AEOS Group

Aeos is about to enter it's 4th year of operations. We've been bootstrapped and profitable since day one and been in the green every month. Every time we start building a new office, it's always a big risk with security deposits and rent and the long lock ins. There is no investor to catch us if we fall. That said, it's never a bad time to recite the fundamentals. They could be useful for you, too. YMMV: - Agency is a muscle and it can be developed. Same way as the gym, via progressive overloading. - People think you can start out and build a deeptech/rocket science company but it's better to progressively overload. Start with freelancing, then do a small co, make some money, build your network, and then, when you're ready, take a big swing. Most people you know who are doing extremely crazy things started small and kept overloading beyond their current capabilities, but just a bit. - Companies today need ruthless execution, softy founders just get eaten by the market and then personally blamed later for failure. - Most digital businesses only last 3-4 years thanks to AI and basically have to rethink every time new technology drops. Aeos itself worked because of the sudden advantages of AI in content. It's better to disrupt yourself than be disrupted by competitors though, it's okay and worth it to go through the pain of change. - Startup schools like YC teach you that pivoting is okay. You are comfortable pivoting because half your batch is pivoting every month or so, and you see that all the big successes in your cohort pivoted a few times till it "clicked". Indians shame pivoting (they think this is failure or some kind of sign of a flimsy mind), but this is the wrong attitude: entrepreneurship in the early stages is an act of discovery, not of doing. You cannot know if a path sucks until you walk down it. If you want to "do" along a set path, get a job. Aeos is one of the rare examples of a company that didn't pivot and has pretty much done what it did on day one, but I know this is not the norm. - All the best founders I know are paranoid that something bad will happen tomorrow and disrupt them. I could never relate to someone who thinks their company/job/lifestyle is set and secure forever. It is not. Anything can happen, you have to be prepared. - You will only be successful when your social reputation is on the line for the swings you take. The reason you can't point to too many anonymous successes is because their reputation is never on the line for failure. This is true for employees too, the most visible employees who then try to swing actually do much better because of the implicit reputation cost. - Don't get me wrong: failure is normal and on the path to success. But if you do not have a feedback loop for this, you will never learn what you did wrong. We diagnose failure, improve, adapt, and try again. If the path itself is broken, choose another one. - Avoid overengineering on costs before you hit scale. It's an engineer bad habit, repeated across time. In fact, avoid building for other engineers, you will try to make complicated things to impress them, when you should actually only be impressing and improving the lives of your customers. Your customers actually want simple things, or an abstraction of the complex until it is simple for them. They don't want to see the tangled wires underneath: why are you so proud of them? - If you give your life, your all to something, and you can find a group of people who are willing to do it with you, there is no greater honor and satisfaction, even in failure. But most of the time if you progressively overload well, you will end up with an output that surprises everyone. Unleash The Avatar trailer 1 versus 2 versus 3 and (and now 4, with another round of radical improvement) is a good example of continuous progressive overload from a team that won't give up. - We are ultimately always in the service of the customer (and in our case, also the viewer), and not ourselves. It's actually been maybe 2 odd years since I've last thought about what I want. I've spent almost all my time thinking about my customers needs, my team's needs, my audience's needs. I have lost myself in the process, but I wouldn't have it any other way. - Most people will never win because they're always thinking about what they want, when the world rewards you for thinking about other people's problems and solving it, for a price. - There are four quadrants when it comes to hiring: untalented and unreliable, untalented and reliable, talented and unreliable, and talented and reliable. Out of all of these, hiring the talented and unreliable is where you will lose all your money and energy. - Attention is the most valuable thing in 2026, and 2027, and 2028. Yes, even beyond building technology. Software itself was valuable because it easily scaled, and the reason a software engineer made more than a doctor was because they served way more customers at once, often at much lower prices than a doctor. A doctor can only see so many patients an hour, but an engineer can service millions of customers in the same time. With AI coding, anyone can build for scale, but finding those customers is going to be harder as everyone competes for attention. Producing the content itself will be easier, but actually figuring out attention is super hard. - It's okay if you fall. Just get back up again! There is only defeat in death.

Most people may not know this, but Aeos helped ElevenLabs with their Kannada implementation. A couple of years ago we were working with a large cricket team (still an Aeos client) on dubbing and Kannada wasn’t an option. We spent a lot of time helping figure it out. The ElevenLabs team was super fast at making it all work (they were a much smaller co back then btw) and now many across the country can access Kannada dubbing!

I've long wondered whether it is possible for a content creator like me to impact things that I've been personally frustrated with, like India's public service websites. With all the advances in AI and the pure speed at which talented builders can make things, it should be possible to contribute. But good engineers from India will always run into an access problem - what platform do they show their work or ideas on that will get taken seriously enough? So...I'm trying. We're doing a hackathon called "Build What Moves India" where we try our level best to get great panelists involved, enough credits for AI (I spoke to my friends at OpenAI), and also try to get public service website decision makers to pay attention and at least evaluate the solutions presented. I'm not deluded enough to think that a single hackathon can solve a country's problems, but I think it can start *some* dialogue between the smart folks on X, the tech community in India, and legacy bodies. I've also spoken to a few of my good engineer friends from X to come mentor (almost all of them have struggled with EPFO at some point). Everyone said yes! More soon but just a heads up. I'd love if you participated!