture behind Vercel’s AI Cloud, trusted by teams like OpenAI, Cursor and Supabase, and show how to build, ship and secure AI applications and agents at speed. He highlights the latest AI releases from Vercel that can turn your ideas into reality, and share how teams like Zapier use v0 to ship fast. Expect a mix of architecture, real-world examples and practical takeaways you can apply immediately.
Speaker Profile 🎙️️
Robin leads Field Engineering for APJ at Vercel, the team behind Next.js and v0. From scaling startups to global enterprises, he helps teams reimagine what’s next in web and AI infrastructure. Robin believes that everyone can cook, and the future belongs to those who experiment, break things, and ship fast.
👋 See you there!