Building in public

Mastermind sessions, in writing.

Every week, Chinat and Xisen sit down to push each other on the companies and ideas they’re building. Each session becomes two short reflections — one from each of us — on what we’re working on, what we’re stuck on, and what we’re committing to.

• April 12, 2026Chinat

  Everything is a CLI now

  The shape of every partnership we're signing this quarter is a skill install, not a contract. That's a bigger change than it sounds.

• April 12, 2026Xisen

  The word we keep coming back to is "networking"

  Pulse opened its API this week. The work from here is figuring out what breaks when two agents that don't know each other try to cooperate.

• March 14, 2026Chinat

  The pipeline is starting to be legible

  Demo Day for intake, the Hong Kong flagship for distribution, MentorMates underneath. I'm finally starting to see the shape.

• March 14, 2026Xisen

  What to benchmark when your users are agents

  Pulse security stopped being a concept and started being a benchmark. That changes what the product has to prove.

• March 9, 2026Chinat

  The flagship is the hackathon, not the product launch

  Hong Kong is the operating thread this quarter. Everything else feeds into it.

• March 9, 2026Xisen

  Why I stopped building an outreach tool

  Outreach automation is the wrong shape of problem. The real work is agent-to-agent memory and access.

• February 28, 2026Chinat

  From a YC hackathon floor to a Hong Kong flagship

  I'm on the floor of a YC hackathon this weekend. The real point isn't the prize, it's what the weekend tells me about Hong Kong in July.

• February 28, 2026Xisen

  Narrowing Pulse to the founder use case

  The Pulse pivot is still narrowing. Founders are the sharpest user, and two specific jobs do most of the work.

• February 14, 2026Chinat

  The Stanford hackathon changed what I thought I was building

  A thousand hackers, three days, and one reframe. MentorMates is a platform question, not a feature question.

• February 14, 2026Xisen

  Two features, done better than anyone

  I was chasing differentiation on surface area. The better bet is depth on one or two capabilities.

• February 7, 2026Chinat

  Partnerships are distribution, not decorations

  We shipped the first real agentic layer in MentorMates this week. The lesson: partnerships are only useful when they convert to reach.

• February 7, 2026Xisen

  User interviews and API-shaped thinking

  Two moves that pulled Pulse forward this week: more user interviews, and starting to think about it as an API instead of an app.

• February 3, 2026Chinat

  Hackathon week is the real test

  Two hackathons in one week at Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Distribution showed up. Team reliability didn't.

• February 3, 2026Xisen

  Heartbeats, active layers, and better testing discipline

  Pulse got a heartbeat and an active layer this week. The bigger win was pulling the team into better testing discipline.

• January 24, 2026Chinat

  Daydreamers Academy and hackathons are the same thing

  Sounds like two different products. They're not. They're both structured learning infrastructure — just at different time scales.

• January 24, 2026Xisen

  The research direction has to be chosen, not discovered

  After too many parallel threads I realized the research question doesn't get picked by the field. It gets picked by me.

• January 17, 2026Chinat

  MentorMates is the center of gravity

  A Q1 planning call forced a real choice. Multiple good options, but only one center of gravity. MentorMates wins.

• January 17, 2026Xisen

  Writing the paper is the discipline

  Drafting a paper is a forcing function. You can't hide scope creep when you have to write it down.