The idea has been gaining steam in Silicon Valley. In February, a VC named Tomasz Tunguz dropped a blog post arguing that inference costs are becoming the fourth pillar of engineering compensation alongside salary, bonus, and equity. Here is the math: the 75th percentile software engineer in the US draws $375k. Add $100k in inference costs and you're at $475k. That's 21% in tokens.

A month later, Jensen Huang took this up a notch. The Nvidia CEO said he'd be alarmed if a $500k engineer wasn't burning through at least $250k worth of tokens.

What does this actually mean if you're running an AI startup today? As agents go mainstream and the competition heats up, how do you stay ahead? How is the token bill allotted and negotiated? 

Akash Anand, CEO of Clueso, a Y Combinator-backed startup turning raw screen recordings into polished product videos, joins Zero Shot to break down his real token math.

Spoiler: more tokens does not simply equal more productivity.

Tune in!

___

This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

____

Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

____

Additional Resources

How AI is making and remaking the products that we build 

More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.

Jensen Huang says he would be 'deeply alarmed' if his $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 of tokens

Over the last two months, people — yes, ordinary citizens — have been installing OpenClaw on their devices. Local governments are incentivising OpenClaw projects. Grandparents are lining up to get the software installed. And a cottage industry of "influencers" is telling people how to optimise their agent usage. It's a social and cultural moment as much as a technological one. 

How did China get here? To answer that question, we have Kevin Xu on this episode of Zero Shot. Kevin is the founder of Interconnected Capital, a global technology hedge fund, and a widely-read writer at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.

His career is seemingly divergent: former White House press staffer, head of GitHub's international expansion, and an investor in AI startups. But it is this layered perspective — of a tech analyst, writer, fund manager, and operator all rolled into one — that can truly unpack what is happening in China.

Tune in!

___

This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

____

Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

____

Additional Resources

Interconnected | Chinese open source: A definitive history

Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze

In China, a rush to "raise lobsters" quickly leads to second thoughts

OpenClaw, government support fuel rise of 1-person companies in China

"Claw-powered" one-person companies become hot topic at China's "two sessions"

Explore Intermission 

Say you want a chunk of plywood. Or a passenger lift. Or a power cable. Or a corrugated packaging box. Chances are you will find yourself on IndiaMART, the country’s largest B2B marketplace connecting buyers with suppliers. With 60% of market share and a 12,000 crore market cap, the company essentially commands this space. 

There is one major problem though: ChatGPT. In December, IndiaMART filed a petition against OpenAI in the Calcutta High Court for “selective discrimination” at the hands of the company, saying that its LLM “specifically and consciously” excludes it from its results while servicing other e-commerce platforms. In a hearing, the court said the exclusion seems to have occurred “without any logic”. The case is ongoing. 

As our host Praveen Gopal Krishnan says, the “specifics of the case are far less interesting” than the proverbial can it seems to have kicked down the road. 

The case asks some crucial second, third, and fourth order questions about AI, competition, and who gets to win in this new market. 

To answer all of those questions and give us a picture of the regulatory landscape of India, we have Samir R Gandhi on this episode. 

Samir heads Axiom5, a boutique law firm specialising in competition law. He has spent over two decades at various law firms, and has had a ringside view of the development of competition law in India from the time of its enactment.

He says the case gives him a sense of “deja vu” because it is fundamentally about an old incumbent being challenged by a disrupter. But the questions posed by AI systems — “part morality, part philosophical, part business model, part geopolitics” — will have wide-ranging implications for the market from a legal standpoint. 

Tune in! 

This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by  Cymasonic Productions.

____

Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

____

Recommended Reading: 

Ghosted by the bot: Why IndiaMART is desperate to be visible on ChatGPT
CCI Rejects Allegations of Anti-Competitive Conduct against Uber and Ola
Accio
Amazon V. Perplexity: Welcome To The Battle For The Future Of Commerce

That’s an honest admission from Avinash Raghava, the founding volunteer and CEO of the pay-it-forward community SaaSBoomi. As someone who has spent years building networks and communities — at Nasscom, Accel, and Together Fund previously — Avinash has a full view of the inflection point that founders are at.

They are having to reinvent themselves, change business models and pivot entirely to become AI-native. The idea is to disrupt their own models before the market does. 

SaaSBoomi is undergoing its own transformation. It is now AIBoomi, with the primary focus of helping founders navigate the new world where old SaaS playbooks are irrelevant. 

Can there be a new playbook? How does one write it? How does one learn, grow, and create a community along the way? 

Avinash takes on all of these questions in this episode. The result is a conversation that captures and dissects the crossroads that SaaS is currently at. Tune in!

____

This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.

____

Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. 

Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears!

____

Recommended Reading: 

​​Which Software Companies Will Survive the SaaSpocalypse

The Three-Body Problem (novel)

Dark forest hypothesis

https://annual.aiboomi.org/

Over 100 Indian AI startup founders moving to US for funds and talent

Voice AI has gone from whisper to commotion. Can the market get any louder?

This podcast launched in September, and we’ve produced 14 episodes for you so far. We’ve covered a wide range of topics, and our conversations—between Praveen, Rohin, and Brady—only work because you’re willing to sit with the complexities we wade into. 

We know artificial intelligence will move fast in 2026, so we’ll keep asking the questions that matter in this AI hype cycle. We’re glad you’re coming along with us.

So, thank you, and we’ll be back next week.

As always, if you’d like to get in touch with any or all of our hosts, please drop us a note at zeroshot@the-ken.com. We respond to all messages.

The cover art of Zero Shot is generated by AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.